A Plague on the Nation

Doing The Moral Limbo

Paul Waldman

September 20, 2006

Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America and the author of the new book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success, just released by John Wiley & Sons. The views expressed here are his own.

Before we hail Colin Powell, John McCain, Lindsay Graham and their Republican colleagues as some kind of heroes of liberty for standing up to President Bush’s proposals for interrogating terrorist suspects, let’s recall what their brave position on this issue is: The United States of America shouldn’t torture people. It is a testament to how ethically diseased today’s GOP—those guardians of “moral values,” remember—has become that this is a minority position within their party.

Bush’s September 15 soliloquy on “flawed logic”—a topic he knows something about—was prompted by the willingness of the former secretary of state and the two prominent Republican senators (as well as at least six other Republican senators and another former secretary of state) to oppose him on a matter of national security. “If there's any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it's flawed logic. I simply can't accept that,” Bush said. “It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.”

In other words, if you object to kangaroo courts and the use of “alternative interrogation methods,” you must think we’re no better than terrorists, a logical double-twisting back flip worthy of Greg Louganis.

Bush and most of his followers continue to dance their moral limbo, their backs arched as they descend lower every time the chorus begins again. They would turn America into a country that tortures prisoners on the off chance that doing so might yield some useful information (even though it almost never does). They excused the abuse of innocent Iraqis and Afghans in detention facilities on the grounds that, well, at least our soldiers didn’t behead anyone. They enthusiastically embrace the administration’s argument that the president can pick and choose which laws to enforce and which to ignore, simply because he’s the commander in chief. Call me crazy, but I doubt that if the president making that argument was Bill Clinton, they’d feel quite the same way.

And they now rally around Bush’s effort to set up modern star chambers in which people can be tried, convicted and eventually executed without ever being permitted to see the evidence against them.

The justification is always that we’re dealing with terrorists, who are really, really bad people. So why should they deserve due process? The answer that the twisted conservative mind seems incapable of grasping is that a nation committed to liberty, justice and the rule of law does not have one set of procedures for nice people and another set for mean people. It sets up procedures that reflect its values.

That’s called “principle,” and it is something that Bush’s supporters don’t talk much about these days. For them it is always about good guys and bad guys, and if we’re dealing with bad guys, then nothing we do can be wrong. Their spinning has grown so desperate that any appreciation of even the most rudimentary facts of history has, from the sheer centrifugal force, flown off from their brains.

At the end of World War II, confronted with the most monstrous crime in human history, America did not establish kangaroo courts to dispense swiftly with the perpetrators and sate our thirst for vengeance. Along with our allies, we constructed the Nuremberg trials to be as open and fair as possible, in no small part to show the world how democracies act and what makes us different from our enemies.

But some would have us believe that the Third Reich was nothing compared to the threat posed by radical Islamists. The ultra-right Manchester Union-Leader recently called the war on terror “the most difficult and challenging war we have ever faced.”

And it’s not just World War II that was small peanuts. Recently, Bush told a group of conservative writers brought to the White House to meet with him, “It's impossible for someone to have grown up in the ’50s and ’60s to envision a conflict with people that just kill mercilessly, using techniques that are kind of foreign to modern warfare,” as right-wing talking head Fred Barnes reported. Those who grew up during the Cold War, like their namby-pamby Greatest Generation parents, just aren’t capable of understanding the sheer apocalyptic nightmare we’re up against. (Although it’s good to see Bush reaching out this way—he also recently had a 90-minute Oval Office rap session with a group of right-wing radio hosts including Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Neal Boortz. Keep your friends close and your sycophants closer, I suppose.)

And if we’re not just involved in a war but fighting the most dangerous, difficult war in our history against the most super-evil enemy any country has ever faced, then who has time for the Constitution? As John Yoo, the former Justice Department official responsible for much of the administration’s rethinking of our entire system of laws, recently said, “We are used to a peacetime system in which Congress enacts the laws, the president enforces them, and the courts interpret them. In wartime, the gravity shifts to the executive branch.” Silly us for getting “used to” a system in which Congress enacts the laws, the president enforces them, and the courts interpret them. Time to revise all those Schoolhouse Rock songs.

It is impossible to see Yoo’s sentiment—one he shares with an administration devoted to the “unitary executive”—as anything other than deeply anti-American. We could call it “conservo-fascist,” but that would just be name-calling. The fact is, however, that of late conservatives have not only demonstrated their contempt for fundamental American values, they have embraced the most reprehensible tactics with a disturbing glee.

In the latest Weekly Standard, William Kristol—fierce advocate of not only the war in Iraq but another war against Iran, so you know he knows what he’s talking about—enthuses that Republicans are becoming the pro-torture party, and therefore they’re bound to do well in November’s elections.

If this truly is a clash of civilizations, the conservatives have chosen to engage it by getting in touch with their inner barbarian.

And when progressives (and the occasional conservative) question whether such actions betray our values, the answer from Bush and his supporters is that we should be measured not by our principles—or by any principles at all—but by the actions of our enemies. The moral high ground is to be found no more than one step above the worst thing terrorists have done lately. The president may order the use of sleep deprivation and “stress positions” to induce mental and physical agony in prisoners—but hey, he hasn’t personally chopped anyone’s head off, so you know he’s on the side of the angels.

But it is moral poison to measure yourself by the worst acts of your enemies. This is what conservatives have brought to America; the time since 9/11 has seen a moral descent—if not an outright moral deadening—on the part of the right.

Republicans are fond of questioning Democrats’ loyalty whenever they oppose a Republican president, as though he and the nation were one. But one must ask whether their loyalty is to a nation and to the ideals on which it was founded, or to a political movement and those who lead it.

This is hardly the first time that the American political right (whichever party it inhabited at the time) has argued for casting off such inconvenient notions as justice, freedom, democracy or the rule of law because they quavered with fear at external threats. Nor will it be the last. But every time history has judged them wrong, and this time will be no different.