Is that a fact?: Methinks They May Protest Too Much
March 29th, 2006 – 5:20 PM by Eric BlackA dripping-with-phony-outrage DFL press release Wednesday demanded that U.S. Rep. Gil Gutknecht retract and apologize for an “ignorant and incendiary” insult to the Democratic Party.
DFL Chair Brian Melendez demanded, via the press release, which was emailed to reporters and posted at dfl.org, that Mark Kennedy denounce and disavow Gutknecht’s calumny because Kennedy was standing on the Mankato stage with Gutknecht when the slander was uttered.
What was the insult that Gutknecht must withdraw and Kennedy must repudiate?
Gutknecht told an audience of College Republican at Minnesota State University that if they help “hold the line” for the GOP in this year’s midterm election, they could play a role as pivotal as that played by Minnesota’s 1st Regiment in holding the line at the Battle of Gettysburg. (Here’s the coverage of the event from the MSU Reporter, the student paper.) Do you get the outrage? Here’s your next clue.
According to the headline on the DFL press release:
“GUTKNECHT LIKENS DFL PARTY TO SLAVEHOLDERS AT KENNEDY EVENT, DFL PARTY CALLS FOR APOLOGY.
Of Human Bondage
It is true, although Gutknecht cleverly avoided saying so directly, that the forces the Minnesota 1st helped defeat at Gettysburg were Confederate troops, which came from the side in the U.S. Civil War that was defending slavery.
The student paper’s coverage does not indicate that slavery, slaves or slaveholders were mentioned at the MSU event. Gutknecht didn’t say that if they get control of Congress next year, the Dems would re-legalize human bondage. But he did say they would raise taxes on the rich.
The DFL press release fits the pattern of political parties looking for opportunities to feign outrage, put the other party on the defensive and create a lot of weird self-serving partisan linkages. (The DFL press release says that if Kennedy fails to denounce Gutknecht’s rhetoric “Minnesotans will know they can expect another campaign full of distasteful distortions and distractions from him” and managed to work in a passing reference to Kennedy’s pro-Bush voting record and a reference to “the insult-and-divide strategy he learned from the Karl Rove playbook.”)
The kindest interpretation of this press release would be to take it as payback for the phony outrage expressed by the John Kline campaign over the silly caricature of Kline as Col. Klink from “Hogan’s Heroes.” How dare they compare us to Nazis?
Is That a Fact hereby launches a catalogue of the different kinds of bull slung in political rhetoric. We declare this to be in the category of “Feigned outrage.”
p.s. If you want to know more about Is That a Fact, read the much meatier example just below.
44 Responses to "Is that a fact?: Methinks They May Protest Too Much"
Another year of negative electioneering telling us what horrible, do-nothing jerks they are and politicians won’t have to worry about low poll numbers. They’ll have to worry about lynch mobs of an unemployed former middle class waiting for them on their home turf.
This is not so much an issue of Gutknecht calling Democrats “slaveholders,� although at the time of the Civil War that was THE political party of the South. No one today could confuse the Democratic party of the South in the mid-19th century with the Democratic Party today.
The bigger issues with his using this particular imagery are: 1) He’s making a comparison to congressional campaigns and bloody, death-dealing war, 2) He’s specifically making a tie to congressional campaigns and OUR Civil War – THE most divisive event in our history as a country, 3) He’s making the classic “God is on our side� argument. In terms of the 1st Minnesota and our history as a state, that regiment and what they did at Gettysburg are, in a sense, “deified.�, 4) As a history buff, Congressman Gutknecht should know that there were LOTS of Democrats in the ranks of the 1st Minnesota, not least of which was the first colonel of the regiment AND also the colonel at the time of the battle, who made the charge, was severely wounded and crippled for the rest of his life.
The history of that regiment and their sacrifice at Gettysburg belongs to all of us, as Minnesotans specifically and as Americans generally. We live in a single country called the United States of America because of events like the 1st Minnesota and what they did at Gettysburg. It’s totally inappropriate to co-opt it and compare one’s own political party to that regiment and the other party to the ‘overwhelming enemy hoards’ of the confederate army assaulting them.
– Brian Leehan, award-winning author of “Pale Horse On Plum Run: The First Minnesota at Gettysburgâ€?
Why is everyone assuming that he was trying to make comparisons between a historical event and how we need to stay firm in our beliefs today. I am disappointed that the media has slowly dropped parts of the actual story from print, of course this is to keep people from realizing that the story was only intended to rally the students and send a powerful message about the sacrifices that some have made in our country. For those who don’t know Minnesota’s 1st regiment was told to hold the line during the battle of Gettysburg where they were outnumbered ten to one. The regiment suffered at least 78% casualties within the first 15 minutes of engagement, and yet somehow they were able to hold their ground. This story was used to mobilize and encourage the young people who were present and in no way likened anyone to any group. None of you can deny this because you did not hear what Mr. Gutknecht had to say. He said more than the few lines quoted, which were conveniently left out by the liberal media. On the other hand I was there and know there is more to what he said than what was quoted.
Let me get this straight, you’re saying that it is an allegory, right, that 78% of the support of the Republican party has been wiped out by the misjudgement of the President of the United States by going into an ill-begotton war and Gutknecht was trying to buck up those poor college kids by telling them, dang-nabbit, we poor beat-up Republicans can still pull this thing out? That sounds like something Jim Jones would say. Kool-aid anyone?
