The thing about our political discourse, is that the only way a politician breaks through\u00c2\u00a0through into the news cycle and conciousness is by saying something outlandish.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know how you cure this, but it is what it is.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s always hard to figure if these things count as “gaffes” or something else, but they develop into a cycle of “Say something outrageous, defend, apologize for any offense”.<\/p>\n
\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>Alabama’s new governor Robert Bentley is apologizing for comments he made Monday during a Martin Luther King Day celebration<\/em><\/a>. An\u00c2\u00a0auxilary to the “like Hitler did” Godwin’s Law, the Goebels reference<\/a>:<\/p>\n Rep. Steve Cohen on Thursday stood by his remarks in which he compared Republican attacks on the health care overhaul to Nazi propaganda advanced by Joseph Goebbels.\u00c2\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n The Tennessee Democrat, who is Jewish, said he regrets that anyone was offended and that his comments were used to “distract from the debate about health care.” But in a detailed written statement, the congressman elaborated on and defended his analogy.\u00c2\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n “Taken out of context, I can understand the confusion and concern,” he said. “While I regret that anything I said has created an opportunity to distract from the debate about health care for 32 million Americans, I want to be clear that I never called Republicans Nazis. Instead, the reference I made was to the greatest propaganda master of all time.”\u00c2\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Goebbels references are a bit less offensive than Hitler, in the sense that Hitler has ceased to mean a damned thing and Goebbels at least refers to specific concerns of public relations in a world where facts are transmitted but are receptibily meaningless.\u00c2\u00a0 Laced in Goebbels’s techniques, for instance, is gratuitous invective — see for instance, calling a bill the “Repeal Job Killing Health Care Act”.\u00c2\u00a0 But as always, it’s something of a conversation killer.\u00c2\u00a0 He could just go the Joseph Wilson route and shout “You Lie!” and received the media attention.\u00c2\u00a0 (Or maybe he couldn’t have — does the House have a rule against pointed references to colleagues on the floor in debate?)<\/p>\n In case you’re curious on the roll call vote — almost a\u00c2\u00a0party line vote<\/a>, except for one Democratic Congress-woman who obviously couldn’t vote, and three Democratic Congress-men who voted aye — Oklahoma’s Dan Boren, North Carolina’s Mike McIntyre, and Arkansas’s\u00c2\u00a0Mike Ross.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Curiously, I see that some media outlets <\/a>get the\u00c2\u00a0Oklahoma Congressman wrong — reference his father, David — but really, one member of a political lineage in Oklahoma is about the same as the next — he got in off of his father’s coat-tails.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The thing about our political discourse, is that the only way a politician breaks through\u00c2\u00a0through into the news cycle and conciousness is by saying something outlandish.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know how you cure this, but it is what it is.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s always hard to figure if these things count as “gaffes” or something else, but they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7456"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7457,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7456\/revisions\/7457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Bentley issued an apology yesterday for stating that anyone who doesn’t share his Christian faith cannot be counted among his brothers and sisters.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 The offending comments came hours after Bentley was sworn in as governor, when he told a Montgomery Baptist church audience, quote, “Anybody who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister.”\u00c2\u00a0 His speech spurred outrage from Jewish and civil rights groups, who said the comments were offensive and inappropriate.
\n<\/em>I guess I should shrug and say “It’s Alabama”, but what was the point of this statement?\u00c2\u00a0 You can shovel any number of\u00c2\u00a0Christian allusions without pointedly calling out non-believers.<\/p>\n