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They’re back. You know who I mean. They arrive in vans and buses which let them off and then go park in out-of-the-way places while the riders carry their electrically stapled, non-union-printed signs (if you zoom in on the photo you can see the GOP name in the lower right corner) to places assigned with an eye for the media cameras by shadowy figures who know how to direct crowd scenes.
They’ve rehearsed on the ride up, although by now everyone knows the script so they could sleep walk through it–which some of them do, a strange vacant look on their faces as they yell so loud the veins in their necks look ready to burst. They eyes are the dead give-away, for they have the look of the undead, like the actors in a George Romero remake. They aren’t here but there–and you don’t want to know where there is.
The eyes and, well, a certain sameness, as if they were all somehow related or were members of the same country club. The pants, the shoes, the shirts and, most of all, the hair jobs give them away even as they try to mingle in the crowd to plant little fuses set to go off at key moments which somehow certain Faux Networks seem to know are coming and have their cameras already focused on the right spot.
The Brooks Brothers Riot
They are well-schooled because they date back to the beginning of the millennium when they almost pulled off–or maybe did pull off–the first coup d-etat by a political party in American history. It was during the 2000 vote count in Florida.
It was called the “Brooks Brothers Riot.” The Washington Post captured it in a famous picture which can be found all over the net–more on why in a minute.
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The numbers identify the key players. in the foreground: Tom Pyle, at that time an aide for Tom DeLay, Chuck Royal, who is still legislative assistant to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.); Duane Gibson, an aide on the House Resources Committee, Garry Malphrus, a former staff director of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on criminal justice–and now, of all things, a judge; Rory Cooper, who was at the National Republican Congressional Committee, and Matt Schlapp, then a Bush campaign aide. The “Lady in Red,” is Layna McConkey Peltier, a former congressional aide who was employed by Steelman Health Strategies at the time of the photograph.
Like everything else about Bush v. Gore, the Brooks Brothers Riot provokes wide disagreements about its significance. The name comes from the well-heeled and somewhat clone-like look of the participants, as if instead of fatigues and helmets this army was issued business suits for uniforms, suits that identify their users’ ranks as surely as shoulder stripes: mid-level lieutenants and captains that commanded others who were expected to follow orders as easily as they obeyed the demands of their superiors.
As Miami-Dade election officials worked their way through the laborious task of recounting ballots, this group of Republican activists, angry that the recount was not proceeding as they wanted, forced their way into the room and confronted the vote counters, who in response finally ceased their task.
The key to understanding the riot lies in IRS documents of the Bush Cheney Recount Fund. Pages of mundane expenses detail payments to Einstein’s Bagels, Best Buy, Cort Furniture Rental, and AT&T. Airline expenses provide some idea of the magnitude of the effort, ranging from $101,000 to Delta and $64,000 to American to several thousand for Northwest and US Air. The name of Enron appears several times in the list of expenditures–they made corporate jets available to the effort.
There are also payments to Garrett Sound and Lighting, Beach Sound Inc., and the House of Masquerades that allegedly paid for a party for the rioters. Then as you slowly work your way down the columns names jump out: Schlapp for $2,070, Pyle for $456, and Malprus for $180.
The crowd was under the direction of Republican activists including Elizabeth Ross, a staff member for Senator Trent Lott, and the already-mentioned Thomas Pyle. The rioters had been recruited from operatives reportedly flown to Miami specifically for the event.
The Aftermath
How important the event rated with the GOP is suggested by the fact that not long after the riot the perpetrators celebrated at a Thanksgiving Day party (the date seems appropriate), taking thank-you calls from Bush and Cheney.
Like an act of Road Rage, the riot was in-your-face intimidation. As a first generation American whose politician grandfather endured sometimes violent Nazi intimidation, I learned symbolic acts can hold unpleasant messages about future intents. The rioters wanted to make a forceful statement that things had better go their way—or else. That adults in suits can behave like schoolyard bullies sent an unambiguous message about the values of the Republican Party. By rewarding the rioters with parties and promotions the GOP underlined this message.
