Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Will anti-tea party calumnies lead to anti-defamation lawsuit?


On March 20 William Douglas, a black reporter for the McClatchy news service, claimed that on March 20 Tea Party protesters, demonstrating against the health takeover legislation, screamed the 'N' word at members of the Black Caucus as they passed through the protest sight. Jack Cashill argues convincingly that the claim was a malicious calumny, later embellished with fabricated details. The report was clearly developed as a weapon for use in a shrewdly calculated and still ongoing campaign to destroy thwart the political effect of the disgusted revulsion rising in response to the Obama faction and the elitist subverters of liberty they serve and represent.

With banal regularity these would-be party dictators trot out the increasingly laughable suggestion that anyone who opposes the liberty destroying, constitution shredding, posterity bankrupting, death rationing schemes of these supercilious, self-righteous fanatics has just got to be a racist. Even after years of NEA orchestrated diseducation, some people have common sense enough to reject this feeble-minded version of a formal fallacy recognized as such since ancient times. (If Joe is a racist, then he opposes Obama. Joe opposes Obama. Therefore, Joe is a racist. It's called affirming the consequent.)Are the people acting on this specious reasoning doing so because they are logic disabled? Or does their arrogance lead them to assume everybody else is?

The best way to find out is to turn their propaganda strategy against them by forcing them to defend the calumny with which they hope to carry out their cold blooded character assassination. One of the conservative public policy law firms should sue Douglass Williams and the McClatchy company for defamation, on behalf of the Tea Party protesters present when the Black Caucus members staged their provocation. That way, instead of pretending that the burden of proof is on the people who were exercising their first amendment rights, (forcing them to prove what didn't happen- a classic ploy of tyrants) the reporter making the charge would be put on the spot. The Congressional representatives who used sly weasels words to give the lie an aura of plausibility could be subpoenaed. Then we'll see what they have to say under oath.

As far as the Tea Partiers go, this could help to set the record straight. Of course, there is the risk that the other side would counter with an effort to prove that the possibility of racism has to be taken seriously. They could begin by calling witnesses to testify to the fact that some Republicans pretend to oppose Obama because of his health scheme, but praise Mitt Romney for implementing a similarly objectionable plan as Governor of Massachusetts. Some Tea Party people protest the Obama plan, but supported Scott Brown, who avows his admiration for Romney's scheme. Obama is black. Romney is white. They reserve their outrage for the black guy. As SNL's Church lady might have said could it be raaaacism?

Again there are a million other reasons why people supposedly conservative people are willing to overlook Romney's Obama-like political qualities (many of them perhaps best symbolized by green paper rectangles with familiar portraits, suitable for framing.) The racial disparity argument barely conceals another formal fallacy. But it also reveals the fatal flaw of the GOP leadership (as well as other putatively conservative leaders), which is their tendency toward exclusively cynical political calculation. This is precisely what the Obama faction really counts on manipulating with its campaign of calumnies against the Tea Party movement.

As far as I can tell, most of the participants in the Tea Party movement's authentic activities (as opposed to the ones the GOP ham handedly seeks to co-opt) are motivated by a deep commitment to America's liberty and to the constitution that serves and preserves it. They don't oppose Obama because he's black. They oppose him because he's a throw-back to the communist Reds of the last century. He's a reconstituted ideological fossil from a humanly miserable bygone age- like the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park." His thinking could pass for fashionable back in the 1930's, when totalitarian socialists were all the rage in some quarters among America's elites, with Hitler and Stalin still recognized for what they were- two sides of the same coin. But many Americans have long since realized that once fashionable old socialist cant doesn't hold a candle to the self-evident truths that have been and must remain the firm foundation of the American way of life. They are timeless, ageless principles not because America's founders were all knowing or wise, but because they had the decent humility to derive their understanding of justice and good government from a source that was, and is, and always will be old and new; ancient and young; ending and beginning, all at once and all in all. He is the ruler and will be the judge of the universe He made and governs still, the one Creator God.

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