A Glimpse into the Right Wing Mind

There are two big policy debates taking place in Congress right now: one over the future of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) and the other over various proposals to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The way in which these two debates are playing themselves out provides a fascinating glimpse into the right wing mindset.

Let's compare, for instance, two consecutive posts by popular right wing blogger Jeff Goldstein.

One post is entitled "Truth about Bush’s SCHIP veto doesn’t match harsh rhetoric.” In it Goldstein complains that "cynical Dems were willing to use an injured child already covered by the program as an emotional beard to demand an increase that would cover those making close to twice as much as the boy’s family." He observes that this was a "carefully designed emotional appeal crafted by craven politicians" and laments "the trajectory of the debate toward the emotional, with no regard for the substance of the issues actually under pressure." Toward the end of the post he launches into the following rant:

You are dealing with those so impressed with their own presumed genius that they’ve given themselves license to use any means necessary to bring about their desired ends. Using a largely sympathetic press — and casting their political opponents as villains who hate for the simple pleasure of hating (hi, Mr Krugman!) — they are attempting to control public policy by way of rhetorical totalitarianism and cynical manipulation of the un- or ill-informed, a group to whom they both pander and empower.

He concludes the post by proclaiming that "[w]ere George Orwell not already spinning in his grave, he’d be spinning in his grave."

As you can tell, Jeff is a very serious person who just can't stand how cynical and manipulative politics has become.

But take a look at the post that immediately precedes Goldstein's solemn lament about the state of our political discourse. It's entitled "Searching for Alex Jimenez" and in it, Goldstein approvingly cites an already widely discredited New York Post article in which anonymous Republicans blame FISA for the death of a soldier named Alex Jimenez. After quoting the article at length, Goldstein sarcastically observes:

Presumably, allowing the NSA to track phone traffic in and out of terrorist hot zones is a surrendering of our freedoms that real patriots (think Glenn Greenwald, or the Kossacks, who represent the “center” — and who oppose all violations of civil liberties, unless they happen to be imposed on neocons) should not be willing to trade for the safety that comes through the use of pattern analysis, etc, by an intelligence agency created for just that purpose.

As anyone who knows anything about this debate can see, this is nothing but a cheap straw man. Neither Greenwald nor the folks at Daily Kos nor anyone on the Democratic side has ever suggested that warrants should be required to intercept purely foreign communications, such as those at issue in the Jimenez case. But Goldstein doesn't stop with that misrepresentation. He concludes the post with this:

None of which Alex Jimenez was able to weigh in on, of course. But given the chance, I’m sure he would have willingly sacrificed his life so that Congress, through its embrace of the FISA courts, could wrest away some power from the CiC operating under an Authorization of Military Force.

No word yet on whether or not Russ Feingold will read Alex Jimenez’s obituary into the Congressional Record.

So much for eschewing the politics of cynical emotional manipulation. Goldstein is more than willing to pin the blame for the death of a soldier on Democrats in Congress like Russ Feingold. It doesn't get much more cynical and manipulative than that, particularly when you consider the actual facts.

As others have noted, the delay in initiating surveillance in the Jimenez case was not the result of the law, but rather of total incompetence at the Justice Department. Under FISA, emergency surveillance can begin immediately, without a warrant. Moreover, as Glenn Greenwald and others have explained, no one from either party has any objection to exempting purely foreign communications from FISA, even when they pass through U.S. switches.

Indeed, FISA has never required warrants for such communications, which is why it's still unclear to me why the surveillance of Iraqi insurgents responsible for the Jimenez kidnapping even came within the scope of FISA. I suspect the answer is that the surveillance at issue wasn't targeted at specific insurgents but rather was some sort key word search of a large swath of communications coming through a U.S. based switch. Whatever it was though, the reason it fell within FISA's scope was--apparently--because a FISA judge issued a ruling earlier this year stating that this type of interception required court approval.

But the Bush administration didn't publicly disclose that such a ruling existed until late summer, well after the Jimenez kidnapping in May. So it's more than a little unfair to blame Congress for not acting sooner when, as far as they knew, FISA didn't even apply to these types of communications. It was the Bush administration that waited until months after the Jimenez kidnapping to ask Congress for a legislative fix (at which point it got what it asked for and much much more, almost immediately).

But none of these inconvenient facts are enough to stop Republicans from trying to exploit the death of a soldier to win a policy debate. Apparently having children who have benefited from the S-CHIP program tell the world about their stories is the most cynical and manipulative form of politics imaginable. But accusing opponents of the administration's surveillance bill of being responsible for the death of a soldier--even though the accusation is completely groundless--is perfectly fair.

The ability of many right-wingers to say one thing one second and then turn on a dime and say something completely contradictory in the very next breath will never cease to amaze me.

Finally, even though this is somewhat tangential to my point here, I can't end this post without noting how deeply offensive it is to blame someone like Russ Feingold for the death of an American soldier in Iraq. Had anyone listened to Feingold, not a single soldier would have died in this fiasco. It takes a lot of chutzpah to accuse someone of supporting policies that have resulted in the death of American troops when you yourself support a policy of endless war in Iraq and have served as an apologist for any number of disastrous policy decisions by the Bush administration over the years, all of which have unquestionably resulted in the deaths of American soldiers.