“Safire’s New Political Dictionary” abounds in evidence of the depths to which politicians will sink. Waving the bloody shirt, using the dog whistle, tossing the crowd red meat, getting into the gutter, using the smear, and dirty tricks.
And we should never forget that much of the study of rhetoric, how to argue a position, concerns the ways an advocate without scruples can employ logical fallacies, falsehoods, hyperbole and other tricks of the trade to bamboozle the public. We are now living in a golden age of dirty politics.
Consider the sad case of 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts, out for a jog, accosted, and murdered on an Iowa country road by a man with a screw loose. In a world with a shred of decency, the family would be permitted to grieve in peace, the perpetrator would be swiftly tried and punished, and we could all pause to consider’s man’s fallen nature and the importance of law and order.
Instead, those with an axe to grind see in this awful event an opportunity, a story that can be spun to their advantage, a bloody shirt, a cause celebre, a wedge issue. So, #MeToo people see in Tibbetts one more victim of men who can’t take ‘no’ for an answer. They aren’t wrong, but a decorous pause to mourn the dead before rushing to make her a symbolic tool rather than an individual human tragedy might be polite.
Far worse is the glee of the right in finding that the accused, 24-year-old Cristhian Bahena Rivera, is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. Instantly, the White House said, in effect, “See, We Told You So.” It called the death “a devastating reminder we must urgently fix our broken immigration laws.” Do we really think anyone at the propaganda shop was actually devastated?
It was also quickly pointed out that the crime vindicated Trump’s claim that 63,000 Americans have been murdered since 9/11 by illegals. Fox News tastefully headlined its hyperventilating coverage “The Monster Down The Road.” A Neo-Nazi group ginned up robocalls using her death to preach racial intolerance.
And the reliably unscrupulous Newt Gingrich rushed to say ,“Mollie Tibbetts could be a more important figure than Paul Manafort for the November election. The left has to bear the burden for being the party that is tolerating Americans being killed by people who are here illegally”
Well, it’s nice Tibbetts’ death could serve a purpose for demagogues and Nazis. She did not die in vain. Except the story they tell is not quite accurate. First, is opposing Trump’s immigration policies really the equivalent of tolerating murders? I don’t think so.
And if you’re going to take a superior attitude, it might help your case if you made it honestly. In fact, Trump’s 63,000 murders by illegals between 2001 and 2017 came from a tendentious right wing analysis that bungled the math.
It turns out the statistics on which the claim is based covered not 16 years, but 55 years. The actual number for the time period Trump claimed was not 63,000 murders, but rather 8,218 “arrests” for murders, not “convictions.” So Trump was only off by 87 percent.
The libertarian Cato Institute has actually done research that shows illegal immigrants are “much less likely to be convicted of a crime” than native-born Americans — people like Neo-Nazis, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn and other Trump cronies awaiting trial. The trouble with partisan rhetoric is that everybody can play.
Other facts also lend nuance to the story. The presence of Rivera in Iowa was not due solely to the wicked liberals refusal to build a wall. He was there as one of many agricultural workers in the area doing a job cheaper than America workers would. His American employers seem to have been lax in checking his status since they did not use the e-verify system. Rather, they checked his Social Security card which was not in the same name he went by, a red flag they chose to ignore.
Rivera was also living in one of several trailers provided as part of the compensation for immigrant dairy workers. The farm was operated by a man and his wife who were clearly profiting by employing those without documentation and who could therefore be denied benefits and protections available to Americans.
In a piquant detail, the farmer’s wife runs her own business, a fund-raising call center for right wing politicians that has raised over $40 million for such anti-immigrant stalwarts as Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Mike Lee, and Rep. Joe “You Lie” Wilson. The hypocrisy is as thick on the ground as Iowa cow pies.
For those seeking a glimmer of hope in this whole tawdry mess, I offer Ron Tibbetts, the father of the victim. He paused in his eulogy for his murdered daughter to decry the demonizing of a whole class of people because of the evil act of one. He said, “The Hispanic community are Iowans. They have the same values as Iowans. As far as I’m concerned, they’re Iowans with better food.”
There speaks the breathtaking decency, fair-mindedness and humor-amid-the-tears of the real America. Compared to that, the nasty, reflexive seeking of partisan advantage from every tragedy only demeans men like Trump and Gingrich whenever they open their mouths.
God bless the grace of Ron Tibbetts. May his daughter rest in peace, and her killer be accorded the equal justice under law that our Republic relies on. I’d pray that those exploiting her death repent, but some chasms are too wide and deep for any leap of faith to bridge.