I always try to be fair and listen to both sides of an argument, so I just listened to the Republican and Tea Party responses to President Obama’s State of the Union address. I am actually dumbfounded, proving once again that they never cease to amaze me.
I am addicted to news, it’s the first thing I turn on in the morning and the last thing I watch at night and many hours in between. Whether it be CNN, MSNBC, even FOX News and of course C-SPAN, which I find fascinating, they all get an equal share of my viewing. Thanks to their up-to-the-minute and live coverage I have watched our current events unfold first hand. Current events become history the moment after they happen, and as a trained historian and because I saw these events unfold I can judge them somewhat objectively. (Although a famous quote from a standard historiography text book states that “Seeking true objectivity is like trying to nail jelly to a wall”).
Whether I’m objective or not I know for certain that I saw and heard things that I now consider historical fact.
I saw Hans Blix testify before the UN Security Council that after exhaustive searching in Irag the IEAE could find no evidence that any weapons of mass destruction existed there. A few days later I saw Secretary of State Colin Powell present an artist’s renderings of a hypothetical truck with a chemical weapons lab on board which was presumably constantly driving around the roads of Iraq and that was why the IEAE couldn’t find the WMD’s. And that was why, the Bush administration claimed, we must go to war in Iraq, to destroy those chemical trucks and thereby rid the world of terrorism. They failed to recognize that no terrorism existed in Iraq at the time because Saddam Hussein wouldn’t allow it. With no exit strategy and no foresight, they plowed ahead, not realizing that democracy must come from within, and not be imposed on a country that’s not ready for it. It was an unwise decision that immediately wiped out the budget surplus and created the beginnings of the deficit that we now have.
I also witnessed the financial collapse of 2008. I saw Senator McCain say that he thought it would be a good idea to suspend the presidential campaign in order to return to Washington to take care of this crisis, and Senator Obama’s response that anyone who wants to be president should be able to handle more than one thing at a time. I saw the House of Representatives and the Senate approve the bail-out of the banks. I saw President Bush and Ben Bernanke suggest the beginning of the stimulus plan that President Obama continued in order to loosen credit and create jobs. I saw the committee hearings on the bail-out of the auto industry needed to save tens of thousands of jobs and the subsequent passage of the bill in congress.
And yet, in both the Republican and Tea Party responses to the president’s address, they blamed Obama for the huge deficit and not the Bush administration policies that led to not only the deficit, but the financial collapse and subsequent recession. For all of their proclaimed fiscal conservatism it was the Republicans who deregulated the banking industry and allowed the high risk trading that ensued and led to the downfall of so many sound companies. Now they want parts of the recently passed Financial Reform Bill repealed, and the whole industry to rely on self-regulation in order to avoid further disasters in the future. Isn’t that kind of like asking the fox to guard the hen house?
In his response Republican Rep. Ryan said that Lincoln, the first Republican president, believed in limited government. Again, they don’t know their history. Lincoln believed in government funded “internal improvements” the equivalent of our infra-structure improvements. He offered the populace “40 acres and a mule” if they would populate the western territories, and initiated the building of the trans-continental railroad, both government investments for future growth.
Rep. Bachmann mentioned that the federal government has grown so big and controlling that they’re telling us which light bulbs to use. Really? It’s a suggestion Michelle, not a mandate, and it will benefit us all to conserve energy. How quickly they’ve forgotten the side-stepping of the Fourth Amendment (Searches and Seizures) in order to allow unwarranted wire-tapping of our phones and internet use under the prior administration. But they will invoke the 4th amendment in order to protect the rights of mentally ill persons or prior criminals to buy guns in order to protect the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms). Does it make any sense?
On the first full session of this Congress the House of Representatives read the Constitution aloud, Democrats and Republicans taking turns. But the majority was in control of what was to be read and left out significant parts that they felt were not important. They left out a portion of Article 1, describing the apportionment of the population to Representatives with the phrase “which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, and three fifths of all other persons,” all other persons meaning slaves. This phrase was the single most important cause of our Civil War. And yet they chose to leave it out of the reading. They also skipped over the 18th amendment, Prohibition, which in itself led to the development of organized crime and inadvertently led to the failure of agriculture which ultimately led to the Great Depression. So they chose to ignore those parts that might be embarrassing if we are to proclaim ourselves the guiding light of the world. Maybe they left them out because they were later superseded by amendments or repeals and were no longer applicable. But for a party that proclaims that they will abide by a strict adherence to the Constitution, it’s hypocritical to leave sections out. That’s our history. It’s important to know that our founding fathers compromised on the slavery issue and kicked the can down the road for a later generation to fight it out. It’s important to know that extremism against some unwanted behavior of a minority of the population had a severe backlash on our safety and economy. We can’t improve unless we admit the mistakes we’ve made. And that maybe our founding fathers weren’t such saints, just men protecting their own interests.
So our Republican party, including the Tea Party, are very selective in their memory of history or have a very short term memory.
Revisionist views are very common in the history profession. In fact the history profession wouldn’t exist if people didn’t find new ways of interpreting old facts. Sometimes a historic document or artifact is discovered that sheds a whole new light on any particular event and the whole process of interpretation is invigorated. But omitting facts, or conveniently forgetting them, is extreme revisionism. To a historian, it’s unforgivable.
