I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
One of the many differences between my former hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, and my current hometown paper, the Santa Fe New Mexican, is the tone of the editorials. Not the ideology, as both list perilously to port, but the tone. Times editorials are rather staid and traditional, whereas New Mexican editorials tend to be edgy, filled with slang and italicized Spanish words, and unrelentingly sarcastic.
Sunday’s screed took U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Alabama, to task for claiming that some of his fellow House members are socialists:
Even for a politician preaching to the choir, this was a doozy: Alabama Rep. Spencer Bachus, back home in Birmingham for the latest congressional recess, reported breathlessly to a suburban crowd that there are socialists on Capitol Hill.
Ooooooh. Tell us more, Congressman.
Well, he said, he’s been keeping a list: 17 of ‘em in the House of Representatives.
One of the current Democratic Party talking points is that a good way for liberals (aka progressives) to disarm conservatives (aka whining, infantile, redneck, racist mental defectives) is to mock them for warning Americans about the dangers of the slippery slope to socialism. My fellow columnist here at the NMI did so last month, and I’ve seen a number of opinion pieces in various venues with the same basic message.
Sunday’s New Mexican editorial shifted into slang-and-sarcasm overdrive making fun of Mr. Bachus as a latter-day Joe McCarthy, the red-baiting senator whose very name has become an epithet:
So thank goodness there’s a Spencer Bachus to keep alive the spirit of Tailgunner Joe, by darn …
Except that, since those benighted times, it has occurred to America that there’s a right to be a socialist — and even to run for Congress in that guise.
One problem with the New Mexican’s attack, however, is that the editorial writer implies that Mr. Bachus does not recognize that right, that he’s trying to lead a right-wing purge to rid the House of those he deems to be socialists. While I’m sure Mr. Bachus would like to see those left-leaning legislators defeated in November 2010 and replaced with men and women more ideologically to his liking, he never said a word suggesting that they do not have a right to serve in Congress.
The unrelenting attacks — so often in the form of mockery — on conservatives for being opposed to socialism usually either imply that conservatives are conspiracy nuts, seeing socialism where it doesn’t exist, or that they are McCarthyite witch-hunters out to deprive “socialists” (the tone is usually so snide you can’t help but picture the air quotes even when there are no actual quotation marks around the word) of their constitutional rights.
The fact is, the United States has for decades been growing a larger and more intrusive government. Our citizenry is divided roughly into three groups: those who see this is a good thing and would like the U.S. to move farther along the path toward a more European-style welfare state, those who believe this is the wrong path and would like to see a return to a more limited federal government, and those who have no opinion one way or the other because they’re too busy watching football or porn or fatuous reality shows to bother informing themselves about dry, dull questions of public policy.
That bored, apathetic group who’d rather scrapbook or listen to music on their i-pods or watch American Idol than keep up with politics is, ironically, often depicted as somehow better than those of us who are “partisan” because they don’t want to divide the nation. They are the swing voters who vote “for the person, not for the party” — which sounds really nice, until you think about it, and realize that it only means they have no political principles and are easily swayed by slick rhetoric from charismatic candidates.
Members of this apolitical group are likely to laugh at the New Mexican’s mockery of Spencer Bachus, and to take at face value the implication (not the claim, which would be untrue, and therefore is not made) that Bachus is trying to strip those he deems socialists of their constitutional rights.
He is not. And all the sarcasm in the world will not change that.
