Foaming rhetoric

I didn't go to the Republican Convention. There are limits to my tolerance! But maybe not to Elizabeth DiNovella's. She's our culture editor, and she managed miraculously to write two features for us this month, one on the GOP and another on Venezuela, which she had visited in the weeks before.

For my part, I chose to suffer through night after night of Republican rhetoric in the comfort of my own home. Democratic rhetoric, too, if you count Zell Miller, who put the Zell into overzealous. The thing about Miller's speech, other than the foam, was what an ode to authoritarianism it was. Echoing rhetoric that could easily have stumbled out of the mouth of Francisco Franco or Augusto Pinochet, Miller said:

"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.

"It is the soldier who salutes the flag, serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag, who gives that protester the freedom he abuses to burn that flag."

This is nothing but martial disgust for those who exercise our most precious freedoms.

One bit of Bush's own rhetoric keeps bothering me more than others, and, granted, there's a lot to choose from. He said in his acceptance speech that his choice in Iraq was "to take the word of a madman or ... take action to defend our country."

But Bush didn't need to "take the word of a madman."

He could have taken the word of the U.N. weapons inspectors. They were given unprecedented access to sites all over Iraq, and they reported back that they could not find the huge stockpiles of weapons. Mohammed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, even said flat-out that "we have found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons program."

But Bush didn't want to hear those words. And Bush was not content to let U.S. spy planes survey every square inch of Iraqi territory 24/7.

No, he was dead-set on war. So much so that, even if Saddam had backed down at the last minute, Bush still would have ordered the invasion. "If Saddam Hussein leaves, we'll go in anyway," Bush said, just days before the launch, according to Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack.

In this issue, Nat Hentoff excoriates ACLU head Anthony Romero for at first defending the signing of a document saying he would not knowingly hire someone who is on the government's watch list of people who are supporters of terrorism. That document was part of an application to participate in a program that allows groups to receive charitable contributions from federal employees. (The ACLU has since disavowed its participation in that program and is suing the government over the requirement.)

When this story broke, it came to my attention that when The Progressive applied to be a member of Community Shares of Wisconsin earlier this year, I had signed off on a similar document. I don't remember doing it, and obviously wasn't paying attention when I did. I should have been on the ball. As soon I was alerted to this, I immediately rescinded my signature.

If even some of us who work on these issues every day can fall for an Ashcroft trap, you can only imagine how widespread the problem is.

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