Would You Have Rather He Had Cited Stalin?
Robert Byrd’s speech before the Senate has received a smattering of controversy from his friends on the other side of the aisle, and a fair amount of right-wing punditry brushing us up on Byrd’s KKK past. (Which they managed to drudge up when he oppossed the confirmation of Condelleza Rice.)
His speech? It’s pretty good.
The problem with turning up examples of what is wrong with breaches of parlimentary procedure, and the exasperated power grabs that are at the heart of said breaches, is that the roads they historically lead to, is that invariably it takes us to a very bad spot.
For example, spots where the indefensible is defended, or brushed aside.:
Gannon: In your denunciations of the Abu Ghraib photos, you’ve used words like ‘sickening,’ ‘disgusting’ and ‘reprehensible.’ Will you have any adjectives left to adequately describe the pictures from Saddam’s rape rooms and torture chambers? And will Americans ever see those images?
McClellan: I’m glad you brought that up, Jeff, because the President talks about that often.
Or… some such nuttiness from elected officials.
“Syria is the problem. Syria is where those weapons of mass destruction are, in my view. You know, I can fly an F-15, put two nukes on `em and I’ll make one pass. We won’t have to worry about Syria anymore.” — Rep. Sam Johnson (R-TX).
(There are two things wrong with that quotation. Maybe three.)
Anyway… We all have our own guages on where the slippery slope runs from, or how Nazi Ideology pervades our nation’s political policy.
Grover Norquist: Yeah, the good news about the move to abolish the death tax, the tax where they come and look at how much money you’ve got when you die, how much gold is in your teeth and they want half of it, is that — you’re right, there’s an exemption for — I don’t know — maybe a million dollars now, and it’s scheduled to go up a little bit. However, 70 percent of the American people want to abolish that tax. Congress, the House and Senate, have three times voted to abolish it. The president supports abolishing it, so that tax is going to be abolished. I think it speaks very much to the health of the nation that 70-plus percent of Americans want to abolish the death tax, because they see it as fundamentally unjust. The argument that some who played at the politics of hate and envy and class division will say, ‘Yes, well, that’s only 2 percent,’ or as people get richer 5 percent in the near future of Americans likely to have to pay that tax.
I mean, that’s the morality of the Holocaust. ‘Well, it’s only a small percentage,’ you know. ‘I mean, it’s not you, it’s somebody else.’
And this country, people who may not make earning a lot of money the centerpiece of their lives, they may have other things to focus on, they just say it’s not just. If you’ve paid taxes on your income once, the government should leave you alone. Shouldn’t come back and try and tax you again.
Terry Gross: Excuse me. Excuse me one second. Did you just …
Grover Norquist: Yeah?
Terry Gross: compare the estate tax with the Holocaust?
Grover Norquist: No, the morality that says it’s OK to do something to do a group because they’re a small percentage of the population is the morality that says that the Holocaust is OK because they didn’t target everybody, just a small percentage. What are you worried about? It’s not you. It’s not you. It’s them. And arguing that it’s OK to loot some group because it’s them, or kill some group because it’s them and because it’s a small number, that has no place in a democratic society that treats people equally. The government’s going to do something to or for us, it should treat us all equally. “