Maneuvers and Manure

We liberals may control the media (or is that we Jews? Or are the two the same thing?), but the Grand Old Party does propaganda like nobody's business. While some of us optimistically focus on the number of congressional seats Democrats may pick up this November, there is a considerable amount of conservative legislation masquerading as "moderate" and "rational" because of clever political maneuvering.

Take, for example, a proposal by Senators McCain, Graham and Warner which would strip the right of habeas corpus from political detainees. In other words, detainees couldn't challenge the validity of their imprisonment ("here's proof I'm not a terrorist"), or challenge the legality of their treatment ("here's proof I was tortured").

…Virtually no attention has been paid to this radical and wildly unjust provision, because as bad as the McCain-Graham-Warner proposal is, the president's was slightly worse. And by masquerading as the principled opponents to a handful of the most extreme provisions in the president's proposals, these "dissident Republican senators" were depicted as the moderates in the debate, as the reasonable, serious thinkers who would carefully balance the need for strong antiterrorist measures with the need to safeguard our basic liberties.

The "this may be a finger up your ass, but at least it's not a fist" approach to government shows up again in the debate over Dubya's illegal, warrantless eavesdropping program:

…the understandable focus on the incomparably dangerous [Bush lackey and Pennsylvania Senator Arlen] Specter bill has obscured the fact that there are competing bills sponsored by "independent, dissident Republican lawmakers" that are only slightly less horrible than the Specter bill but still radical and destructive in their own right. Competing bills by Sen. Michael DeWine and Rep. Heather Wilson, for instance, would vest in the president the power to eavesdrop on the conversations of Americans without judicial oversight or approval of any kind.

The parallels with the torture debacle are obvious. The torture controversy arose because the president wanted to use techniques of torture to interrogate detainees, and he proposed an extremist piece of legislation to accomplish that. Republican senators flamboyantly opposed that legislation -- thus bestowing themselves with "moderate" credentials -- but introduced their own slightly less extremist proposal that accomplished the same thing (legalizing the torture techniques).

Do you see what's happening here? With virtually no public support for the Interloper or his policies, Republicans are protecting their own hides by lining up in faux opposition to the president's agenda. "Hey, we stood up to Bush!" is a great GOP rallying cry, especially when instead of supporting the worst legislation ever, they're simply proposing the second-worst legislation. But hey, next to a ton of manure, one pile of shit doesn't smell so bad, right?

The Catch-22 is, of course, that Democrats can't really oppose "compromise" legislation because of this diabolical GOP positioning. We have once again been painted into a corner that will force us to "cowardly" defend terrorists if we oppose "moderate" Republication legislation. It's a paradox worthy of Lucifer himself; perhaps Hugo was right after all…