I usually don’t read books like this, but when I saw in the book store “
Painting the Map Red – The Fight to Create a Permanent Republican Majority” by Hugh Hewitt, and noticed a chapter titled “The values we value”, I was overcome by curiosity to find out what on earth those values could be. My son has already chastised me for buying the book, asking me sarcastically if I now intend to contribute money to the RNC. But I feel that the money was worth the additional insight this book gave me into the hypocrisy and depravity of today’s Republican mind, as I read about Hewitt’s plan for the GOP to attain 60 Senate seats this November.
On the use of fearOne of the later chapters of the book is titled “The Democratic Left Is Addicted to Venom, and That Venom Is Poisoning the Political Process”. Yet, in the book’s Introduction, Hewitt approvingly quotes from Fred Barnes:
For Republicans, go negative. They have to go negative. They have to scare people about what Democrats would bring. You know, Democrats would run up the white flag in Iraq. Democrats don’t want to fight the War on Terror. Democrats want to raise your taxes. That’s what you have to do…. It turns out we’re winning in Iraq, the War on Terror. We haven’t been hit again. We’re aggressive in waging that war. The Democrats would take all that away. I mean, you really have to go heavily negative.
Then Hewitt adds to that:
Republicans… are afraid of complaints that they’re “questioning the patriotism of Democrats.” But a liberal party that preaches retreat and defeat deserves political reproach, not “we’re all friends here in Congress” politeness…. Demands of national security should be the trump card to prove that the GOP is the party of seriousness and the Democrats the party of grandstanding and irresponsibility.
The core Republican/Bush value: trustworthinessI’m not kidding. He really says that “trustworthiness” is Bush’s greatest strength with voters.
Hewitt notes several things that Bush has done (or tried to do) so far during his pResidency, including cutting taxes, a prescription drug benefit statute, appointing judges, tort reform, and other things. He doesn’t explain why any of these things are good for American citizens, since his only point is that Bush does what he says he is going to do.
And unfortunately, he forgot to mention a few other promises that Bush has made, such as his promise to be “a uniter, not a divider”, his promise to find out who blew Valerie Plame’s CIA cover and get rid of that person, his promise that his tax cuts did not disproportionately favor the wealthy, his promise to do something to curb global warming, his promise to protect our troops by doing such things as supplying them with adequate body armor, his promise to ensure adequate medical care for our veterans when they come home from Iraq, his promise to adequately fund the No Child Left Behind Act, and his promise to protect Americans against terrorism and natural disasters…. Oh, I’m sorry, those last two items weren’t fair of me to mention, since Bush didn’t promise to protect us against terrorism until
after 9-11, and he never actually promised to protect American citizens against natural disasters.
But Hewitt saves the bulk of his passion for the “War on Terror”:
President Bush gave an ultimatum to Saddam: Completely and transparently open your regime to inspection and comply with all UN resolutions. Or face overthrow.
Saddam is on trial because George W. Bush can be trusted to follow through on his threats as well as his promises….
This is the crucial “value” with which Republican candidates must identify…. Your word is your bond if you are an admirable American.
But wait a minute Hugh, there seems to be an empty space in your argument. To make your argument more complete, don’t you want to mention that Saddam failed to comply with the UN resolutions? That contrary to those UN resolutions, Saddam proceeded with plans for chemical and biological and nuclear warfare against the United States. And then that he hid the evidence of those plans so completely that nobody could find them. That Saddam even fooled the CIA into believing and telling the Bush administration that there was no evidence that Saddam had or was close to having any weapons of mass destruction. But that George W. Bush and his Neocon friends were the only people in the world who were smart enough to know what Saddam was really doing. And that is why George W. Bush went to war with Iraq. Isn’t that what you meant to say? Well, maybe you can insert those missing pieces into the next edition of your book.
Democrats on the issue of trustworthinessHaving made the point of how trustworthy Bush is, Hewitt then contrasts this with the trustworthiness of Democrats. He says:
Candidate after candidate must begin paragraph after paragraph with the phrase, “You cannot trust Democrats to…” The list that could follow is long and persuasive, but it must largely be shaped by the region in which the speech is delivered.
Some items on this long list of what is wrong with Democrats are:
They won’t let Americans own their rifles and their shotguns
They are extreme environmental activists
They are corrupt, and you can’t trust them to “clean their own house”
Their attitude towards politics is “win-at-all-costs”
They are obstructionist.
They are weak on economic security.
It is interesting that Hewitt provides no details to back up any of these claims. He simply asserts them as facts and urges Republicans to use them as talking points. It’s a good thing for those Republicans who follow Hewitt’s advice that our corporate news media can be relied upon not follow up such assertions with any embarrassing questions.
But the one issue where Hewitt does provide a lot of detail when lambasting Democrats is the issue of war. He goes on and on about the anti- Iraq war statements that various Democrats have made. But he never really explains why it is bad to be against the Iraq war, except to repeatedly assert such things as that Iraq has had elections since we invaded their country, Saddam Hussein is no longer in power, and the war in Iraq is keeping terrorists out of our country. The bottom line is, as far as I can tell, that Hewitt doesn’t believe that our starting a war requires justification.
