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GOD WORDS. DEVIL WORDS AND TRUTH
By press time, the Senate will have voted, in
all likelihood, on the appointment of John Bolton
as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Most of
the Senators, Representatives, commentators and
analysts I’ve seen addressing the matter suggest
that Bolton will be appointed.
The issue is less Bolton's ambassadorship than
the measures taken to ensure that President Bush
is protected from the embarrassment of his own
poor judgment For this reason, I am concerned
less by the appointment of any one person than
by the flawed logic, charged language and polit
ical one-upsmanship that will have given us—by
the end of this administration—judges, ambas
sador and Supreme Court nominees who favor an
ideological sliver of the nation's interests.
In Language is Sermonic, Richard Weaver sug
gests that the values of a culture become codified
in "God words* and "Devil words." Certain terms
become good or bad, and arguments as to their
relative merit evoke, at best, suspicion, or at
worst, reprisals. Ttrnk of the current phrases: "war
on terrorism,* the *post-9/ll world,* “the free
people of Iraq,* "culture that celebrates life,*
"activist judges legislating from the bench,* and
"XYZ means jobs for the American people.*
There are so many others that Jon Stewart
recently suggested that Bush pulls his speeches
from a specialized set of refrigerator magnets.
One can't possibly be against some of these
things or for some of the others. The terms are
charged, and through expo
sure we stop listening to
them. We simply accept the
terms as shorthand for cul
tural assumptions we've
gotten used to.
Who, after all, can be
against the war on terror? Is there a peace with
terror? Or we might ask how can we conduct a war
against a diagnostic abstraction. Can there be a
war on boredom' Might our energies be more use
fully spent conducting a war on idiocy?
If we ask for a specific definition of the war on
terror, the most charged of our current God words,
we can weigh the merits of, say, pre-emptive war,
the continually shifting rationale for that war, the
extent to which intelligence was either missing,
cooked or too complicated to bring to the presi
dent's attention.
We can begin the kind of public debate that
will ensure the health of "democracy:* the
freedom to express, dissent and argue about the
merits of actions taken on our behalf.
But that's not happening. Instead, the Bush
Administration substitutes God and Devil words
for substance. The result is language that seems
designed more to conceal or bully than to per
suade. For instance, in the New York Times, one
finds the transcript for Bush's May 31 press con
ference. Regarding the vote on Bolton's nomina
tion, which was put off until June 7 when Senate
Republicans failed to gain enough votes to end
debate. Bush said he was disappointed that
Bolton did not get an *up-or-down vote on the
Senate floor, just like he deserves an up-or-down
vote on the Senate floor. And clearty he's got the
votes to get confirmed.*
This is misleading. If Senate procedures are
followed—and procedures are the only reason
Bolton wasn't confirmed—then the issue isn't
what Bolton deserves, The issue is the separation
of powers that protects the rights of the minority
party from an ideologically extreme administra
tion—and that administration's Congressional
lackeys who'd appoint a chimp if the President
nominated it The issue is how the Senate works
and how those workings keep one branch of gov
ernment from dominating another. Bolton
'deserves* what he gets as a result of the normal
operations of the Senate. To assume otherwise is
to assert that the President is right because he's
the President and a Republican who can dispense
political favors. Anyway, the press conference
offered Bush a chance to plug his candidate.
However, Bush, notoriously inept at thinking on
his feet demonstrated his own victimhood to lan
guage that shoves without persuading, tints
without substantiating. "The reason I picked
Bolton,* he said, *is he's a no-nonsense kind of
fellow who can get things done.* But can anyone
imagine nominating a pro-nonsense kind of fellow
who can’t get things done?
This kind of commitment to non-statement has
dominated the debate on Bolton, on the "stalled*
judicial candidates and ultimately on the workings
of the Senate itself. The entire issue of the fili
buster, a tool that protects minority opinion by
slowing consideration and prompting compromise,
has been marked by an empty rhetoric that barely
stretches itself to conceal the Republican
majority's disdain for consensus and for any dis
senting voice. As a result, listening to the
Republican leadership is often embarrassingly
unpleasant—much like watching a fat guy who
insists on wearing a Speedo.
Senator Bill Frist, Majority Leader, has set the
disingenuous tone. Concerning the compromise by
i4 Senators that allowed a floor vote on three
controversial judicial nominees, Frist said in a May
24 speech in the Senate, *[T]his has been a very
significant debate. By exposing the injustice of
judicial obstruction in the last Congress, we have
made progress on restoring a core Constitutional
principle: all judicial nominees deserve fair up-or-
down votes.*
Certainly, no one is in
favor of injustice or obstruc
tion, just as no one can pos
sibly be against restoring a
core Constitutional principle
or fair up-or-down votes.
However, is the blocking
of judicial nominees by one party or another, by
one coalition or another unfair? If the procedures
of the Senate allow such an action, if the majority
party can't prevent such actions because they
don't have the votes or, more important, are
unwilling to compromise because of ideological
intransigence or fear of Presidential reprisals—
how is this either "unfair* or a violation of a "core
Constitutional principle"?
It seems as absurd as calling the rules of base
ball unfair just because one doesn't hit a homer
every time one steps into the batter's box.
Perhaps all this is a little too complicated. To
dumb it down, consider the example of Saxby
Chambliss. Chambliss has reduced the issue of the
procedural workings of the Senate to a one-ques
tion survey. During the fury that was the floor
fight over judicial nominees, Chambliss asked his
constituents whether they felt that the President's
choices deserved a "fair up-or-down vote.*
Well gee, who could possibly be against a fair
up-or-down vote? Can anyone imagine a circum
stance that would incline us to an unfair up-or-
down vote? The call for an *up-or-down vote* is
substantively empty. It ignores Senate procedure,
substitutes the whims of the President for
Senatorial consensus, and suggests that actions
taken in good conscience (i.e., blocking nominees
who are felt to be ideologically extreme) are indi
cations of "unfairness* or "obstructionism.*
Worst of all it suggests that Chambliss (and
the horse he rode in on) believes that his con
stituents are too unsophisticated even to suspect
that they're being pushed to agree with a proposi
tion that hasn't been demonstrated. This level of
reductive dishonesty is similar to asking the
Senator to answer yes or no to the question "Do
you think you beat your wife enough?* *
Sometimes, *up or down* is misleading. I'd
hope our representatives could come to a point
when they'd cowboy up and act as though they
recognized the complexities implicit in the demo
cratic process.
Samuil Prertridgi
Sam Prestridge is a local writer.
One can’t possibly be against
some of these things or for
some of the others.
8 FLA6POLE.COM • JUNE 8, 2005