It’s going to be nearly impossible to cover every attempt of the right wing to get someone fired, unless that’s your specific blogging beat, because, as I noted yesterday, they’re in full-blown blood lust mode. That said, I’m going to post on the attack on Kevin Jennings, the Assistant Deputy Secretary at the Department of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, because it’s interesting that Sean Hannity and his cohorts that are trying to get Jennings fired through sheer tenacity are basically arguing that gay men are pedophiles. This is an interesting switch in tactics. Usually, they invent some unheard of ethical breach, come up with half-assed reasons they have decided this is an ethical breach, and then force the person to resign rather than get dragged down in debating whether it’s unethical to do things like set up a meeting between artists and the President, if you work for the NEA. The more dada-esque the accusation, the better, in fact. Lindsay described the strategy:
With Rove in semi-retirement, the Republican party is led by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin with assists from wingmen Dick Armey and Orly Taitz. This crew favors a different approach, one less surgical and more psychiatric. Freak out randomly: The president telling kids to stay in school?!!! Counseling seniors about living wills!?! Czars?!!
The key is that there is absolutely no way to predict what will set off the GOP. At this rate, the Democrats will be reduced to a whimpering puddle on the lab floor in no time.
As she noted, it’s an attempt to induce learned helplessness. Those of you familiar with domestic violence will recognize this strategy immediately as the one used by abusers to control their victims—-make up random shit to get upset about, freak out until they apologize just to shut you up, and if they argue with you about something real, deny that it happened and accuse them of being crazy. The most memorable fictionalized version of this process of breaking someone was chronicled in the 1944 movie “Gaslight”. That the right wing is so good at this form of bullying is sadly not surprising; that they go to great lengths to fake certain emotions to manipulate the dialogue really isn’t that surprising, either.
Initially, the attempts to get Kevin Jennings fit the general mode. The accusation was one of the right wing’s favorites: guilt by association tinged with sexual hysteria, which is the method they effectively used to get ACORN. (I really, really hope that the employees fired over that can leverage a decent lawsuit against the pseudo-pranksters.) Jennings was accused of counseling a 15-year-old in a relationship with an older man without reporting the relationship to the authorities. Readers will recognize the form from a common accusation leveled at Planned Parenthood. It’s effective because it hits the right wing desire to be titillated while pretending to be outraged, and then scapegoating someone else for their guilt over being titillated at the idea of having sex with teenagers. Notice the common theme here is, after all, sex with teenagers. That’s an important attention-grabber on the right.