By DAVID VEST, CounterPunch.org, 4/7/06
A Washington press corps that stood
idly by while Bush and Cheney plundered the country, wrecked
the environment, spied on Americans without a warrant, tortured
civilians and lied the country into a war that will only get
worse, woke up one morning and collectively decided: “Let’s
all play Get Cynthia!”
Let’s get her for being too
outspoken, bringing up the wrong issue at the wrong time, failing
to get with the program, becoming a distraction, leaving House
Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi beside herself with rage.
Let’s get her because, hell,
she practically volunteered for it, and besides, she’s an easy
target, standing practically alone, fired upon at will by Republicans
— who seem to think her story cancels out DeLay, Abramoff, Katrina
and Iraq — and virtually undefended by Democrats, except by
the rolling of eyes heavenward, as though to say, “Oh, please!
We’re not responsible for HER!”
Rep. Cynthia McKinney has now
apologized for her part in the face-off at Checkpoint Cynthia.
It was not enough to stop the cartooning of the coverage. Already
the news wires are spinning her statement as a complete about-face,
an abandonment of everything else she has said about the incident.
Look, she said there was racial profiling in Washington! Look,
now she’s apologizing!
Journalists are reporting this
story as though it were their job to “get” her, breathlessly
revealing that the woman who receives more hate mail than Teddy
Kennedy employs a part-time bodyguard, as though it proved something
about her mental state.
But note, please, Rep. McKinney
did not take back anything she has said about racial profiling
in the nation’s capitol. And the fact remains that, while each
day’s mail brings a new wave of personal threats, some of the
people charged with protecting her affect not to recognize her.
A Republican colleague offered the suggestion that she could
announce “I am a Member of Congress” each time she
passes a security checkpoint. But McKinney has served for eleven
years, not eleven minutes.
Here’s a test of media fairness:
how many times, over those eleven years, have you seen Rep. McKinney
on CNN, NBC, ABC, or CBS, asked to explain her views on Iraq
and the Middle East? Not once, you say? Read on for the “why
come” of it all.
The leaders of her own party
turn their backs while she endures the most vicious racial stereotyping
I’ve seen, since the last time I looked at that old KKK rag called
the “Thunderbolt” when a fellow college student stuck
a copy in my face back around 1963. “I know it’s probably
racist,” he said, “but it’s funny,” as if that
would have made it all right.
It wasn’t funny, it was disgusting,
and I don’t think what’s happening to Rep. Cynthia McKinney is
funny now. Much of the commentary seems to have been written
by the same sort of people who say they don’t agree with Rush
Limbaugh, they just listen to him for “entertainment.”
(Anybody out there who listens to Rush for entertainment, please
get your eyes off of my words, I’ve got nothing to say to you
and I sure as hell don’t want to “amuse” you.)
Two-party collusion in the
destruction of a reputation is the story here, folks. For Pelosi,
the affair is “not something we need to focus on.”
Judging by Dennis Hastert’s comments, Checkpoint Cynthia was
the biggest national security event since 9/11.
Rep. Tom DeLay called McKinney
a racist. Nothing DeLay said would surprise me, and that comment
was no exception. What did surprise me was that I couldn’t find
any stories quoting any Democrats saying, “Tom DeLay called
somebody a racist? Tom DeLay?!”
Oh, I know. They didn’t want
to take the bait, fall into the trap, keep the ball in the air
for another news cycle. But really, how can they stand this?
How can anybody?
Right wingers, aided by Democrats,
are spinning McKinney as “arrogant,” “haughty,”
a “nut-case,” even “the madwoman McKinney”
— a woman who, just between us pros, wink wink, doesn’t understand
how “the game” is played.
She understands the game all
right. She just refuses to play it. When CNN’s Soledad O’Brien,
trying to take control of an interview, said to McKinney, “Let
me stop you there,” what came back on her was something
spoken in a tone rarely used toward a TV personality: “You
can’t stop me, Soledad.”
And you can’t control me, she
might have added, and you can’t dictate your own framing of the
issues with me.
How easy it is for people who
don’t have a history of having their right to be present challenged,
to counsel others to be more “calm” and “sensible”
when provoked.
How easy it is to imagine a
senior party member sitting down with Rep. McKinney, patiently
and paternalistically explaining that politics is the art of
compromise, sweetie. We all know what’s supposed to be meant
by that, but what kind of compromise do we really want our elected
representatives to make with racial profiling, warrantless wiretapping,
torture, and a war founded on lies?
The Democratic Party has already
compromised this country into desperate straits, going along
to get along with Bush. It has been so long since one of them
stood ground on anything, we’re all shocked when it happens.
Cynthia McKinney is standing
firm, with little visible support, but then she has stood alone
before. Like that time when she actually voted to withdraw U.S.
troops from Iraq, when given the chance. She was joined by only
two other members of the House. The Republicans dared the Democrats
to vote for withdrawal, and the Dems all frantically denounced
the maneuver as a trap. McKinney seized the moment and called
their bluff. Is that what her critics have in mind when they
call her a “nut-case” or even worse names?
