{"id":17994,"date":"2023-02-13T08:35:29","date_gmt":"2023-02-13T13:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=17994"},"modified":"2023-02-13T08:35:29","modified_gmt":"2023-02-13T13:35:29","slug":"decorum-propels-d-c-deceit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2023\/02\/13\/decorum-propels-d-c-deceit\/","title":{"rendered":"Decorum Propels D.C. Deceit"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

James Bovard photo (used as NY Post illustration)<\/p><\/div>\n

Mises Institute, February 13, 2023<\/h3>\n

Decorum Propels D.C. Deceit<\/a><\/h2>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

During Tuesday\u2019s State of the Union address, President Joe Biden uncorked a series of howlers that eventually spurred heckling from Republican members of Congress. Pundits raced to condemn the backlash to Biden \u201cYou saw real white trash on display,\u201d declared James Carville on MSNBC. Carville, who served as President Bill Clinton\u2019s hit man, claimed he had a \u201cthe equivalent of a Ph.D. in white trashology<\/a>.\u201d When Paula Jones charged Clinton with sexual assault in 1994, Carville responded, \u201cYou drag $100 bills<\/a> through trailer parks — there’s no tellin’ what you’ll find.\u201d<\/p>\n

The uproar over the State of the Union heckling illustrates how D.C. standards of decorum in D.C. can subvert any effort to put a leash on politicians.<\/p>\n

Pundits were far more upset about the Republican pushback during the speech than about the 8-foot-high black metal fence that was speedily erected around the Capitol grounds before Biden\u2019s visit to the Hill. It was the third year in a row Congress was barricaded for a Biden appearance. When the fence (initially installed after the January 6, 2021 Capitol clash) was re-erected last year, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), complained last year that the fencing \u201cmakes the United States look like a totalitarian regime<\/a> trying to keep its own people out.\u201d The American Civil Liberties Union declared that Congress hiding behind a fence projects \u201cthe kind of message that heads of autocratic regimes<\/a> send by cloistering themselves away from their populaces in armored fortresses.\u201d But Washington\u2019s Guardians of Decorum had no trouble with \u201cwindow dressing\u201d that prevents common folk from approaching the \u201cTemple of Democracy\u201d when sacred rites are occurring.<\/strong><\/p>\n

State of the Union addresses put presidents on a pedestal and good citizens are supposed to be in awe – or at least defer to the Commander-in-Chief. For one night, citizens are obliged to swallow his promises to solve all the nation\u2019s problems. But this prerogative provides an entitlement to delude the American people. What is good for Washington is not good for democracy. Deference has produced disaster after disaster.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In his 1996 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton announced “the era of Big Government is over.” In his State of the Union the following year (after he was re-elected), Clinton opened the floodgates, calling for a “national crusade for education standards,” creating a \u201ccitizen army\u201d of one million volunteer tutors, urging federal subsidies for private health insurance, criminalizing any parent who crossed a state line allegedly to avoid paying child support, advocating a constitutional amendment for “victims’ rights,\u201d and ramping up the war on gangs and the war on drugs \u2013 as well as expanding NATO.<\/p>\n

In his 2002 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush revealed that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea were an \u201caxis of evil.\u201d Bush put the nation on a path to a ruinous war from which the Middle East has still not recovered.<\/p>\n

In his 2016 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama notified Congress that
\n“there are outdated regulations that need to be changed.\u201d He had been president for seven years at that point but he apparently considered all his prior time in the White House to be a \u201cmulligan\u201d \u2013 a golf swing that missed and can be politely disregarded.<\/p>\n

In his 2019 State of the Union, President Donald Trump waved a rhetorical magic wand to proclaim that Americans \u201cstay free\u201d from \u201cgovernment coercion, domination, and control.\u201d (Plenty of folks were riled up that I criticized Trump\u2019s hokum in a Mises piece<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Biden uncorked plenty of howlers<\/a> in his speech on Tuesday. He also donned the mantle of Therapist-in-Chie<\/strong>f – a role pioneered by President Bill \u201cFeeling Your Pain\u201d Clinton. Biden declared that Americans had lost their \u201cpride\u201d and \u201csense of self-worth.\u201d But thanks to Biden\u2019s endless decrees and interventions, people could respect themselves again<\/p>\n

