I listen to Rush Limbaugh a lot, because ... well, because I'm a masochist, but also because I find it useful to hear what right-wing ranters like Limbaugh and O'Reilly and Hannity have to say. (It helps me formulate the arguments that I have to make when I talk to the idiots who buy their garbage, and these idiots are legion, cropping up in online forums and in supermarket checkout lines and in bars and, regrettably, at my family gatherings.) The day that Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement and speculation was just starting to erupt over what Bush would do in replacing her, I heard a
line from Limbaugh that I had never heard before:
...The judiciary to [liberals] is God. The Supreme Court is God. God has nine heads and God just lost a head today -- and the left has to make sure their God has nine heads with at least five of them on their side. Just think of it in religious terms. The left is looking at that court as God and church and sanctuary with abortion as the sacrament.
At the time, I remember thinking "Rush thinks that I think the Supreme Court is God? What a weird thing to say. Oh well, that Rush says a lot of weird shit," and I didn't really think about it too much.
But then I started hearing it again from Rush. Over and over again, actually, almost every time he brought up the topic of the Supreme Court. In Googling, I could only find one more transcript of the idea (cause I'll be damned if I'm going to pay Rush for access to his archives), but I can tell you from personal experience that Rush has been repeating this same idea practically nonstop for the last nine months or so:
The liberals in this country don't trust the ballot box with their issues because their issues doesn't win at the ballot box, folks. They don't trust it. That's why the Supreme Court and the federal bench are their altars. They are the Bible. They're the Ten Commandments. They're Moses. Think whatever you want, whatever religious analogy you want. That's why anything opposite them -- and abortion's the sacrament of feminism. Abortion is the sacrament of liberalism, and it's never going to change, so anybody who doesn't accept their sacrament and go to their communion and accept this, then they consider you an enemy and they'll come up with all kinds of other phony reasons to keep you off the court if you're a judicial nominee.
A little further Googling showed that this particular meme got some traction from a remarkably thoughtless statement that Nancy Pelosi made in reference to Kelo v. New London, the eminent domain decision, on June 30, 2005:
Q Could you talk about this decision? What do you think of it?
Pelosi: It is a decision of the Supreme Court. If Congress wants to change it, it will require legislation of a level of a constitutional amendment. So this is almost as if God has spoken. It's an elementary discussion now. They have made the decision.
To anybody with a basic understanding of analogies, it is clear that Nancy Pelosi was not saying that she thinks the Supreme Court is God, but this comment was seized upon by many religious wingnuts as meaning exactly that (and she should have realized that would happen.) It is important to note, though, that Rush was pushing the law-as-liberal-religion meme at least as early as 4/15/2005, so this Pelosi remark was used as support for the existing party line, not as its genesis.
I got to thinking about this when I read a recent excellent DKos comment about the way Republican spinmeisters brand their parties, politicians and policies the same way that Coke, Ford and UPS brand their products. I can't find the comment at the moment, but the commenter was talking about how you combine an appeal to emotion with absolutely relentless repetition, so that after a period of time your audience automatically thinks what you want it think when they hear certain words. It's really nothing less than a brute-force method of mind control. No matter what your overall opinion of an Energizer battery, you will consciously or unconsciously think of them as being especially long-lasting, because it is impossible not to. No matter what your overall opinion of John Kerry is, you will consciously or unconsciously think of him as a flip-flopper, because it is impossible not to. No matter what your overall opinion of Howard Dean is, you will consciously or unconsciously think of him as being angry, because it is impossible not to. You get the idea.
So what do we know about liberals from previously existing wingnut memes? First of all, of course, we hate America and want to see it fail. Second of all, we are godless, because all true God-fearin' men and women vote Republican. As a longtime listener to Rush, I can categorically assure you that he and his audience take these as givens. It is important to remember this when analyzing the effect of this new law-as-liberal-religion meme.
Since this meme is aimed at a conservative, religious audience, hearing abortion referred to as a "sacrament" is very offensive and horrifying - the most important sacrament in Christianity, of course, is Communion, in which they pay homage to the sacrifice of their Lord and Savior. Random Religious Dittohead hears this and thinks: "My goodness! The liberals love baby-killin' as much as I love Jesus!" I imagine the immediate reason for this deployment of law-as-liberal-religion meme was to rally the troops for what the conservatives believed would be a titanic confirmation battle, to make their people believe that getting their man on the Supreme Court was truly a righteous religious battle of believers against atheists. Of course, said confirmation battle(s) ended up being somewhat less than titanic, but that's another diary, and this meme has another, less obvious, more dangerous effect.
The truly insidious nature of this particular law-as-liberal-religion meme is that it frames the incredibly basic concept of OBEYING THE LAW as being both outside the mainstream AND sacrilegious! It is breathtaking in its audacity, really - instead of just meekly suggesting that breaking the law isn't that big a deal, it argues that respecting the law is actively bad. It equates a deference to the law with the worship of a false religion.
None but the truly lunatic fringe - the Pat Robertsons and the Michael Savages - would ever state it quite so baldly. (It is a truly sobering thought that, given how loony this nation has gotten since 2001, Rush Limbaugh can no longer be accurately described as being on the lunatic fringe.) But that's the way the Noise Machine works - level upon level of the same meme being pushed at different levels of intensity, so that one man's "Bill Clinton isn't the kind of guy you'd want to babysit your daughter" is another man's "Given the chance, Bill Clinton would rape your underage daughter." Or one man's "Liberal bias is rampant in the media" becomes another man's "I hope terrorists attack The New York Times."
In the short term, this is especially important to keep in mind when it comes to examining why the NSA domestic-spying issue has not blown up anywhere near as much as it should have by now. In a rational America, the revelation that the executive branch had completely subverted the judicial branch, and the Bill of Rights and then claimed that they were entirely within their rights to do so should have had impeachment proceedings rolling in six weeks. I see a lot of Kossacks debating what the main thrust of our attack should be - some say we should appeal to Americans' expectations of privacy, some say we should point out that the program is not effective, some say we should focus on the fact that the program is demonstrably illegal. I think that the law-as-liberal-religion meme is being pushed in great part to make the third method much harder. We could talk until we were blue in the face about how Bush is breaking the law, and the wingnut fringe will just think "Damn those godless liberals, worshipping the law again!"
Yeah, I know this makes zero logical sense to you and me, but how much logical sense has there been in the world in the last few years? We thought the Armstrong Williams and Jeff Gannon stories could bring the Administration down, but the "liberal media" meme was so ingrained that people couldn't accept the concept of right-wing government propaganda being much of an issue. We thought the bald-faced Bush debate lie about never having said he wasn't concerned about Bin Laden ("must be one of them ex-a-jer-ray-shuns") would kill his re-election bid, but the "Bush as honest straight-shooter" meme was so ingrained that people couldn't accept the fact that, faced with an undeflectable attack on his strongest issue, Bush just flat-out denied reality.
In the long term, now that the immediate Supreme Court fights are over and the meme has served its primary purpose, I feel like it will be further developed as a last line of defense as Republicans from Tom Delay to Jack Abramoff to Scooter Libby to Karl Rove to possibly even Bush and Cheney find themselves unable to pretend that they did not break the law. When it becomes blindingly clear to everybody that these people worked outside the law without a second thought whenever it suited their purposes to do so, they won't plead guilty and step down honorably, hell no. Their proxies and agents in the Noise Machine are right now laying the groundwork to plant the seed in the pliable group mind of Wingnuttia that obeying the law is against God and anti-American, and that those who seek to enforce the law against them are, therefore, traitors to both God and country.
Get ready.