The most important GOP value of all: America’s inherent greatnessI’m going to start this section by paraphrasing Hewitt’s view on this issue, and then I’ll provide the quotes from his book that support my interpretation. So you can judge for yourselves whether I’ve been unfair to or mischaracterized him – and please tell me if you think that I have. Here is Hewitt’s view (which I feel quite certain is also the view of most Bush supporters) on this issue:
America is great. Therefore, America should do and take whatever it wants in the world. And those who criticize it for doing so are bad.
That attitude is revealed in a chapter entitled “The Democratic Left and the MSM Have Declared War on the Military. Again”, in which a very large portion of Hewitt’s writing is geared towards lambasting Senator Richard Durbin for daring to publicly criticize America’s conduct of its “War on Terror”. Here is the statement that Senator Durbin made on the Senate floor, regarding the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay, that proves how much Democrats hate America:
Senator Durbin’s statementImagine if the president had followed Colin Powell’s advice and respected our treaty obligations. How would things have been different? We still would have the ability to hold detainees and interrogate them aggressively… We would be able to do everything we need to do to keep our country safe. The difference is, we would not have damaged our reputation in the international community in the process.
When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here – I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what on FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:
On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for eighteen to twenty-four hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold… On another occasion, the air conditioner had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion…. with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.
If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in the gulags, or some mad regime – Pol Pot or others – that had no concern for human beings….
It is not too late. I hope we will learn from history. I hope we will change course. The president could declare the United States will apply the Geneva Conventions to the war on terrorism. He could declare, as he should, that the United States will not, under any circumstances, subject any detainee to torture, or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The administration could give all detainees a meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention before a neutral decision maker.
Such a change of course would dramatically improve our image and it would make us safer. I hope this administration will choose that course. If they do not, Congress must step in.
Then, after several pages describing the outrage of various Republican Senators, a U.S. soldier, and Karl Rove (expressed in a speech) towards Durbin’s actions, Hewitt offers his interpretation of what Durbin was doing:
Durbin was speaking in code, communicating with the hard-left base of his party and their European friends and well-wishers. Here’s what he was saying…
First, Durbin’s reference to the Nazis, the Soviet gulag, and Pol Pot’s killers was an intentional part of a detailed argument, an argument that equates the killer prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay with combatants in war, and which asserts that America is acting wrongly and unlawfully vis-avis these prisoners. Not only does this undermine the justice of America’s cause in the war on terror, it elevates unlawful combatants to the status of legitimate warriors.
Next, Durbin’s detailed argument asserts that the conditions and practices at Gitmo amount to “torture,” and are part of a pattern that began at Abu Ghraib and continues throughout the world, practices which class the United States among the “most repressive regimes in history”….
Durbin’s argument…. implied that the American military had built a global network of Abu Ghraibs/Gitmos, wherein systematic torture of prisoners is taking place, all of it under the control of the United States military….
Of course Durbin had not segregated the criminal conduct by a handful of out-of-control GIs not acting under orders – and already prosecuted and punished – from the authorized conduct at Gitmo and elsewhere. To do so would have protected the military’s reputation, but it would have also damaged Durbin’s agenda of demonizing the war effort. To advance that agenda, Durbin took a single report from an FBI investigator, inflated its allegations to Abu Ghraib-level criminal conduct, and attributed it to every detention facility used in the war on terror….
Durbin never articulated the threat to Americans from terrorists…. Durbin never articulated a defense of any interrogation tactics, never paused over any threat, never recalled the brutality of the jihadists from September 11….He never named a single victim of the violence of the jihadists, but instead worried over their conditions….
Then Hewitt gets to the Democratic Party in general, chiding them for not piling on to the hammering of Senator Durbin for his remarks:
It may be more accurate to write that the Democratic Party stopped denying its real nature, and instead embraced its inner defeatist, its never-banished “blame America first” impulse. In the eight months since, the Democrats and the MSM have done little to disguise their heartfelt suspicion of American military power and the American military. They are what they have so often shown themselves to be: a party of bitter hostility to the idea of American exceptionalism…
The leadership of the Democratic Party is now committed to a strategy of retreat that will inevitably lead to disastrous defeat and the deaths of Americans here at home….
After a year of steady attacks on the president, the administration and the war, the MSM has wholly abandoned any claim to objectivity for 2006. They now vigorously campaign for the idea that the invasion of Iraq was founded on an intentional and deceptive manipulation of intelligence….
Together, they are committed to the repudiation of the Global War on Terror as waged by the Bush administration specifically and the hobbling of the American military generally.
An appropriate response to HewittActually, Mr. Hewitt has expressed his “values” so clearly in the above excerpts from his book, that a response is probably unnecessary. Nevertheless, I felt the need to write a response (though I haven’t decided yet what I will do with it other than post it on DU).
But, since this post is already quite long enough, I have decided to end it here.
My response to Mr. Hewitt can be found here for those who are interested:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1126630
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
