The day in September when I foresaw today's benighted discourse, violated Godwin's Law, as I warned about the rise of uniparty forever wars after Democrat Zell Miller's rant at the 2004 GOP convention

It's telling that I used the same tropes the Left later misused against anti-NeoCon Trump. One evolves; others stay stuck. I was prescient: Bush/Cheney were war criminals and media played along.

READ IT AND WEEP FOR AMERICA

September 1, 2004
By James M. Crotty

There was a moment during Georgia Democrat Senator Zell Miller's spite-filled rant at Wednesday night's Republican National Convention when I had to pause and reflect on how public political discourse ever got to this sorry state in America. Was it that old tired bugaboo: a decline in educational standards? Was it a lingering anti-intellectualism that finally found expression through the proliferation of electronic media? Was it the handiwork of those pioneering auteurs of puffed-up bellicosity, Liddy and Limbaugh?

Here I was watching a United States Senator who, in a smarter, more civil era, would be seen as a raving lunatic. Not a passionate Cicero. Not even a rabble-rousing Marc Anthony. But a bona fide madman.

Yet the audience in Madison Square Garden did not see the fiercely independent Zell Miller as crazy. They saw him as a Howard Beale truth-teller. I sat there puzzled. Any person, of any political persuasion, with full command of his or her faculties, who can separate fact from fiction, could easily perceive that this man was not telling the truth. To even answer his points would give credence to his wildly inaccurate claims. 

So why were these delegates wildly celebrating his performance?  Then it dawned on me. For years I had derided left-wing critics for their extreme caricatures of right-wing “zealots.” I pleaded for nuanced portrayals. I especially bridled at the loose use of the words "fascist" and "totalitarian." Tonight, suddenly, I was not so sure. 

While we are a far far cry from anything remotely resembling fascism in America, the virulently hostile climate encouraged by Zell Miller's speech, and the lockstep praise for it on ideologically disparate Fox, CNBC, and MSNBC made me think that I might be watching the beginning of something akin to it. And that twenty years hence, when the transformation only hinted at now fully blossoms into something genuinely draconian, one might think back on Miller's military-industrial disquisition, and Dick Cheney's equally specious follow-up, as a rhetorical Kristallnacht, when rules of decency in American public discourse completely collapsed once and for all. The reason will be that champions of truth, balance, and objectivity finally threw in the towel, effectively deciding that the only way to counter below-the-belt evil was to let the below-the-belt "evildoers" have their way.

But how could I think something so preposterous? Surely Miller's fevered delusional expiation was just parti pri bombast, designed, as commentators rationalize, "to rally the base." But, then again, his disquisition was in prime time. So-called “undecided voters” were ostensibly watching. Could they possibly believe the hypocritical claptrap he was pontificating? Surely the Bush people thought these viewers would buy it or Rove, Card, & Company would have vetted Miller's speech more judiciously. 

I was stunned. What could one possibly say? In previous times, when at least the appearance of reasoned discourse prevailed, one would write such a lunatic off. After all, CNN's post-speech interview with Miller exposed the Senator's complete inability to explain why he was still a Democrat, his pathetic grasp of evidence, and his sad failure to comprehend that Dick Cheney voted against many of the same weapons and weapons systems that Miller excoriated Kerry for opposing. 

I mean, Zell's Bells, you can't be serious, Senator. But Zell definitely was. In his rabid jeremiad, Miller said, "Senator [John] Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations. Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending." I clearly remember, and hopefully, you do too, that Mr. Kerry said, in his own address to the Democratic National Convention, 
that as president he would most assuredly NOT wait for international approval for war when America was in imminent danger.  Here are Mr. Kerry's exact words: "I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as President. Let there be no mistake: I will never hesitate to use force when it is required.  Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response. I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security.  And I will build a stronger American military."

Confronted in the CNN interview with his bold-faced calumny, Miller merely waived some notes around, like he was toting Joe McCarthy's list of Communist spies. Was I watching Senator John Yerkes Iselin of The Manchurian Candidate? CNN's Judy Woodruff, Wolf Blitzer, and Jeff Greenfield could barely control their laughter. Miller was imploding before their eyes. They decided to take a break before it got to the Admiral James Stockdale phase of total self-destruction.

