What Am I Missing Here?

[rinue]

CPAC (a yearly conference for conservative activists) has been going on in Washington for a couple of days, and it airs on CSPAN, which means I watch a lot of it for work. As you might imagine, the Constitution is a rallying point and sort of ultimate "get out of jail free" card. Basically, you say say something inflammatory, everybody cheers, you say that the media is going to come after you for it, everybody cheers, and you announce that you are not a [whatever negative epithet you imagine] - you just believe in the Constitution. Everybody cheers again.

The thing is, there is normally no connection whatsoever between the Constitution and what is being said, unless it's that the Constitution supports the thing they don't like. Most of the time, they're mad at the federal government for having powers explicitly set out in Article I, section 8. Less frequently, but still frequently, it's the whole of Article VI. It's all over the place, though. Some kid just ranted about how the terrorists shouldn't be tried in civillian court and then name checked the Constitution, and I was thinking . . . you mean in Article I, Section 9, where it says "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it," or in Amendments 7 and 8 in the Bill of Rights, where it says again that the right to a speedy public trial should not be abridged and never once says this only applies to citizens (and seems pretty clear that only members of our military should be tried in our military courts, and then only when essential)?

The Tea Partiers did this stuff at their conference, too, along with lots of loony theories for why the government can't constitutionally tax, despite Article I, section 8, which says they can, and lots of "America should return to God like the founders intended" (except when they wrote Article VI. They were probably drunk, or something.)

(The other thing I like is the calls for the goverment to be accountable to the people, followed immediately by the assertion that it doesn't matter what the majority wants as long as the conservatives are appropriately loud and disruptive. Because the government shouldn't make decisions for you unless, you know, I am the government.)

It's pretty obvious that "The Constitution" is code language for something, but I can't figure out what it's code for. "States Rights" was so easy. "The Constitution" has me baffled. The best I can come up with is "I want to return to an idealized simpler time when I imagine I would have had greater privilege," but that seems like it's not quite right. Help?

[I should add that maybe 8% of the people speaking at this conference are actually intelligent and informed, and they make compelling points that don't resort to buzzwords. I can't understand how they can handle being around everyone else at the conference.]

[ETA: Tim Pawlenty has just claimed that the founding fathers were anti-abortion. I hope he will later reveal their opinion on Coke versus Pepsi, and which of the cable networks is best. I personally believe Ben Franklin would have been all upons birth control, Pepsi, and the Cartoon Network, respectively. Jefferson, a Coke and Viagra man, would have switched back and forth between Discovery, TLC, and Iron Chef reruns (but only the Japanese version).]

Comments

[valancy.livejournal.com]

C-SPAN can alternate between very satisfying and remarkably depressing. It is the roulette of captioning.

[rinue.livejournal.com]

CPAC didn't depress me; I was just bewildered. I get what you are saying, though, because it alternated between this, the governors' association meeting (good), Obama at town hall meetings, and various speeches by the Dalai Lama. It might just be me, but I feel that CSPAN does have a bias, and that bias is mostly toward facts rather than rhetoric, because they'll counterprogram so that there will be some rant about how stupid federal healthcare is and then it'll cut to health and human services talking about the recent insurance data out of California.