Calm Like a Bomb: Inside the Family Research Council’s 2007 Washington Briefing
I spent the better part of Saturday stumbling around the Washington Hilton, talking with self-identified “Values Voters” about the upcoming Presidential election. I was amazed that nobody seemed noticeably insane. In between speeches from Republican presidential candidates, there were no audible discussions of impending Armageddon or the forthcoming homosexual invasion. Most summit-goers actually articulated opinions and views with a serene calmness, couching their attitudes in the vernacular of hating the sin and not the sinner. I honestly didn’t encounter anyone patently unpleasant, and one old lady actually went as far as to cordially promise to pray for me. Other folks produced business cards and offered to talk more over coffee. Ultimately, the seething invective I anticipated from any conference with Dr. James Dobson serving as a keynote speaker failed to materialize.
And then I got a look at Frank Gaffney. A hack national defense expert and neoconservative fearmonger, Gaffney is one of these jagoffs you see spewing feverish gibberish on talking-head programs about invading Muslim hordes stealing your children from McDonalds playpens – a Shakespearean villain who uses terms such as “Islamofascism” the way the rest of us employ words like “but.”
A mealy-mouthed rodent of a man with an always moist forehead and a stupid looking mustache, Gaffney was running “The Double Threat to Our National Security: Radical Islam,” the day’s final breakout session. Equally terrified by both Al Quada and the United Nations, Gaffney spent the second half of his venomous diatribe assailing something called “The Law of the Sea Treaty” (L.O.S.T), a measurement the U.S. Senate is currently preparing to ratify – and an international agreement that Gaffney insists will result in nothing short of the prison-style raping of American sovereignty.
Gaffney’s audience was composed almost exclusively of senior citizens with circulation problems and way too much time on their hands… piss-scared folks who digested his talking points like they were coming straight from the book of Job. Crammed asses-to-elbows inside a poorly ventilated conference room, the spectators passed the presentation by alarmedly shaking their heads from side-to-side and muttering “Oh sweet Jesus” each time Gaffney presented another baffling bullet point – basically reacting to everything that escaped the presenter’s mouth as if absorbing a sucker punch to some sort of collective stomach.
Things only derailed further when Gaffney opened the floor to questions. First, our own Raleigh Smith rose to her feet to make a seemingly benign point about how the treaty in question might be beneficial to the United States Navy (which, like President Bush, Washington Democrats, and even Walter Cronkite, the Navy supports) – not exactly a piece of Socialist propaganda. A few questions later, our friend Max Blumenthal confronted Gaffney about having a degenerate gambling tycoon on his board of directors.
Now, I know next to nothing about L.O.S.T. and could not possibly make myself care about a guy like Frank Gaffney’s professional associates. What I found utterly fascinating was the manner in which the audience reacted, almost on principle, to the raising of real questions. Nevermind the fact that Gaffney seemed perfectly willing to offer answers on his own, however ridiculous his rebuttals may have been. The point worth making is that it took all of ten seconds for these ostensibly polite members of the “moral majority” to officially dispense with the aforementioned pleasantries and morph into a group of angry seniors who just had their canasta game interrupted.
In both instances, audience members transformed into empty-headed dispensers of vitriol, savagely intent on shutting down the questioners. Blumenthal was loudly outed by members of the audience and ordered to “sit down” and “shut up” by no less than six people, and Raleigh was treated to more of the same – particularly when a woman leapt to her feet and loudly screeched, “I propose we don’t take anymore questions from the media!”
Which by that point seemed like a pretty good idea to everyone. The session’s final comment came from an old lady who talked about not minding the polite Arabs she used to know during her time residing in Saudi Arabia, and even defended some of the “quiet Muslims” she’d encountered here in America.
I am no Muslim, but on Saturday, I was kind of quiet. As long as you’re willing to play that role – to assume the part of pleasant outsider politely looking for directions to either heaven or the nearest straw poll – the Values Voter set will probably not mind you either. Develop the audacity to ask even the most tepidly confrontational question, however, and prepare for a different type of response – one that is much more predictable yet undeniably harder to stomach.
election, election 08, 2008, dobson, values voters, thom file, FRC, frank gaffney, gaffney, washington briefing
