The Senate Republicans’ open letter to Iran wasn’t meant for Iran.
I don’t believe the Republicans, particularly the ringleader on this one, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, are stupid enough to think the Iranians are as stupid as the letter makes them out to be.
They think their own voters are stupid.
And that’s who the letter’s meant for.
The suckers back home.
Always keep in mind: Everything the Republicans say is aimed at riling up the base. This is always the goal: Keep them mad, keep them afraid, keep them from thinking, keep them writing checks and coming out to vote.
Boiled down, the letter says, “Dear Islamofacscists, it doesn’t matter what you work out with the weakling in the White House. Whatever deal you make with him has to be approved by us and we’re not going to approve any deal. We hold the real power here. And even if Obama does slip one by us, he’s a lame duck. Come 2017 he’s gone so your deal with him’s off. On the other hand, we’re here to stay. Get that through your turbans and live with it!”
This amused Javad Zarif, the Iranian Foreign Minister, who with his smile showing through the official prose responded that people in his government are aware of how the American political system works. Since the Revolution, they’ve seen a few American Presidents come and go---five before President Obama. But, he went on, the Iranians aren’t negotiating with just the Americans and the President isn’t negotiating on his own. Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China are also at the table. Whatever deal is worked out, it will be an international agreement and, Zarif’s statement implicitly asks, are the Senators as ignorant about the United States’ obligations under international law as they’re assuming Iranians are about American politics?
The answer to that question is quite possibly yes. Never underestimate the ignorance of even the smartest Republicans these days because their thinking is governed entirely by their self-righteousness. “We’re the good guys! Whatever we think must be right! If we think two plus two make five, then two and two must make five. God is on our side and God wouldn’t let us be wrong.”
The honest Republican answer is more likely, “So what? Who cares? Not us. We got other fish to fry.”
Read as it should be, as of a piece with everything else Republicans do and say, the letter says this:
“Dear Real Americans, the weakling apologist Kenyan-Marxist-Commie-Socialist-Fascist-Muslim-You Know What Color-Not Really One of Us fool in the White House is about to cave, again, to the enemies of freedom and bring down doom upon all our heads. But don’t worry. We’re not about to let him get away with it. Anyway, he’s out of here in two years. We’re here to stay. Whatever he’s done we’ll undo as soon as he’s out the door. So for all he’ll matter, you don’t need to even think of him as President. Just remember to vote for us again come next election day and make your checks payable to [insert your Senator’s PAC’s name here].”
There’s a P.S.
“Hey, Obama, fuck you!”
The point of the letter is telling the base what they want to hear. What they need to hear.
They need to hear the world is coming to an end and we’re all going to die.
They need to hear there’s an outside cause, that it’s not their doing or through any fault of their own we’re doomed. It’s those Others!
These days it’s the Muslims, mainly. Iran. ISIS. But immigrants too. The brown ones from you know where. It was Ebola. It’s always the gays and the women and the blacks and the browns. And even us! The white race is engaged in self-inflicted genocide through abortion, birth control, the end of marriage---all these young women choosing to pursue glamorous careers and enjoy sexy, swinging, sinful lifestyles without consequences instead of doing their biblical duty to be good wives and mothers---the conversion of our sons and daughters to homosexuality, and our own weakness in not standing up to those Godless, value-less Others undermining our sense of what’s right and wrong and enforcing the traditions and rules we were raised to cherish and obey by our good, noble, and strict God-fearing parents! Any one of those. All of those. It doesn’t matter. It changes but it doesn’t change. It’s all tied together because it’s all the work of those Others. Our enemies without and their agents and tools within.
That’s the first message and the bridge to the next.
The Iranians are our enemy and the President is on their side.
He’s not like us, you know. We don’t mean because he’s black because he isn’t, he’s only passing in order to get the black and guilty white liberal vote. But, you know, he’s black. And he wasn’t raised like us. He isn’t a real American. He’s a Muslim. He’s a socialist. He’s a Kenyan anti-colonialist and doesn’t that sound scary? He’s from Chicago. That means he’s ruthless and corrupt. He was a college professor and we all know what they’re like. He’s always apologizing for America. He doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism. He wants to take away our guns. He wants to give all our tax money to THEM! Did we mention he’s black except he isn’t? He’s weak. He’s disloyal. He’s not someone we want as our President. He isn’t our President. Not really. Not legitimately.
They need to hear this because they need to hear they matter. President Obama is the embodiment of the fact that most Americans aren’t like them. We don’t look like them. We don’t think like them. We don’t believe what they believe. We think of this America going about the business of being itself as usual. We like it that we’re not all alike. Diversity, pluralism, and tolerance are intrinsic to our idea of a working democracy. They see our idea of a working democracy as a threat to their sense of self which is bound up in identification with the group. Family. Church. Town. State. Country. If the group isn’t what they think it is and need it to be, a perfect reflection of themselves, then they aren’t who they think they are. They don’t exist to themselves. This is why there must be Others. If you doubt who you are, at least you can comfort yourself with who you are not.
So they need to hear he doesn’t matter. That he can be discounted. That nothing he does will last. That everything he’s done will be undone. In two years it will be as if he was never here.
