Dick Armey Uses Language of Incitement to Sow Hate for Obama

Related subjects: Ethics, Healthcare Policy, Legislation, Obama administration, Transparency Yield, U.S. Elections, U.S. Politics Comments (1)

11 October 2009 :: J.E. Robertson

Dick Armey is the latest Republican to use language of incitement to promote lies about Pres. Obama’s health reform agenda. Armey says proposed reforms are “ruthless” in their treatment of healthcare recipients. But just about the only truths in his comments are that there are in fact health reforms being proposed and that they have something to do with healthcare recipients.

Armey’s flagrant fabrications are rooted in lies his party has consistently championed with the specific and even stated goal of “killing” any reform that would place an enhanced competitive or regulatory constraint on private insurers’ freedom to interfere with patient care or drop or exclude patients in order to pad their profits.

The signal that Armey is drawing directly from this tradition of lies and innuendo is the facile recourse to fictional vocabulary like “Obamacare”, a name no Democratic supporters of the proposed reforms use and which is clearly a nostalgic bid to return to the days when Republican collaboration with an insurer-backed PR campaign sunk the Clinton plan for health reform by spreading lies and fear and mis-labeling the plan “Hillarycare”.

Such terms are inflammatory in a subtle way, because they are designed to elicit a visceral response of aggravation and fear. Such terms are aimed at sounding alien and megalomaniac, implying for people who voted for someone else that the targeted figure aims to impose an arbitrary and binding personal worldview, barring others, limiting choice, and eroding democracy.

Armey’s specific use of the term ‘ruthless’ puts him in the category of politico or pundit using language of extreme moral grievance to mischaracterize reforms aimed at helping patients, in such a way as to make patients fear the very thing that would help them and hate the people working to make it happen.

To demonstrate how relentless and even compulsive the Republican recourse to violent hate speech is becoming, we should take note of Rush Limbaugh’s comparing the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Pres. Obama to a suicide bombing. Aside from the hysterical departure from anything resembling the known universe, the use of that term to talk about a gesture of good will and recognition for work to reduce violence is a cruel assault on anyone whose life has been devasatwd by that particularly twisted form of violence.

But Limbaugh surely feels free to make such inhuman claims and to speak with such naked hatred for the president of the United States. The question is why. The answer is because he’s being given cover by prominent conservative figures, including elected Republicans, who can hardly conceal their glee at the potential electoral benefits to be derived from spreading hateful lies about the president.

Rush’s hate-filled rhetoric is at once more extreme than ever and yet closer than ever to rhetoric used by mainstream elected Republicans, because of the reckless claims made by people like Dick Armey, or Sen. Lindsey Graham who recently predicted Obama was leading the nation toward “Armageddon”.

The language of hate and incitement has gone so far that the Republican leader in the House of Reoresentatives has called for “rebellion” and Sen. DeMint (R-SC) now sees fit to travel to Honduras to give support to a rogue military regime not recognized by the United States and urge them to “resist” the foreign policy of the very country he is sworn to serve.

From spin to lies to partisan hyperbole, the perverse evolution of the present-day Republican public discourse is not just poisonous to the party and it’s moral character, it’s also toxic to our democratic process and now has planted the conceptual seeds of extremist violence in the middle of our two-party system. The party that has so sought to claim the nation’s flag and basic appeal to “freedom” as its symbols is now more persistently the source of disturbing insinuations of hatred for and violence against the nation’s highest elected official, who won a significant majority of the vote leas than one year ago. Is that irony? Or travesty? Or just the flip side of a cynical campaign to work the political system against the interests of the people while cloaking that intention in violent, misplaced effusions of outrage?

The media is also complicit (perhaps unwittingly) in the radicalization of the rhetoric used to oppose Pres. Obama (and to his efforts to reform American government and restore reason and balance to the market system). The media have condoned and participated in the spread of extremist rhetoric and wildly false claims by spreading the falsehood that attributes confusion about health reform to a lack clarity by the president an the “success” of Republican “arguments” against him.

Far too little media resources have been devoted to debunking the health opponents’ deliberate distortion machine. And the dirty little secret that has received even less attention is the massive amount of money those opponents are spending to confuse the public, buy members of Congress and corrupt the process.

In just a few months, insurers have spent $380 million lobbying Congress, advertsing wildly false claims, and donating tens of millions to the campaign coffers of most members of Congress. That is the salient fact about the healthcare reform debate that Republican opponents and “blue dog” Democrats hope will be drowned out by all the irresponsible shouting and innuendo.

According to the Bill Moyers Journal, Max Baucus (D-MT), the head of the Senate finance committee —which has been holding up the Democratic reform proposal in an effort to eliminate the so-called “public option” for low-cost, non-profit insurance— has taken fully $1.5 million from lobbying organizations and linked groups representing private,  for-profit health insurers.

We can explain the language of incitement as part of a reckless and distracted climate of distortion that has sprung up around an insincere Congressional debate, but that cannot, under any circumstances, explain it away. Every day, we have more examples of self-proclaimed “conservative” political figures and pundits expounding or condoning extremist language clearly intended to elicit a violent emotional response.

The leadership in both parties in both houses of Congress should hold a bipartisan conference to discuss the need to moderate language to avoid overt incitement to violence. This seems like a surreal suggestion, but our political discourse has degenerated to that point. No leader in either party in Congress should be allowed to hold their leadership position if they do not visibly and legitimately disavow all language of incitement to hate, bias or violence.