Rhetoric is red, liberty is blue

Invective is a cheap commodity in politics, and so locals are buying the stuff by the barrel amid the gusher of controversy over Steve Landes drawing a thick black line from the White House to Soviet reds and Nazi fascists.

Seeking his eighth term as the 25th District representative in the House of Delegates, Landes squeezed a shot into the air last month when he told a gathering at a Republican picnic that GOP voters fear they’ll be reported to the White House if they post partisan signs in their yards. “... [T]hey’re afraid their neighbors are going to tell on them,” Landes said. And then this: “When you’ve got a White House that’s keeping names of people that don’t agree with them, that reminds me of what went on in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.”

After those words resurfaced in a story by The Washington Post, Landes’ Democratic opponent, Greg Marrow, demanded that the Republican lawmaker apologize. Others called for his resignation So rose a scenario, that of spiced rhetoric begetting fatuity. Landes declared his First Amendment right to free speech, then denied the charge that he’d associated President Barack Obama with Hitler, saying he referred to the White House, not the commander-in-chief, and Nazi Germany, not the Fuhrer. His first point is correct and the second, comic.

So what of it? To be precise, this: Obama, so far as we are aware, has not attempted a takeover of Europe, nor has he initiated mass genocide. Landes explains that his intent was to link the tactic of name-keeping under Obama to that employed by the Soviets and Nazis, which, the implication goes, does not of necessity connote the additional tactic of killing dissidents. All right, but for what purpose did tyrants across the Atlantic keep names? To track dissidents. Here we are then, back where we started.

Relenting slightly, Landes concedes that his phrasing was less than “artful,” borrowing a term favored by, of all people, Obama staffers when the president or one of his gang (Joe Biden, please stand up) has taken to gnawing his own shoe leather with the foot still inside. But Landes does not shrink from his premise: Soviets and Nazis took names, and so does the White House, hence the connection. So now questions: Is the White House tracking its dissidents, and if so, to what end?

The evidence Landes offers on the former is a White House blog posted Aug. 4 inviting people to forward to e-mails and Web sites containing “fishy” information on the subject of health care reform. The idea, explained Macon Phillips, the White House new media guru, a.k.a. Col. Flag, was to allow Team Obama to shoot down damnable lies about reform. The idea was not, Phillips said, to gather e-mail addresses from opponents without their consent.

Conservatives and privacy groups were dubious. The White House says it since has halted the initiative — and, in fact, the flag e-mail is dead. Still, it’s difficult for us to believe that addresses obtained while remained operable were not fed into a database somewhere. The White House vigorously denies this, and good luck refuting that claim, since the White House is not subject to Freedom of Information law. If names were kept, for what purpose? One guess is security. Beyond this, speculation thickens and credibility thins to vapor. Here, in other words, Landes’ link runs to nowhere.

Whatever, the notion of people having been called upon to forward to the White House information on what amounted to dissent rattles, and not just us but groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union. True enough, the connection Landes drew could not be substantiated, but the furor over the Phillips blog demonstrates the lawmaker had a slight point. Safeguarding liberty requires safeguarding dissent.