If she’s a nut-case, then maybe
we need to send some more crazy people up in there.
She stood alone in 2002, when
power brokers in her own party recruited a Reagan Republican
stalking horse to defeat her, after McKinney expressed support
for Palestinian rights and was among the first to call for an
investigation of the Bush Administration after 9/11. The party
line at that time was that “we’ve all got to stand behind
the president” in the Wonderful War on Terror.
And then, when McKinney rose
from the political dead and returned uninvited from the oblivion
they had consigned her to, and reclaimed her seat without anyone’s
special blessing, other than the voters of her district, the
Democrats in the House celebrated her historic comeback by refusing
to restore her seniority.
That was Nancy Pelosi’s way
of saying, “You will comply.”
They wanted to keep Crazy Cynthia
away from the microphone, of course they did. Out of sight, out
of mind. Can’t have our elected officials running around saying
the same things the public is saying about the war on Iraq! Makes
us look bad! And thus it comes to pass that we get news stories
saying things like, “Since returning to Washington, McKinney
has kept a lower profile until last week’s incident,” as
if keeping quiet on public matters was her own idea.
The incident with the Capitol
Police wasn’t about her hair. It wasn’t about the identity pin.
It’s about the fact that when you are female, black, antiwar,
and militant, invisibility looks good on you, from where the
pro-war Dems sit.
Some of us are old enough to
remember that many Democrats accused Martin Luther King, Jr.
of “ingratitude” when he began to speak out against
the Vietnam War. That was the very moment when, in the eyes of
many who had previously and publicly despised him, he was transmogrified
into the Great Civil Rights Leader, who had now “gone too
far” and “risked” damaging the wonderful “reputation”
he had earned, not to mention all the “progress for his
people” that (hint, hint) could be rolled back if a “backlash”
were provoked.
Vestiges of this view persist
today in some quarters. William F. Buckley has said (recently)
that he regrets that National Review opposed Civil Rights. He
has not, insofar as I am aware, expressed a hint remorse for
not supporting King in trying to stop the war in Vietnam.
So now, today, we have Rep.
McKinney calling Israel to account, demanding justice for Palestinians,
questioning what happened on 9/11, giving no quarter on racial
profiling, and voting against the war in Iraq.
How are the do-nothing Democrats
supposed to get the benefit of the antiwar crowd, if there are
people running around actively voting against the war?
They act as though they believe
all the country really needs is not to end the disaster in Iraq
but to let the “good guys” run it.
The noble John “Nobody
Spins Me” Kerry writes an op-ed calling for not one but
TWO deadlines in Iraq (top that, Hillary!) and the whole party
has a conniption fit because all anyone can talk about is this
uppitty Black woman who won’t let security or anybody else, including
party leadership, manhandle her.
Nancy Pelosi had her party
theme all picked out: we were all supposed to be talking about
Tom DeLay and this “Republican culture of corruption,”
and if anyone pressed us on Iraq, we were to demand, with one
mighty voice (are you ready? all together now …) “that
2006 be a significant period of transition” in Iraq.
The Democratic Party, in splendid
unison, calling upon American sons and daughters to hurl their
bodies into the immolating fire, for the sake of “a significant
period of transition” — who could resist?
How different from that other
voice, that Black voice from Georgia, joined by a handful of
others, saying “Bring the troops home. Stop this war. Now.”
You begin to get a pretty clear
idea why the Democrats have never asked McKinney to give the
rebuttal after a Bush State of the Union.
And as for the Republicans,
with few exceptions, they don’t ever intend to let another person
of color claim to be a victim of racism without attacking her
credibility. Not one more. (Recall how patiently they explained
to us all that what happened in New Orleans in the aftermath
of Katrina “wasn’t about race.”)
Let them convene their grand
jury and push their polls. Maybe one day a polling agency will
call you, to ask what you think about white folks telling people
of color that they’re wrong to feel that anything, anything,
is ever about racism.
Before judging Rep. McKinney,
ask yourself, what kind of person would still be in public service,
after setbacks and sabotage attempts like these? What kind of
person would keep reporting for duty after being consistently
disrespected, and repeatedly challenged to “identify”
herself after 11 years in Congress? And then to be mocked and
attacked for her refusal to meekly “comply” when physically
prevented from going to cast a vote.
You got a bit of the answer
if you saw Rep. McKinney on CNN with Wolf Blitzer. I liked it
when she refused to let him control the conversation, but I have
to tell you, we stood up and cheered at my house when she told
Blitzer, “Don’t even begin to twist my words.”
Among the comments at our table
that evening was, “Why can’t SHE be president?”
Singer-songwriter David
Vest can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com.
His CDs includes Serve
Me Right To Shuffle and Way
Down Here (Live).