http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20051229/cm_huffpost/013007

Jane Smiley: The Republicans: Winners or Perpetrators?

Jane Smiley
Thu Dec 29,12:33 AM ET

I was thinking that the spy scandal was being expertly taken care of
without my input, what with Martin Garbus, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, and
Barron's magazine hot on the "president's" tail. My plan was to continue
reading Les Rougons-Macquart in peace, but then I read RJ Eskow's blog
about the Democrats, and while I thought it was insightful and well-argued,
there was one thing I disagree with, and that is that the point of the
whole spy scandal, now that Bush has been caught and has admitted breaking
the law, is not whether the Democrats can find a way to be electable, it is
whether the Republican Party is a criminal enterprise, and whether average
Republicans, both in and out of the government, are going to countenance
and support unnecessary and shamelessly unlawful behavior. Let's not shift
the focus to Losers and Victims, but rather, keep it firmly on Winners and
Perpetrators.

Let's talk about the "winner" aspect first. I clearly remember back in
2000, when Bush cheated to "win" the Presidential election with the help of
Justices Scalia and Thomas, who dishonored themselves in perpetuity by
voting to stop the Florida recount, the Republicans gloated and gloried in
the "win". They acted like a nasty Little League team, who wins on a
technicality and then goes on to rub the faces of the other team in the
dirt, as if winning at the cost of the integrity of the game were actually
a thing worth celebrating. Clearly, the Republicans had learned their
sportsmanship on the football fields of America's colleges and
universities, by observing the hiring practices of successful coaches, the
educational careers of cheating athletes, and the fund-raising efforts of
testosterone-poisoned alumni. It was not how you play the game, but whether
you win or lose! What a terrific model of traditional values that is! The
Bush team thereafter went on to exemplify "winning through intimidation"--
"You're with us or against us." "If you disagree with the President, you
are supporting the terrorists". Blah blah blah--we know the whole litany,
and it is nauseating. We also know where it came from--the corporate
boardroom as well as the athletic stadium and the middle school and the
frat house, where bullies are king and "the common good" is a joke. By
2004, the Republicans had refined their election stealing techniques, and
anyway, they were benefiting from continued disbelief on the part of the
Democrats, who didn't seem to be able to imagine that the Republicans could
be so brazen as to do it again, even though when Texas redistricting came
up, Tom Delay gave them a taste of the corruption in store. What does it
matter, the Republicans seemed to be saying in 2004, fair elections? The
whole idea was a joke to them and they hardly bothered to conceal their
thousands of little cheats and obstacles to an honest vote.

You had to wonder at the so-called moderates who were going along for the
ride, all those diversity figures who were trotted out at the Republican
convention, just for show, then packed away again for next time.
Schwarzenegger and McCain were the most disgusting, but there were plenty
of others, dupes or knaves, in whose name an illegal war had been
perpetrated, in whose name an election was going to be stolen, in whose
name war crimes were going to be committed in Fallujah right after the
election, in whose name detainees and captives were going to be rendered
and tortured. What kind of person, you had to wonder, would associate him
or herself with winning at any cost, but there were plenty of them, and
lots of them worked in the MSM and actually allowed their very own names to
appear as by-lines! So they won. I'm sure they felt good about it.
Supposedly, winning is the only thing and winners are always happy. Fair
enough.

Back then, I was willing to admit that maybe some people didn't see these
issues in quite the black and white way that I did. The conservative caste
of mind is different from the liberal caste of mind, and much of what we
believe is dictated by temperament. For example, I've noticed that for most
liberals, the greatest sin is murder. Liberals recoil at harming others.
The fact that the Iraq war has physically harmed tens of thousands of
Iraqis, not to mention many thousands of American soldiers, is the red
letter immorality that defines that misadventure for liberals. If they
reluctantly supported the war, those deaths and injuries are the hardest
sticking point; if they never supported the war, those deaths are the most
unforgivable horror.

Conservatives, though, don't really mind doing harm to others, even murder,
especially if they add the phrase, "for your own good." After all, people
get harmed all the time--the world, to a natural conservative, is a harmful
place and a vale of tears. To a conservative, the greatest crime is
betrayal of the tribe, and if worst comes to worst, better that those
outside the tribe (often not even defined as human) come to grief (get
injured, get raped, lose everything, get killed, let's be honest) in
preference to oneself or one's allies. To a true conservative, it doesn't
matter that Jesus's number one rule was to do unto others as you would have
them do unto you--they somehow read this as do unto others before they do
unto you. Conservatives, I think, have a stronger flight/fight response
than liberals. They are both more fearful and more aggressive. It shows in
their religion (God is someone to fear), it shows in their child-rearing
techniques (beatings,whippings, spankings are to be administered, not
avoided), it shows in their attitude toward marriage and sexuality
(conforming to one's own strict moral standards isn't enough--others must
conform, also, or the whole society is in danger). To the conservative
mind, harm may be justifiably done to others who do not conform. Doing harm
to others is a relative evil, not an absolute one. It is, you might say, an
aspect of winning.

We can argue about these tempermentally-based political differences and
never resolve them, I admit that. In the US, especially, conservatives have
never, until now, at any rate, brought upon themselves the sort of
destruction and humiliation that conservatives in other countries have
brought upon themselves. They are still naive, and think that they can do
harm with impunity. We shall see if they can.

At any rate, for a long time, American culture provided one area,
negotiable though it has been, where conservatives and liberals could more
or less agree that right and wrong is located, and that is the area of the
law. While flouting the law is almost a national pastime in the US, the
flouting is always done away from the public eye. Everyone pays lip service
to the concept of the law-abiding citizen--even Tony Soprano presents
himself as an average guy when he's at his daughter's soccer game.There's a
good reason for this--we all know that, gripe as we will about certain
laws, the law stands between us and actual chaos. Most people adhere even
to laws that they don't agree with.

If the Republican party, though, allows Bush and his cronies to get away
with warrantless internal spying, self-admitted and even trumpeted, then
they have explicitly allowed "winning" to become an openly committed crime,
a coup d'etat and a form of usurpation. The "president" will have actually
usurped the powers of the Congress and even the Judiciary, and the
Republican Party will have colluded in this crime for the sake of tribal
loyalty and, I suppose, mere "winning". It actually doesn't matter what bad
legal advice Bush has received from his house lawyers, poodles all, namely
Gonzalez, Ashcroft, Miers, and Yoo. Just because they are in a closed power
loop, where they tell the boss what he wants to hear, that doesn't mean
they are actually correct in their interpretation. If fellow Republicans
allow their republic-destroying opinions to go forward as the standard,
though, then they are colluding in an egregious crime committed against the
nation. IMO, as they say. Whether the Democrats are losers or victims;
whether the Democrats can regain control of the House of Representatives is
interesting but irrelevant. What is relevant are the morals and ethics of
the Republicans--individual Republicans--you, Senator Brownback. You, Rep.
Hastert. You, Chief Justice Roberts. You, Uncle David. You, Mom. Do any of
you conservatives care about the Republic? This is your accountability
moment. Is your loyalty to the US or is your loyalty to Bush, Cheney, and
Rove? Crimes lead to larger crimes when criminals get away with them. Bush
clearly shows no signs of even beginning understand why he might not have
the right to be all powerful. There's that Constitution thing again
("God-damned piece of paper"--George W. Bush, December 2005). A crime is
being committed. If, because of "winning" or "loyalty", many more or less
innocent bystanders do nothing prevent its continuation and do nothing to
punish the perpetrator, then they are implicated. It's as black and white
as that.