In his State of the Union address last year, Biden declared, “When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they keep moving.” That’s why the Founders enacted the Bill of Rights to put a leash on Washington. Law professor Jonathan Turley observed, \u201cPresident Biden has arguably the worst record of losses in [federal court] the first two years of any recent presidential administration.\u201d And his list of planned power grabs in his SOTU signals he will \u201ckeep moving.\u201d<\/p>\n

The standards for D.C. decorum in discussing foreign policy practically guarantee that presidential lies will receive a pass, regardless of how many people perish as a result of their perfidy. For instance, the establishment media was shamelessly craven when Bush conned America into the Iraq war. CNN chief Walter Isaacson explained: \u201cEspecially right after 9\/11…. There was a real sense that you don’t get that critical of a government that’s leading us in war time.\u201d Jim Lehrer, the host of government-subsidized PBS\u2019s Newshour, justified kowtowing in 2004: \u201cIt would have been difficult to have had debates [about invading Iraq]…you’d have had to have gone against the grain.\u201d When journalists dug up the truth, editors sometimes ignored or buried their reports. Washington Post <\/em>Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks complained that, in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, \u201cThere was an attitude among editors: \u2018Look, we\u2019re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?\u2019\u201d New York Times<\/em> White House correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller explained the press\u2019s conduct at a Bush press conference just before he invaded Iraq: \u201cI think we were very deferential because… nobody wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.\u201d NBC news anchor Katie Couric stated that there was pressure from \u201cthe corporations who own where we work and from the government itself to really squash<\/a> any kind of dissent or any kind of questioning\u201d of the Iraq War.<\/p>\n

Despite the Iraq debacle, the Washington establishment remained more concerned about offenses against decorum than about human rights atrocities<\/strong>. In December 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee finally released a 600-page summary of its report on the CIA torture regime. CIA abuses included death resulting from hypothermia, rape-like rectal feeding of detainees, compelling detainees to stand long periods on broken legs, and dozens of cases where innocent people were pointlessly brutalized. From the start, the program was protected by phalanxes of lying federal officials. A New Yorker<\/em> commentary noted that \u201ccomparisons to Nazi and Communist tortures\u201d were treated as \u201cbeing some kind of wild violation of decorum<\/a>.\u201d President Obama held a press conference just after the report came out, and just before leaving for a Hawaii vacation. Instead of asking him about the torture report and the White House role in seeking to suppress the evidence, White House reporters hollered out: \u201cWhat is your New Year resolution?\u201d<\/p>\n

Actually, the most dangerous breach of decorum in American democracy nowadays is pervasive federal secrecy. Is President Biden recklessly dragging the U.S. into war with Russia \u2013 or Iran \u2013 or China? Average Americans have no way of knowing because the feds are creating trillions of pages of new secrets each year, shrouding almost all the most controversial foreign policy decisions. Americans are not even entitled to know whether their government blew up the Nord Stream pipeline<\/a> from Russia to Europe. Instead of self-government, the Washington elite offer a parody of democracy in which citizens are liable for any disasters their rulers secretly inflict on the world.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But back to the State of the Union. There is an easy fix to prevent future breaches of decorum by testy members of the opposition party. The president should begin his speech by taking the same oath to testify honestly that is routinely required of witnesses at congressional hearings. If a president makes a false statement in the State of the Union, he could then be prosecuted and face to up to five year in prison<\/a>. The provision could be crafted to permit citizen lawsuits that the Justice Department could not stifle to shield presidential deceits.<\/p>\n

Personally, I would find that much more satisfying than hollering at the president.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mises Institute, February 13, 2023 Decorum Propels D.C. Deceit by James Bovard During Tuesday\u2019s State of the Union address, President Joe Biden uncorked a series of howlers that eventually spurred heckling from Republican members of Congress. Pundits raced to condemn the backlash to Biden \u201cYou saw real white trash on display,\u201d declared James Carville on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16426,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2124,10,51,15,3555,36,27,3554,55,3553,344,12,1107],"class_list":["post-17994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-biden","tag-bush","tag-clinton","tag-congress","tag-elites","tag-iraq","tag-lying","tag-nord-stream","tag-secrecy","tag-sotu","tag-state-of-the-union","tag-torture","tag-ukraine"],"yoast_head":"\nDecorum Propels D.C. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17994"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17995,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17994\/revisions\/17995"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}