If Representative Gutknecht is fond of Civil War History, I’d suggest he could benefit from sitting in the classroom of MSU instructor Dr. Croce, History Department (now faculty emeritus) and study the leadership of Abraham Lincoln in the class on the American Civil War. The Republican Party was formed to place the national interest above sectional interest and the rights of individual States, and built on the principles of civic virtue and opposition to aristocracy and corruption. Lincoln used the American creed to unite a country bitterly divided by a bloody war, and his administration included raising tariffs and implementing income tax. Recommitting to the party’s founding principles and rejecting the politics of greed, corruption and corporate influence are the best strategy for any Republican candidate to win any election battle in 2006. “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Menâ€? was the party slogan for Republicans 150 years ago.
What’s more relevant to the discussion of who should be our next senator from Minnesota is: What are our U.S. senators of the Twenty-First Century doing for our soldiers that are fighting the current wars? The majority voted Nay on amending the FY2007 budget to increase funding for veteran’s health care by $1.5 billion because they favored keeping corporate tax loopholes. Senator Coleman voted Nay, along with 53 Republican comrades. Then he went to Camp Shelby the next day and ate steak and salad with the National Guard preparing to deploy. Senator Dayton, member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, voted Yea, along with all 43 Democratic senators, one independent, and a lone Republican, Senator Chaffee of Rhode Island. Senator John McCain and the other 12 Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee voted Nay on increasing funding for Veterans Affairs health care. Then McCain went to Iraq, accompanied by Governor Pawlenty, to visit the Minnesota National Guard troops.
When Minnesota National Guard members, of units linked to the First Minnesota Regiment of the 1860s, return home from Iraq a year from now, they may have to pay an ‘enrollment fee’ of $250 to get health care from VA, and pay a $15 co-pay per prescription for non-disability medicines. Now there’s a breach to be filled, only a deficiency of $1.5 billion. The House has yet to vote on the FY2007 companion amendment. How do you think Reps. Gutknecht and Kennedy will vote? Will they vote for the Vets, or for the corporate tax loopholes?
2007: Welcome home, soldier. That will be $250 please, if you’d like to see a health care provider at the VA. You can send your thanks to the U.S. Congress. Thank the Republican Majority. No wonder all those military veterans are running for Congress as Democrats. Stay tuned for another ‘pivotal moment in U.S. history.’ The New Majority is on the horizon.
Nancy, Navy Veteran, MSU Alum
After reading the above posts by Rich and Nancy G., I can safely say, “my work is done here,” and bow out of this. I will, however, note that I totally agree with Eric Black’s entry comments to kick off this thread: the DFL memo about “Dems. compared to slave-holders” is just insipid. But, as he points out, both sides do the same thing – back-and-forth, tit-for-tat. It all distracts/detracts from any real, legitimate give-and-take on the issues.
Point of history for Congressman Gutknecht: the stats for the charge of the 1st Minn. on July 2nd at Gettysburg are that they were outnumbered about 4 or 5 to one, and the casualties were roughly 60% to 66%.
I would love to see a full transcript of his comments, given Evan’s concern about all that was left out of “the liberal media’s� reporting. But if Gutknecht did, indeed, say what was reported, I don’t need to read the rest of what he said to disagree specifically with his use of the 1st Minnesota’s fight at Gettysburg for partisan political rallying. Even the simile is a poor choice: the Republicans have both houses of Congress and the White House … they are NOT a small cadre of brave veteran combat troops holding back an overwhelming ‘hoard.’ The only thing they’ve having to fight is poor public opinion, which they created for themselves. It’s not even a case of them shooting themselves in the foot with a single-shot muzzle-loading musket: they’ve been busy with a machine gun on BOTH feet – and they’re working their way up both legs. The Dems are the least of their worrie. Incompetence, bad policies, corruption, scandal, lock-step ideology “though the heavens may fall� … the Repubs. are their own worst enemies.
Actually I think the Republicans today are just like the Southerners in 1865: The war in Iraq, the whole Bush foreign policy in fact, is the Lost Cause of the Twenty-first century. Mark Kennedy and my own representative, John Kline, will go down in the upcoming election. The whole GOP is trapped in the psychology of this phony “war on terror.” Like soldiers charging into a line of gunfire, they know they are doomed, but they can’t imagine doing anything but charging straight ahead to their (electoral) deaths.
(Gutknecht might survive though, due to his skill as a procurer of agri-pork dollars for his district.)
What Andy Said.
I think that the DFL press release should have instead pointed out how the GOP stopped being the Party of Lincoln nearly a century ago (while what Kevin Philips called “the Southern Strategy” wasn’t perfected until the 1960′s, in 1928 Herbert Hoover used a Catholic-baiting variant of it to win half a dozen Confederate states for the GOP, the most any Republican presidential candidate had won since Reconstruction. If Hoover hadn’t totally blown it with his Bush-like response to the Great Depression, the GOP’s lock on the South would have occurred a good four decades earlier than it did.
[...] new category in its catalogue of the different kinds of bull slung in political rhetoric. Category One was “feined outrage.� Category Two: “horse flogging.� Category three was [...]
[...] e of this post. If you’re counting, that’s our fifth category. The others are “feined outrage.â€? “horse flogging.â€? “pounding the table.” and “the c [...]
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