Voters base election on mythology
Print
Share
Email to a friend
Add This
Feeds
Editorial
Article RatingLast week’s Supreme Court decision finding an individual right to gun ownership should have been no surprise to regular Sentinel readers.
Right here in this very column, I called that decision a few months ago. I even allowed as how I didn’t have any problem with the idea, which probably surprised a few conservative readers. I noted that it logically followed that an individual right to bear arms probably didn’t go along, constitutionally speaking, with a ban on an entire class of commonly available weapons.
With the long-building suspense broken on this issue, there is, not surprisingly, an attempt to spin this as a good omen for Republican prospects in the upcoming election.
The Hill, a Washington newspaper that covers Congress, published an article, “GOP Hopes to Keep Guns in Spotlight,” in which various Republican strategists played up the opportunities the decision gives them to hammer Democrats, starting with Sen. Barack Obama, who supported the Washington, D.C., handgun ban that was struck down last week.
It occurred to me that they might be overconfident on this topic. After all, one of the rites of fall in election years has been the under-the-radar pitch associating the Democratic candidate with “secret plans” to confiscate all guns “after the election.”
These shaggy-dog stories are distributed through direct mail, aired on local talk radio, sometimes even posted on billboards. And, in recent years, through the ubiquitous forwarded e-mail, usually with the subject line “Something to consider” or “Read this before you vote,” usually a reliable indicator that what follows is mostly or completely bogus.
Now that a widely publicized Supreme Court decision contradicts this pitch directly, those who undertake these sorts of campaigns might reasonably be concerned that, in the age of Google, this particular campaign war horse might be headed for the glue factory.
But then I remembered something equally pertinent — the role that mythology plays in most conservative talking points.
Surely you remember, in addition to mass confiscation of firearms, the ever-popular welfare queens in Cadillacs, the babies taken off ventilators by Saddam’s minions in the run-up to the first Gulf war, the legions of white men frog-marched out of their workplaces by unqualified minorities, the murder of Vince Foster by Hillary Clinton, the nuclear weapons Iraq was 45 minutes from deploying in 2002 and so on.
Each of these tropes took up big chunks of bandwidth in the public debate over the past two decades, peddled by GOP sympathizers as symbolic of the Democratic party’s agenda. And if there was little or no factual basis for any of them, well, they were supposed to be illustrative of some greater truth that voters should carry into the polling place.
So much so that these stories are still told long after they’ve been debunked.
The debates of the recent day offer us little hope that the GOP’s leopards have changed their spots. We start with Vice President Dick Cheney, whose relationship with the truth is similar to the one between sunlight and vampires.
Last month, he was on TV arguing for expanding oil drilling in the U.S., making the claim that the Chinese were drilling off Cuba’s shores while the U.S. refuses to drill offshore. That was disproved so quickly and easily that Cheney himself was forced to walk the claim back publicly.
But even after Cheney admitted he was wrong, several GOP members of Congress went on TV to repeat the claim.
That incident was the prelude to a Republican push to end the ban on offshore drilling. To head off the arguments on environmental damage that got the ban passed in the first place, Republicans cited better drilling technology that was so good it prevented oil spills during Hurricane Katrina.
Well, that sounded wrong to me, so I did a little research. Not only was oil spilled by Katrina, with 113 offshore platforms damaged, the spills could be seen from space.
And yet, the new Republican governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, repeated the fake story on Fox News Channel. This is particularly egregious coming from Jindal, who was a congressman when Katrina hit his state and should have had the extent of the damage burned into his psyche.
It was mostly conservatives who cried and stamped their feet when the Supreme Court upheld habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees a couple of weeks ago. Their favorite justice, Antonin Scalia, wrote a scathing dissent claiming that 30 of these detainees went back to the battlefield against the U.S.
Turns out authorities have only identified one such person out of hundreds. Fortunately, the fact that dozens of detainees were held for years, only to be released without facing charges, helped assure that Scalia’s false assertion didn’t carry the day — though it remains in a Supreme Court opinion, to be discovered and mistakenly utilized by Scalia’s successors.
So I fully expect the standing mythology about gun confiscation to figure in this year’s election. I also expect, given current polling results, that they’ll dream up a few fresh ones as well.
