Summary: Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL, Chair of the Democratic National Committee) made a revealing answer when asked about our government’s assassination programs. The resulting mockery misses the key point. Her remarks provides a fascinating look at America, but only as a curiosity, an oddity — until we ask “why” she talks like this.
“When I was sixteen, I went to work for a newspaper in Hong Kong. It was a rag, but the editor taught me one important lesson. The key to a great story is not who, or what, or when, but why.”
— Elliot Carver, in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
Contents
- A leader of Congress pretends ignorance
- About denial
- Another example, and a note from George Orwell
- About solutions
- Posts about our government’s assassination programs (directed at citizens)
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(1) A leader of Congress pretends ignorance
After the second Presidential debate Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL, Chair of the Democratic National Committee) is questioned by Luke Rudkowski (WeAreChange) about our government’s assassination programs.
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Schultz: I’m looking forward to President Obama continuing to clearly and decisively lay out his case for the American people. He’ll talk about the importance of restoring our diplomatic reputation across the globe.
Rudkowski: How does Obama justify his flip-flop on the National Defense Authorization Act, especially the indefinite detention provision, which he said he never wanted but the Administration is now appealing an order…
Schultz: I didn’t hear that a a subject of the debate tonight.
Rudkowski: If Romney becomes President, he’s going to inherit Obama’s secret kill list. How do you think Romney will handle this kill list, and are you comfortable with him having a kill list?
Schultz: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Rudkowski: Obama has a secret kill list, which he has used to assassinate different people all over the world.
Schultz (with a big smile): I’m happy to answer any serious questions you have.
Rudkowski: Why is that not a serious question?
Schultz: Because I have no idea what you’re talking about. (walks away)
Glenn Greenberg at The Guardian reviews the public information about the US government’s kill list, and comments:
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Just marvel at this stunning, completely inexcusable two-minute display of wholesale ignorance by this elected official and DNC chair. … She doesn’t defend the “kill list”. She doesn’t criticize it. She makes clear that she has never heard of it and then contemptuously treats Rudkowski like he is some sort of frivolous joke for thinking that it is real …
I disagree. Attributing this to ignorance is not accurate. Instead it is a willful refusal to see something unpleasant. Deliberate blindness. It’s denial.
(2) About Denial
From Wikipedia (which cites no source, but looks correct):
A defense mechanism postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. The subject may use:
- simple denial: deny the reality of the unpleasant fact altogether
- minimisation: admit the fact but deny its seriousness (a combination of denial and rationalization)
- projection: admit both the fact and seriousness but deny responsibility by blaming somebody or something else.
Denial was first researched seriously by Anna Freud. … Elisabeth Kübler-Ross used denial as the first of 5 stages in the psychology of a dying person.
Why denial as a response? Acknowledgement of what America has become, and is becoming, creates awareness of our need to act. Of our obligations to defend the Republic. It’s a draft notice. Bad news for our families, for our careers — disrupting the even tenor of our lives, putting all that we have at risk by opposing the elites that run America. Failure to act creates cognitive dissonance, painful contradiction between what we should do and actually do.
Imagine Representative Schultz’s thoughts should Rudkowski have forced her to confront — on camera — the reality of Obama’s assassination of US citizens in flagrant violation of the Constitution’s core principles. She could refer to the overwhelming danger of al Qaeda (secret bases everywhere, sleeper agents across America — as seen each week on NCIS and described in the Weekly Standard and Fox News — and conclude that we’ve suspended the Constitution. But that’s introduces complex arguments, disturbing to many Americans.
She could just dance around the issue. But in a long war that becomes untenable, as these questions repeatedly arise.
Or she can just deny that anything has changed. It’s the simple, clean response. It’s what America wants.
It’s a common solution. The Roman people did this during the first century of the Empire, retaining most outward forms of the Republic. Some people did it in response to the horror of the Holocaust, Stalin’s and Mao’s megadeaths. As many people hae done today about the increasing stress on the biosphere. Sometimes it works, most often with denial of history. Sometimes it works until the crash, the equivalent of closing our eyes when driving.
Sometimes it’s a smear, as when scientists who disagree with the IPCC about the causes and forecasts of future global warming are accused of denying past warming (they don’t).
(3) Another example, from yesterday’s post — and a note from George Orwell
More evidence of this response by American’s to our ugly evolution appears daily in the comments to the powerful, fact-rich articles by Glenn Greenwald, formerly at Salon, now at The Guardian. Such as this one: “US justice likely coming soon to Benghazi with extrajudicial executions“, Guardian,19 October 2012 — “If the Obama administration identifies suspects in the consulate attack, should they simply be killed without a trial?” For example this automatic, immediate response of Michael Cohen (New America Foundation; bio here):
He’s a courtier to our power elites, and a skillful, smart one (IMO, one of the best of the younger members in that potentially lucrative service). As such he automatically knows what worldviews are acceptable — what facts can be seen — and still remain respectable. His automatic reply is not to dispute Greenwald’s facts, reasoning, or values — but to deny. A courtier to US elites must master crimestop — the refusal to see heterodox ideas, or even discuss thoughtcrime. From Orwell’s 1984:
The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. .. not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted {Party dogma).
(4) About solutions
It might be that the Second Republic has fallen, and its cure lies beyond reach. Such an epitaph is for the future generations to write. All that matters is that we can do better. We will be what we want to be.
More about this tomorrow.
(5) Posts about our government’s assassination programs (directed at citizens)
- Code red! The Constitution is burning., August 2010
- An Appalling Threat to Civil Liberties and Democracy, 8 August 2010
- A great philosopher and statesman comments on the Bush-Obama tweaks to the Constitution, 10 October 2010
- Every day the Constitution dies a little more, 1 September 2010
- What do our Constitution-loving conservatives say about our government’s assassination programs?, 2 September 2010
- Today is a red letter day in American history! Our leaders speak honestly to us about an important issue., 6 October 2011
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