A column last week by Liz Cheney in the Wall Street Journal (“Republicans, Get Over the 2012 Loss – and Start Fighting Back”) provides a disappointing insight into the broken nature of our public debate.
The column, a strong attack on President Obama, displays the hysteria, unsupported claims and lack of context of much right-wing writing, but that it got published in its current form is perhaps even more telling.
That Reagan quote
Cheney begins with a famous quote from Ronald Reagan in 1961 warning that freedom has to be constantly defended or there is a risk that “you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”
This is a popular quote among the right, as a Google search will show. But what is seldom mentioned is the context of that quote. Reagan was warning against the adoption of Medicare in a piece sponsored or supported by the American Medical Association. Medicare, was adopted, of course, and America is still here, and still free.
That should make conservatives hesitant to use the quote – it’s been proven thoroughly and completely wrong. That doesn’t seem to bother Cheney and others who use it, without any self-awareness, to protest Obamacare and to argue that this program really would mean the end of freedom.
The most radical man?
Cheney has much to say about Obama. He is “the most radical man ever to occupy the Oval Office.” More radical than FDR? Than Lyndon Johnson? Those are two presidents that led far more sweeping changes in social roles and government activism than Obama has ever dreamed of doing.
But she is just getting started: “The president has launched a war on Americans’ Second Amendment rights. He has launched a war on religious freedom. He has launched a war on fossil fuels. He is working to nationalize one-sixth of the economy with job-killing Obamacare.”
The war on gun ownership is an established conspiracy theory, supported by the NRA, arguing that Obama has been scheming for years to take away our guns. That Obama has never actually proposed this, or written about it, that no one has ever heard him say this, nor (apparently) has any major staff person associated with Obama ever advocated such a thing seems not to matter.
A war on religious freedom? Cheney doesn’t say, but presumably this is about mandating churches in their secular businesses to follow the same rules as other businesses in regard to insurance coverage for contraception. Or perhaps it is about support for gay marriage; one strand of opposition to gay marriage argues that the mere existence of it is an assault on the religious freedom of those who oppose it.
Or maybe it refers to something else, but that is the point: Cheney never says what any of this refers to. So, in a sense, it’s almost beside the point to debate if Obama has a “war” on fossil fuels, or even if his actual energy policies are good or bad, because she isn’t discussing any specific policy.
Foreign affairs
Cheney’s anger at the president of course includes foreign policy: “The president has so effectively diminished American strength abroad that there is no longer a question of whether this was his intent. He is working to pre-emptively disarm the United States … al-Qaeda is resurgent across the Middle East.”
As with the domestic issues, one can only wonder what she is talking about. Defense spending has not been slashed. Almost no one thinks al-Qaeda is “resurgent” anywhere, except perhaps in Mali and adjacent countries. Is she referring to Islamists’ role in the Arab Spring, mixing political Islam with “jihadists” with a core of terrorists? Does she think that Egypt is now in the grip of al-Qaeda? She doesn’t say, other than the inevitable reference to Benghazi.
Replying to rants
It can be a mistake to reply to such a non-specific attack by searching for things it could mean and then trying to refute what you assume she means. Rather, a better approach is to call attention to how she has failed to provide support for her arguments and simply ask: “What is your support for that?”
The question should be put to Cheney: how exactly has Obama disarmed America? What specific actions constitute a war on fossil fuels? The onus should be put on her to flesh out her claims with specific incidents and evidence. Only when she has done that does anyone have the responsibility to reply.
Of course, this is a written piece and not part of a conversation. We’re not in the room with Cheney; we can’t ask her what she is talking about.
As this is being written, more than 1,500 comments have been posted to the WSJ site in response to her article. Of course, they take many forms, but certain patterns can be recognized. There are those saying she is crazy, those saying she’s right and making even more extreme attacks on Obama, there are those pointing out the context of the Reagan quote and those offering specific rebuttals to her points.
But there almost no actual debate – no one taking the points raised and discussing them. No back and forth about any of those policy areas. The occasional liberal tries to introduce a fact or two and is greeted with silence or insult.
Cheney’s piece didn’t go unremarked and there is no shortage of attacks on it from various liberal blogs. Some of them are just rants of their own, some offer point by point rebuttal. But those sites talk to themselves and do not seem to have produced any reply from Cheney.
Who is Liz Cheney?
Cheney is a daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and has worked in the State Department, including being Deputy Assistant Secretary of State of Near Eastern Affairs from 2002 to 2004. She now is among the leaders of Keep America Safe, an organization that lobbies for increased attention to national security threats.
She has the same right as anyone else to pursue a career and express her views, but her rapid rise (just six years from graduating law school to a senior job in the State Department) and her ability to command a national audience for her views is not an opportunity available to everyone. She doesn’t have her national soapbox due to her wisdom, her insight or the quality of her research and writing. She is part of a privileged inner circle.
Our broken debate
Bob Somerby at his Daily Howler blog has been railing for years about this sort of thing, about how our public discourse is broken. His themes all apply to Cheney’s piece: unsupported allegations, extreme claims, a lack of evidence and a lack of accountability or even exchange or debate. The media provides an uncritical platform for this, failing to do their job of editing and filtering out shallow arguments. Regardless of if an editor agreed with Cheney or not, they should have flagged the piece and sent it back for a rewrite.
Cheney’s column may not be of significance by itself, but it that something so unsupported could be published in a leading national newspaper is a cogent reminder of how broken our public discourse is.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News’ editorial policy.