Yet, a day later, even with the utter absurdity of his monstrous performance, Zell Miller would not recant even one of his lies.  Nor would anyone at the Republican National Committee. Nor would any right-wing pundit. It was as if the RNC didn't care if a simple Google search completely contravened Miller's claims. It was as if their focus groups were telling them that most Americans didn't care about messy tropes like truth, rigor, and accountability. 

Of course, we've long known that facts, tact, and diplomacy don't matter to most ideologues. After all, when confronted with their gross distortions, their inevitable response has been a furious ad hominem retort: "The person who pointed 
out these carefully fact-checked inaccuracies is a LIBERAL!" You only have to watch Bill O'Reilly's raging, foaming, apoplectic attacks on New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on their now-infamous joint "Meet the Press" appearance to see my point. Ad hominems have always been considered the lowest form of argument precisely because they close off debate. If ad hominems are allowed––and Zell Miller's and Dick Cheney's lies don't even meet an ad hominem standard––we are left with three remaining options for persuasion: demagoguery, disinformation, and brute force. Genuine logic and argumentation arose so we could evolve beyond such Hobbesian stratagems.  It’s why this “fascist” premonition is really starting to trouble me. 

Take, for example, my dear father. Dr. Richard Quentin Crotty is a Yale and Creighton-educated Omaha dermatologist. He is an intelligent, respected, and beloved man. But my staunchly Republican pater familias still believes, with all his heart and mind, that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. I asked him recently to read the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report, which repudiates this dangerous NeoCon Saddam canard. But shortly afterward I realized, that even if my father read the report, I am certain that he would continue in his unshakeable faith in the Saddam connection. Why? Where to turn for an explanation?  Perhaps to the master of the Big Lie, a failed Austrian painter who wrote:

"The magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true. Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie will always remain and stick––a fact that all the great lie-virtuosi and lying clubs in this world know only too well and also make the most treacherous use of." 

In his signature sleight of hand, Hitler blamed bogeymen for the huge lies he so blatantly perpetrated. For Hitler, the ultimate bogeymen were the Jewish people. For Bush and his backers, it's the United Nations, "Old Europe," the seekers of a sane energy policy, and anyone who stands in the way of the President's unilateralist NeoConservative vision.

Hitler delivered the autobahn and higher productivity as a mask for unspeakable barbarities. Bush delivered a somewhat weakened Taliban, a captured Saddam Hussein, and token cooperation from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as a cover for thousands of massacred Iraqi civilians, gross abuses at Abu Ghraib 
prison––that in kind, if not in degree, give lie to Bush's moral imperative––as well as 1100 + Coalition casualties and thousands more blinded, maimed, and permanently handicapped, distrust of America by most of the free world, incitement of further nuclear proliferation by Iran and North Korea, an abject failure to capture Osama bin Laden, an increasingly vulnerable Afghan leadership, unjust imprisonments at Guantanamo Bay, belligerent diplomacy that forced us to foot the lion's share of the Iraq invasion and reconstruction (thereby shortchanging critical domestic initiatives, such as No Child Left Behind), an exploding deficit, porous borders, tepid job growth, and the lack of a sane plan to tackle global warming. Those who question Bush’s NeoCon misadventure––just as with those who questioned the Nazis––are branded as cowards, traitors, and "girlie-men." Maybe putting Arnold the Austrian on the RNC stage had more historical symbolism than I realized. 

Here is Joseph Goebbels’ December 31, 1938 address to the German nation: 

"This ability to believe is rather weak in some circles ... Our so-called intellectuals do not like to hear this, but it is true anyway.  They know so much that in the end, they do not know what to do with their wisdom .... 

”They were also unable to believe in the victory of National Socialism while the National Socialist movement was still fighting for power. They are as little able today to believe in the greatness of our national German future. They perceive only what they can see, but not what is happening, and what will happen. 

