In his address to the Republican convention last night, Zell Miller showed he is no democrat. That’s a lower-case “d”: I’m not talking about the political party Miller, a Georgia senator, nominally belongs to. I mean that Miller doesn’t seem to understand the simple basics of our system of government.
Salon’s Tim Grieve has already taken apart the distortions of fact in Miller’s (and other) convention speeches. (Those weapons systems he complains Kerry opposed? Then-defense secretary Dick Cheney questioned them, too.) And Miller’s rhetorical question, “Where is the bipartisanship in this country when we need it most?” should rightly be addressed to President Bush, who, in the days after 9/11, stood astride the most unprecedented swell of bipartisanship in decades — and then squandered it on narrow, extremist policies, dirty-pool politics and a divisively launched and incompetently executed war in Iraq.
No, I want to talk about this sentence in Miller’s speech: “Today, at the same time young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief.”
Strip this of its spin and modifiers and what Miller is saying is, “While Americans are dying, the opposition party is trying to win the election, and that hurts the nation.”
Well, what does Miller suggest Americans do who honestly believe that George Bush is making disastrous mistakes at home and abroad? Grin and bear it and fall in line — because, hey, he is the commander in chief? The very fact that “young Americans are dying” — many of whom very likely did not have to be dying — is what fires up much of the opposition to the president. But Miller thinks that if soldiers are dying, the essential work of democracy — endorsing our leaders or replacing them if we think they’re screwing up — must halt.
Note the militarism here. Forget that our Constitution puts the civilian authority in charge of the military; in Miller’s rhetoric, “commander in chief” trumps “president.” And dissent equals insubordination.
Miller’s speech goes on to declare, “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.”
I’m sorry, senator, but you couldn’t be more wrong. (And every Republican who applauded you needs a remedial civics class). It is the U.S. constitution that bestows these freedoms. Executives and legislators sometimes try to abridge them. Soldiers, for the most part, protect them. But from the time of the nation’s Founding Fathers on, American leaders, thinkers and citizens have been conscious of the tension between our cherished civil freedoms and the logic of warfare. Waging war demands sacrifice and obedience — and compromises freedom. And so democracies rightly and appropriately go to war reluctantly, and voters demand that their leaders show that there is no alternative to fighting.
Oh, right, that’s why we’re having an election-year debate about a “war of choice” in the first place.
I can’t imagine anyone watching Miller’s frothing speech and feeling reassured about the direction Bush is taking us. It was an outburst of intimidation, intended to cow. Dave Winer heard the jackboots behind it: “Why was the Miller speech so scary? Answer — you’re next. That’s what Miller was saying. After this election we put on the brown shirts.” That may be a little over the top, but the fact that’s it’s only a little over the top is itself chilling. Josh Marshall heard the same noise, just a little more muted: “This whole confab has been built around militarism, the seductions of the mentality of siege and insecurity both from without and within, and the sort of no-rules-win-at-all-costs-lie-if-it-works mentality that will lead this nation to grief.”
There is no Bush administration record to run on: At home they’ve raided the treasury and looted the future of Social Security for tax cuts for the rich, and abroad they’ve squandered the support of the world and bungled the war on the perpetrators of 9/11. All the Republicans can do — as we’ve seen this week –is attack, attack, attack. They’re trying to plant a little seed of terror in each voter’s mind, hoping to immobilize the opposition and persuade the undecided that they don’t dare hope for anything better. Scariest of all is that it has a chance of working.
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