LAST TIME I RECOUNTED MY INITIAL confusion over an email recounting the judge's sentencing in the shoe bomber case.
Of course it could be that conservatives forward more emails in general, and this time the email just happened to be liberal propaganda.
It was forwarded to me by a conservative friend, and certainly read like a standard piece of right-wing propaganda, but the judge's actual comments—in spite of the fact that he was a Reagan appointment—were a clear and compelling statement of the liberal position on the issues involved.
His points included the following:
-
Our efforts against terrorism should not be considered a matter of war, but of criminal justice.
-
Terrorism is a crime, committed by criminals, who should not be handed the dignity of being designated as "enemy combatants" or tried by the military as though they were soldiers on the other side of a war between two countries.
-
They should be treated as individuals, and justice should be meted out to them as we would to any other murderers, in a court of law, with all of the rights to defense that we give anyone else.
-
This is not because we want to protect murderers, but to protect the innocent from being punished, and to protect the freedom and fairness the United States stands for.
-
All of the above is the best answer to terrorists, and the best argument to the rest of the world, that we mean what we say when we stand for justice and freedom, and that we will not be frightened into abandoning our values by a handful of hate-motivated criminals.
That, in a nutshell, is the progressive position.
The conservative position has been, on the other hand:
-
that we should give the terrorists the dignity and status of soldiers,
-
that we should allow them to manipulate us into abandoning the values built into our system by using the fiction of "enemy combatant" status to deprive them of their legal rights,
-
and that we should display to the world that our commitment to our values only hold so long as we find it convenient.
The only conservative note in the judge's sentencing was the echo of the Bush jingle that "they hate us for our freedoms".
But, as I said, this was forwarded to me by a conservative, who has sent me many of the other pieces of conservative email propaganda I've commented on here.
Of course it could be that conservatives forward more emails in general, and this time the email just happened to be liberal propaganda.
But that didn't work, because the comments at the beginning and end are pure conservative propaganda—even though they seem incredibly weak, compared to what the judge said.
The gist of those is that the "liberal media" intentionally buried this story.
As we've come to expect from conservative propaganda, this charge...
- Is put between the lines.
The author doesn't come out and say, plainly, that the media buried the story.
Instead, we're treated to rhetorical questions meant to imply it.
"So, how much of this Judge's comments did we hear on our TV sets?"
You're supposed to answer, "none," and draw the further conclusion that this is because the message was intentionally buried by the "liberal" media. -
And is false.
But why would the "liberal" media want to bury what was, after all, a liberal message?
The answer is that they wouldn't—not if they were really liberal.
Oddly enough, if you were actually the kind of person who would easily draw the implied conclusion, the chances are good that you don't even watch the "liberal" media (which is code for anything but Fox).
So the interesting question is why didn't you hear about this?
One reason is that cameras and recorders weren't allowed inside the courtroom, so there's no way you could have seen the judge make these comments, or hear them in his own voice.
On the other hand, if you don't confine yourself to Fox, you might well have run into this story.
It took me about thirty seconds on Google to find that it was covered by both the BBC and and by CNN—which has published the entire transcript online.
So, is the mystery solved?
I don't think so.
The whole message still boils down to "isn't the liberal stance of this judge wonderful, and isn't it awful that the liberals don't want you to hear it?"
This is incredibly weak, even for conservative propaganda.
So what's the answer?
Well, sometimes you can figure out a propagandist's agenda by what he or she changes.
Next time: the changes...
