consortiumnews.com
GOP Learns to Love Dissent
By Nat Parry
March 19, 2010
“The American people are saying, ‘Stop’ and they’re screaming at the top of their lungs,” said House Republican Leader John Boehner explaining why the GOP is so determined to kill President Barack Obama’s health-insurance reform.
Dissent against the President of the United States, it seems, has become patriotic.
By contrast, seven years ago, as President George W. Bush was ordering the invasion of Iraq, dissent was treated by the American political establishment – and especially Republicans – as something to be ignored, disdained or despised.
Still, in the run-up to the war, millions of Americans took to the streets in massive demonstrations and literally screamed at the top of their lungs for Bush not to do it. Many more called their congressmen and wrote letters to editors of newspapers.
In those days, however, the powers-that-be and the major media considered dissent to be un-American. Iraq War critics, ranging from former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter to the country music band the Dixie Chicks, saw their loyalty, their motives and sometimes their sanity questioned.
Ritter, who challenged Bush’s claims about Iraq’s WMD, was called a Saddam Hussein sympathizer, while the Dixie Chicks faced boycotts and death threats for expressing their personal shame that Bush was a fellow Texan.
And, as Bush readied his “shock and awe” military campaign, few in the U.S. news media defended the value of dissent. There weren't even many voices -- allowed into the news columns or onto the evening news -- that urged caution on something as serious as going to war.
Those who did give voice to anti-war positions sometimes found themselves out of a job, like popular talk-show host Phil Donahue, whose show on MSNBC was cancelled despite the fact it was the network’s highest rated program.
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http://consortiumnews.com/2010/031910b.html
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