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November 18, 2005 > Opinion > Republicans adopt Soviet red state policy

Republicans adopt Soviet red state policy

By Evan Mintz | Thresher Editorial Staff

The Republican Party’s platform once revolved around defeating communism, though it would have been more accurate to say overturning the U.S.S.R. and its allies. Now the Soviet Union is gone and no one cares about Cuba, but the Republican Party should not forget its Nietzsche: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

Recently, Republicans have been quick to stare into that abyss and embrace the tactics of our old Soviet enemies. Talk about being a red state.

In an act of rewriting history that one would expect from the Kremlin, President George W. Bush’s staff has tried to alter transcripts from an Oct. 31 press briefing. According to the White House’s own transcripts, Press Secretary Scott McClellan did not say, “That’s accurate,” confirming he had previously denied that Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, or Karl Rove, Bush’s deputy chief of staff, were involved in leaking CIA operative Valarie Plame’s identity to the press. Instead, the transcript claims McClellan said, “No, I don’t think that’s accurate,” contrary to the transcripts of every news source at the press conference.

If McClellan intended to say differently, he could just admit he misspoke. Instead, the White House’s transcripts maintain he actually said something different from what everyone else heard. Now the Bush administration is pushing news agencies to accept its version of the truth.

Certainly, the more partisan Republicans will dismiss the transcript alteration as a misinterpretation, but it does not stand alone. Then again, whatever happened to those pictures of Saddam Hussein and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during the war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s? That is not so different from Soviet airbrushing of photos of political allies-turned-enemyies. Time and again, the Bush administration has tried to change facts to fit its own view of history, creating a pattern of deceit.

Since Veteran’s Day, President Bush and the rest of the Republican Party has pushed two talking points: first, that Congress saw the same evidence as White House officials did before the invasion of Iraq and therefore has no right to critique the Bush administration; second, that independent commissions have proven that the Bush administration did not misrepresent evidence. Both of these points are erroneous.

First, President Bush and his administration had access to daily security briefings and more secret evidence than Congress. Much of the evidence that has since been proven wrong was filtered through the Bush administration before being released to lawmakers. Indeed, the defensive claims are nothing more than, “You were wrong and it’s your fault for trusting us.”

As to the second talking point, President Bush’s Republican supporters argue that Senate investigations assuaged any fears of political pressure on the intelligence community to find the right evidence. However, the only committee investigating this issue — the Senate Intelligence Committee — has not even started yet. And a report released earlier this year by Bush’s commission on weapons of mass destruction did not deal with the use of intelligence by policy-makers.

It is no surprise that the Bush administration would be slow to potentially critique itself, given its Kremlin-esque tactics. Then again, they could just critique themselves and then change the transcript.

This sort of political manipulation of historical facts is nothing new. Some would pass it off as the Bush administation just playing hardball, not as anything reminiscent of Soviet tactics. However, detainees tortured in secret CIA camps would say differently.

According to the U.S. and foreign officials involved, about four years ago, the CIA started setting up secret torture bases known as “black sites” in Thailand, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe? The more things change the more they stay the same. I’m sure we’ve given some old KGB agents new starts, only this time they are torturing for democracy. And at least Thailand and Guantanamo are warmer than Siberia — plus, they don’t have the pesky human rights restrictions of the U.S. legal system. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials and foreign sources even admit that about 70 percent of detainees taken to these black sites have little direct involvement in terrorism and little intelligence value.

Hey, sometimes you’ve got to torture people to protect human rights. And sometimes you have to be sarcastic to expose the horrible irony of situations.

Given the patterns of lying, manipulation and torture by Republicans, they must have gazed into that red abyss for much too long. I’d expect Republicans to ignore someone known for claiming, “God is dead.” But maybe Republicans have just read their Nietzsche all too well, cast away their Christian slave morality and embraced the will to power. In that case, would Bill O’Reilly please stop getting pissed off when people say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas?”

Evan Mintz is a Hanszen College sophomore and opinion editor.

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