Several years ago when I wrote about the riot in my book I asked:
When will that business-suited army again be trotted out to, as Time put it, “strong-arm” someone into submission? One of the most quoted references to the rise of Nazi Germany begins, “first they came for,” and goes on to detail a chilling list of the arrests that culminated with Auschwitz and Dachau. The message is quite clear; if they can do it to someone else, eventually they may do it to you. If the Counterrevolution could organize a group of Brooks Brothers-suited operatives to disrupt a lawful election count what else might they do?
Now we have our answer.
The Abercrombie and Fitch Rioters
There is little question people are being brought in from “outside” to purposely disrupt the Obama health care rallies. Only this time the Republicans are smart enough to not outfit them all in Brooks Brothers’ suits, but instead put them in more casual dress. Call them the Abercrombie and Fitch rioters. Only those eyes and the haircuts and that certain sameness give them away.
Although I wrote about the Brooks Brothers Riot several years ago in my book and several times since, only now are people beginning to get it. Rachel Maddow did an excellent job of tracking down a couple of the former rioters and linking them to the new protests. She stated:
Who knew the organized efforts to take over town halls and chase congressmen through parking lots would also serve as a ‘Brooks Brothers riot alumni’ meet-and-greet?
There is one thing that is the same: these rioters, just like those in Miami, are dedicated to bringing down the government. Only this time the stakes, if anything, are far higher and the anger is not feigned but real. If in 2000 Democrats thought the GOP had stolen the election, in 2008 there are many Americans who believe that an African American sitting in the White House amounts to a kind of cultural coup d’etat and they have declared a cultural civil war that right now is a knife’s edge away from becoming truly ugly.
There is also one other parallel the media have forgotten–all those so-called Hillary Clinton groups that actually were Republican fronts. That story was broken here.
The Role of the Media
The problem is the mainstream media seems to have little interest in exploring who are these protesters, where do they come from and, most important, who is financing them? They seem to have fallen for the script like 13-year-olds at a slasher movie.
In reports I saw of the protesters at the rallies, it amazed me that no reporter sought to ID any of them. You would think they would follow one of the basic rules of journalism: who is the source? After all if your source is not creditable, neither is the story.
The media missed the full implications of the Brooks Brothers Riot story. They never called for an investigation into it or for the prosecution of those who were violating the law (federal law forbids disrupting a vote count). In a book on Bush v. Gore edited by none other than media bigmouth E.J. Dionne, there is not a word about the riot. Now a decade later we are reaping the results of that media indifference.
But then the mainstream media wrote this script and have been playing it over and over for at least a century. Give me a war, said Mr. Hearst and then made sure it received the proper press coverage. The media like a war, the uglier the better and if the lines are not drawn in black and white in the sand, they will put them in as if they were telestrating a football game.
They have always liked to foment controversy, to portray an oversimplified world that can be reduced to a soundbite and an image. Nothing is new about that, but what is new about this media-fomented war is that some of the media are playing sides, for we live in the era of politicized media, when whole television and radio networks are bought and paid for by partisans of a certain political persuasion. So in this era after the suspension of the Fairness Doctrine by Ronald Reagan, a national commentator is allowed to compare the President to Adolf Hitler.
Instead of following the real story, the media bear a tremendous responsibility for fomenting and encouraging this kind of activity and should it get uglier they will have blood on their hands.
The Future
In their chants, on their signs, and even on their carefully silk-screened t-shirts the Abercrombie and Fitch protesters mention November 2010 as if it were Armageddon–and for some of them it is. But they cannot really believe that they will isolate Barack Obama in the White House, nor does even the most optimistic Republican pollster sitting at some watering hole in the early hours of the morning after too many martinis really believe the GOP will reverse the Democratic majority.
No, these are the same people who thought they could incite the American people to oppose the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor and found out the American people did not buy their veiled racist innuendos any more than they bought them in the Presidential election.
So what then will they do? MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, one of the few in the media who is trying to turn the spotlight on the implications of these organized protests has stated:
You know, there’s a reason why comparisons to Nazis and lynchings in effigy and death threats are unacceptable in public discourse, or at least they’re supposed to be. They implicitly condone, if not encourage violence. It’s time to stop it before people get hurt.
