Sinking the Swift Boaters

Why the oncoming GOP smear campaign will fizzle

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
2/18/07
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/VRWC/swiftfizzle.htm
 

The LA Times had an item, repeated in part by Raw Story, about GOP plans to launch one of their patented vicious smear campaigns against Senator Hillary Clinton. Raw Story wrote, “Braun reports that ‘a flurry of planned projects’ include ‘a Michael Moore-style documentary film, book-length exposes, and websites such as StopHerNow.com and StopHillaryPAC.com. ‘Conservative admirers of the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth media blitz that helped torpedo Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential candidacy in 2004 are now agitating to 'Swift-boat' Clinton,’ Braun writes.”

I can’t wait to see the “Michael Moore-style documentary film.” Maybe they could get Dennis Miller to wander around a sweatshop, trying to get employees to admit that not only do they get medical coverage in full, but that their employers even paid for their children’s college tuition. Someone’s got to hold those powerful workers accountable for the terrible mistreatment they unthinkingly inflict on poor little multinational corporations!

Guerrilla humor used to work well for Rush when the right wing was out on the fringes and largely ignored. It became simply bullying and mean when the far right seized control of the country. Times change, tempus frangit and all that, and the right wing is failing to change with it. What worked well in 1994 and 1998 didn’t work as well in 2004, and won’t work at all in 2008.

Part of the change lies in how elections are covered. Much has been made of the rise of the blogosphere, and bloggers proclaim, occasionally with justification, that they “keep the media honest.” Of course, the blogs tend to screw up frequently; right wing bloggers mostly fell for the myths about Obama being raised as a Moslem, or that Pelosi wanted a 757 to fly about the country. And on the left, there was the myth of Rove being indicted and that Gore was going to announce his candidacy at the Oscars.

But the media took huge hits to their credibility, especially after 9/11, when they laid down and became lapdogs for Putsch, from the NY Times trying to cover for the GOP theft of Florida in 2000 to the disgraceful cheerleading for war in 2003 and support for same all through 2004.

They also know they got “played” by the right wing echo chamber during the Clinton years, becoming, in effect, a mindless amplifier for every nuthatch conspiracy theory about the Clintons the droolers of the far right could manufacture. They told themselves that it was just journalistic skepticism of government, but in reality it was partisanship, laid bare when the skeptics of 1999 became the government cheerleaders of 2001.

They’ve belatedly realized that they need to fact-check some of the drivel being planted by Karl Rove and Richard Scaife, and are doing so. That’s why the most recent efforts to “swift boat” Obama and Pelosi collapsed so disastrously. Contrast with the story of Bill Clinton holding up traffic at LAX for two hours so he could get a $200 haircut. The story had no merit at all, and the media never called the right wing spin machine on it. If the right tried that now, the major networks and even CNN would be reporting that Clinton wasn’t even in Los Angeles on that day and that Air Traffic Control had confirmed there were no significant flight delays there or at any airport Clinton might actually have been at on that day. Thus the story would have circulated for years on Free Republic and on Usenet, but nowhere else.

Another problem the right has is that the public isn’t kindly disposed towards them these days. Moderates and liberals have watched working families lose ground as the government shovels buckets of money to the undeserving wealthy, and conservatives have watched as the “small government” they thought they won passed the Patriot Act and wound up with a President who clearly sees himself as being above the law.

That leads to the corruption and venality of the administration and the GOP in general. Right wingers get downright sulky if you ask them why they don’t respond to the endless graft and criminality of Putsch and his boys with the same moral outrage they used to address every stray rumor of Clinton wrongdoing that came down the pipe. They howled incessantly about Clinton’s wrongdoings, even after the Senate acquitted him, and even after the special prosecutor’s office admitted that they couldn’t find anything worthy of seeking an indictment on in the dozens of other investigations they launched. “Clinton,” right wingers will intone, “was horribly corrupt and a disgrace to our children.”

But they have nothing at all to say about an administration that was asleep at the switch (at best) on 9/11, which lied the country into a costly, bloody, and pointless occupation, and which was incapable of handling a medium-sized disaster when Katrina hit. They are utterly silent about the $12 billion in cash (or, as the London Guardian gleefully calculated, 361 tons in $100 bills) that flat-out vanished in Iraq and may be funding the insurgents. They have nothing to say about the latest scandal, in which it turns out that the administration fired a dozen US Attorneys, all of whom were investigating administration corruption. They have nothing to say about the vast no-bid contracts bestowed on Dick Cheney’s Halliburton. They maintain a stony silence about the fact that a male prostitute was given nearly unfettered overnight access to the White House. These are the same people who howled and whined so hard and so long over Monica Lewinsky.

The upshot of all this is that the GOP has lost its moral authority. People are fed up with them, and don’t trust them. It isn’t just the party, either. GOP soundboxes such as Rush Limbaugh and Faux News have seen big losses in their ratings over the past two years, and my own feeling is that these aren’t people who stopped listening because they got overloaded with hearing the same voice day after day; these are people who left because they felt used and betrayed. Republican responsibility turned out to be a lie; the nation is in debt, hated around the world, and life is getting tougher. Republican morality turned out to be a myth; gays and prostitutes riddled the party, and even the Bush twins turned out to be, at best, useless and at worst, a national embarrassment. Republican honesty turned out to be nothing more than lies carefully aimed at focus groups such as themselves. And Republican patriotism turned out to be not to America, but to large corporations. The role of Americans in Republican eyes is to either serve those corporations in unregulated “free market conditions,” or to die for them in the savage lies of Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan.

So even though they will try their smears, and even though Faux will dutifully repeat them, they just aren’t going to have much impact. And with the albatrosses of Iraq and the serve-the-rich economy they have inflicted upon us, it will only serve to weaken them.

Don’t expect them to recognize this. After all, their reaction to the public repudiation of their policies and values in the last election has been to become even more stridently for the war and against labor, the environment, and a fair economy.

If they can’t absorb the simple lessons of the election, don’t expect them to give up their favorite weapon just because it no longer works.