Gingrich Criticizes Bush, Aids Enemy

Gingrich Criticizes Bush, Aids Enemy
By Glenn Greenwald, AlterNet. Posted April 12, 2006.

(excerpt)

Beyond the unsurprising fact that Bush followers are revealing themselves to be soulless and disloyal now that their hero has fallen, the more important revelation is that they have built a framework in our country ever since 9/11 where dissent from the commander was all but prohibited by the noxious equation of criticism with treason. All of the far-too-late criticisms which people like Gingrich, Conway and so many others are suddenly so eager to voice, have been off-limits for years now as a result of the precept -- spread by people like them -- that the president is not our public servant, but instead, is our commander-in-chief fighting a war in which our very survival is at stake, and to criticize him or oppose his efforts is, to use Gingrich's formulation, to give "a great deal of comfort" to the terrorists.

Indeed, responding to criticisms of his policies in Iraq, the president himself "demand a debate that brings credit to our democracy -- not comfort to our adversaries." Debates over what we should do now in order to win are acceptable, but condemnations of the president for things done in the past or which call into question the value of the troops' efforts (Gingrich: "It was an enormous mistake for us to try to occupy that country after June of 2003") are treasonous. Following that logic, Zell Miller angrily stood before the nation at the Republican National Convention and described the 2004 presidential election this way: "ur nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats' manic obsession to bring down our commander-in-chief." The same logic led Michael Reagan to demand when Howard Dean questioned whether we can win in Iraq that Dean "should be hung." This is the dissent-prohibiting climate in which our country has been wallowing essentially since 9/11.

Presidents have pursued misguided policies before, and surely will again. But one of the self-corrective features of a democracy is that open, aggressive criticism of our leaders enable those mistakes to be exposed, realized and corrected. We have been without that self-corrective capacity for the last five years, thanks to Bush followers who insisted that not only is the president right, but that truly patriotic Americans will refrain from criticizing his policies in any way, because the criticism itself is tantamount to helping the enemy. And so we have collectively pursued disastrous policies, and tolerated patently illegal conduct, because the conventional wisdom emerged that it was preferable, and more patriotic, to keep quiet about our government's actions than to speak out and point out what was obvious for quite some time now -- namely, all of the criticisms which long-time Bush supporters are suddenly voicing as though they believed them all along.

The greatest evil of the last five years isn't that our government pursued disastrous and illegal policies, it's that the administration and its supporters attempted to immunize themselves from criticism for those actions, thus depriving our democracy of its greatest strength. To watch the people responsible for that dissent-quashing now stand up and voice the very criticisms they've long equated with treason is far too infuriating to celebrate. It is important to ensure that the people responsible for the indescribable mess our country is in on so many levels not be allowed to extricate themselves from responsibility. There has been one political faction that has run every part of our country for the last five years, and they are responsible for everything that has happened. We know who they are, and it is critically important that they not be permitted to play-act as a legitimate opposition.


Glenn Greenwald is a constitutional law attorney and chief blogger at Unclaimed Territory. His forthcoming book, How Would a Patriot Act: Defending American Values from a President Run Amok will be released by Working Assets Publishing next month.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/34878/