A Personal Conclusion
There have been more than enough comparisons of the present Republican tactics to the Nazi Brownshirts to fill dozens of blogs. Americans like to use Nazi analogies sometimes a bit too freely and they use them too freely because they do not understand. In fact both sides in this battle have compared the other to Nazis, Brownshirts and even Adolf Hitler.
My family lived with the real Brownshirts and were terrorized by them. Because of my grand father’s opposition to the Nazis and his repeated pleas to the Weimar government to ban paramilitary groups that used violent tactics he and my family were frequent targets of their wrath. I will not go into what they did to my father and his sister, my aunt–or to others.
The real Brownshirts were organized thugs who intimidated opponents with violence. Historian Joachim Fest describes their role and Hitler’s perception of it:
He quickly saw the propaganda advantages to be gained from intimidating his opponents by the parade of uniformed groups ready and willing to use violence…Contrary to civilised expectations, he put his trust in the propaganda value of terror, the attraction of terror spread by the most brutal methods. “Brutality is respected,” he once stated, enunciating this principle. “The people need wholesome fear. They want to fear sometimes. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.”[The Face of the Third Reich, p. 137.}
The point about the Nazi Brownshirts is that they were not prosecuted for their violence. They would show up at political rallies and literally start beating heads. They roamed the streets in organized gangs, looking for people to intimidate.
To analogize the organized Republican demonstrations to Barack Obama as “Brownshirts” is both stupid and inaccurate. The mission of the GOP seems to be to disrupt rallies with shouts and chants–and, most of all, to play to the press. What violence there has been has not been organized nor anywhere near as brutal as the beatings the real Brownshirts could administer.
The mission of the GOP Abercrombie and Fitch Protesters is to disrupt rational political discourse, not to terrorize opponents. They want to make it impossible for Obama supporters to speak and they want to monopolize the conversation. They have been very careful NOT to be Brownshirts, which is why they are so dangerous.
Were they merely physically beating opponents chances are people would quickly dismiss them–and unlike the Weimar police, law enforcement would arrest them. The GOP is much too clever to use tactics that would not sit well with a majority of Americans.
Instead they aim to turn political discourse into a shouting match, rational debate into slogans and half-truths and public gatherings into schoolyard confrontations.
Why the Protests are Illegal
You hear much about free speech from the disrupters, but in fact their behavior is prohibited at most public meetings– as several key court decisions have affirmed. In McMahon v. Albany School Dist. a California circuit court wrote:
Freedom of everyone to talk at once can destroy the right of anyone effectively to talk at all. Free expression can expire as tragically in the tumult of license as in the silence of censorship.
In 2002 the United States Supreme Court declined to rule on this case, thus affirming this ruling.
In its notes on controlling disruptions at public meetings, the California League of Cities cites another court case, White v. City of Norwalk.
Each person who addresses the council shall not make personal, impertinent, slanderous or profane remarks to any member of the council, staff or general public. Any person who makes such remarks, or who utters loud, threatening, personal or abusive language, or engages in any other disorderly conduct which disrupts, disturbs or otherwise impedes the orderly conduct of any council meeting shall, at the discretion of the presiding officer or a majority of the council, be barred from further audience before the council during that meeting.
Most cities including my own, have a similar code of decorum for public meetings. As an elected official I have attended many feisty meetings, but at least in our city whenever a meeting promised to get acrimonious we always made it a point to have a uniformed police officer in attendance to enforce those laws.
In short, the GOP protestors are already violating the law. The question is why isn’t it being enforced? Where are the uniformed officers to keep order and if they are there why aren’t they doing their job?
The one part of the Brownshirt analogy that does get it right is that when the rule of law is ignored in favor of the rule of the thug or the mob, then the law ceases to have meaning. What is needed now is for the same media who seem to be delighted in showing the protests to point out that rule of law and then to pointedly ask Republican leaders whether they will adhere to that rule.
The time has come to ask whether we want America to sink to the level of talk radio or adhere to the laws of decorum that prevail in every city in this country. Is the party that constantly says it believes in strict interpretation of the Constitution and law and order ready to stand behind those beliefs or are they mere rhetoric?
Coda:
For two great takes on this see this and this.
Print Posted by: liberalamerican