”That is why their carping criticisms generally focus on laughable trivialities. Whenever some unavoidable difficulty pops up, the kind of thing that always happens, they are immediately inclined to doubt everything and to throw the baby out with the bath water.  To them, difficulties are not there to be mastered, but rather to be surrendered to. 

”One cannot make history with such quivering people. They are only chaff in God's breath. Thankfully, they are only a thin intellectual or social upper class, particularly in the case of Germany. They are not an upper class in the sense that they govern 
the nation, rather more a fact of nature like the bubbles of fat that always float on the surface of things. 

”Today, they seek to give good advice to National Socialist Germany from abroad. We do not have to ask them for it. They focus all their energies on the small problems that always are there, complain about the cost, and believe that crises and unavoidable tensions are on the way. They are the complainers who never tire of bringing National Socialist Germany before the so-called court of world opinion. In the past, they always found willing and thankful followers. Today, they only have a few backward intellectual Philistines in their camp. 

”The people want nothing to do with them. These Philistines are the 8/10 of one percent of the German people who have always said 'no', who always say 'no' now, and who will always say 'no' in the future. We cannot win them over and do not even want to.  They said ‘no' when Austria joined the Reich; they said 'no' when the Sudetenland followed. They always say 'no’ as a matter of principle. 

One does not need to take them all that seriously. They do not like us, but they do not like themselves any better. Why should we waste words on them?" 

And now Zell Miller from Wednesday night: 

"For it has been said so truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press. 

It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. 

It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest. 

It is the soldier who salutes the flag, serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag, who gives that protester the freedom he abuses to burn that flag." 

Still, as preposterous and mean-spirited as it was, Zell Miller's jeremiad was still no match for the concerted evil of the Nuremberg rallies. Yet in their total adoration of the man and his message of unfettered bellicosity, the screaming acolytes inside MSG evoked strange and eerie echoes of those dark days over sixty-five years ago. If the late Lili Riefenstahl was filming Miller's speech, she would have noted the parallels. 

But I have to pull myself up. What I am saying is equally preposterous, right? Zell Miller is a blue dog crank, who remains a Democrat because he "was born a Democrat." You can't take such a misguided coot seriously, right? We've had cranks before: Father Coughlin in the 1930s; Pat Buchanan in the early nineties; Savage and Coulter today. 

But those people in the audience were chanting. Those Bush poll numbers are slowly inching back up. The lies and distortions about John Kerry go largely unanswered. Hate is winning. Disinformation works.  Seeing their effectiveness, these same vile tactics will one day be used by Democrats against Republicans. Then where will we be?

President Bush can yank on our heartstrings with his high-toned talk of liberty and the call of "History," as if it was some Hegelian force marching through time with “Dubya” as its chosen vehicle of deliverance. But underneath his lofty rhetoric is a daily barrage of division and destruction delivered by a cadre of paid lieutenants––from the Swift Boat Veterans to AM Radio nutballs, to the addled Zell Miller of Young Harris, Georgia––that belie the Administration's even bigger lies of "compassionate conservatism" and "setting a new tone in Washington." 

Such resolute depravity has forced me to confront the pivotal question of this election: how do you best respond to evil when it is coming at you full-bore from within? Especially if America is buying the tainted red meat that Miller, Cheney, and Bush are proffering, that pretty much dooms reasoned public discourse as an effective response. This dark fait accompli also becomes the defining 
challenge that will beset the Kerry campaign: when confronted with unconscionable knavery, how do you respond without resorting to knavery itself? 

Right now in America, we are faced with twin evils: the clear and present evil of Al Qaeda, and another evil growing more emboldened every day: the untethered evil represented by the partisan Lie Machine and media complicity in it. The way in which Kerry responds to the latter evil will tell you everything you need to know about how he will respond to the former. 

Jim Crotty is the author of How to Talk American (Houghton Mifflin) and cofounder of Monk: the Mobile Magazine. He can be reached through www.jamescrotty.com.