And then they need to hear that while he’s here he’s not the boss of them. They’re authoritarians. That’s how they see the President, as the boss of all of us. They like bosses. They like to boss and be bossed. It gives them a sense of order and security. Their lives are full of bosses. Not just politicians and actual on-the-job bosses. Preachers. Coaches. Parents---fathers more than mothers. They identify with the bosses. (For bosses read bullies and tyrants. They invest their bosses with far more authority than they need and that authority is unquestionable, coming as it does, directly or indirectly from God.) They boss others through this identification. Not being able to identify with the boss robs them of their sense of authority along with their identity. And there, in the White House, the boss of all bosses is “not one of us.” The reason they believe he’s taking away their freedom is he’s taken away their freedom to feel like bosses themselves.
They need to see him defied. They need to hear him told he’s not the boss of them. More than that they need him to feel what they feel by his being their boss. Humiliated. They need him insulted. They need him embarrassed. They need him put back in his place.
All these needs are addressed in the letter.
The letter isn’t sitting well with people outside the base, and it’s not just Democrats and liberals who are mad. The New York Daily News called the signers traitors. On the front page. There’s chatter that the Republicans are realizing they goofed. John McCain has tried to wash his hands of it. His excuse seems to be that he didn’t read it before signing because he was too busy worrying about the coming snowstorm. As for other Republicans claiming chagrin, I don’t buy it. I think it’s just the usual case of cynical Senate aides and lobbyists assuring their friends in the Political Press Corps that they aren’t on board with the Right Wing lunacy of the day---“Don’t worry. We smart and responsible Republicans know better and we’re really in charge.”---so journalists and pundits can continue to tell themselves that the real Republicans work on K Street and not on the floor of places like, say, the Oklahoma State House of Representatives of the governor’s office in Wisconsin. Most of the signers, I’m sure, are just fine with it. Proud of it, in fact. Probably congratulating themselves on what a smart move they’ve made. They don’t expect any of them to pay a political price for it. Far from it. The letter is right that most of them are going to be around for decades. Marco Rubio is already using it to raise money for his re-election bid or his Presidential run if finally gets up the nerve to make one.
Forty-seven traitors? Hard to make the case, but you won’t convince any of them they’re traitors. You can’t commit treason against yourself. They represent the real America, after all. They are the real America. It’s Obama who’s been busy betraying the country. The Republicans are saving the country from his cowardice and treachery. The letter is an act of patriotism.
So the job’s done. The letter says what it needs to say. It’s all in there. The fear-mongering, the Othering of the President, the self-aggrandizement and self-privileging of “us”, the defiance, the insult. It’s there the way it’s in everything the Republicans do and say. It’s there for the same reason it’s in everything they do or say.
Rile up the base. Keep them angry. Keep them afraid. Keep them from thinking by keeping them focused on their anger and their fear, Keep them coming out to vote and writing the checks.
Keep Obama from accomplishing anything however good the country it might be---in fact, the more good it might do, the more it must be opposed---because then people might think there’s a reason to vote for a Democrat. And nothing is more important then Republican politicians keeping their jobs, not even peace between the United States and our allies and Iran. Which, by the way, would be a help in containing and defeating ISIS, another supposed existential threat to the U.S. So even that goal is cast aside to advance the ambitions and careers of Republican politicians.
Treason?
None dare call it that. Unless if everything else they do and say is treasonous. And maybe it is, in a way, since it puts money and self ahead of the good of the nation.
But really, treason?
Nah.
Business as usual for them.
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The end of the world is always nigh. It has to be for the whole scheme to work. If last week’s existential threat doesn’t seem as frightening this week, a new existential threat is always there to be identified and exploited. Gene Lyons: ISIS Panic is Ebola 2.0.
Eerie similarities to the revered Japanese story of the 47 Ronin who revolt after their leader gets dissed and diced. I am waiting for the part when they all commit seppuku (aka hara kiri)after another Democrat president gets elected in '16.
Posted by: Theodore Wirth | Friday, March 13, 2015 at 06:08 PM
This analysis is great, but in a sense too kind to the GOP. This is of course the curse of a reasonable man: we can see the "other side." Meanwhile, one Jamie Jones is writing and singing a conservative anthem which could easily get people killed. See
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2015/03/bad-country-music-please-do-not-let-loomis-see-this-post
for details. Hopefully some intelligent musicians will cover the thing in an ironic style. It worked for Okie from Muskogee, which was transformed from a mean-spirited rant into an anthem for people like Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen.
Posted by: Fiddlin Bill | Sunday, March 15, 2015 at 09:35 AM
The alternate theory is that the Republican party is truly pro-Iran. Didn't George W. Bush eliminate their chief rival in the region and give them the victory they couldn't win by themselves on the battlefield? Now the Republicans are telling them not to give up on developing nuclear weapons, even if it means an easing of the sanctions.
(Amusingly, in my freshman year at MIT I met a freshman from Iran who was planning to major in nuclear engineering and wanted assurance that MIT had a good nuclear department. I remember reassuring him. After all, MIT was full of guys who had earned their chops at Los Alamos which was Woodstock for atomic scientists. I wonder where he is now? He might be developing a bomb or reactor in Iran somewhere, but more likely he's in Los Angeles with all those other Iranian exiles. UPDATE - I looked him up on the alumni site. He wound up double majoring in CS and ME. He's supposedly living in Brookline, MA, but that could just be the cover story.)
Posted by: Kaleberg | Sunday, March 15, 2015 at 09:02 PM