South Dakota Lt. Gov. Matt Michaels got together with some fellow elected officials at the BPI plant in South Sioux City yesterday to eat some pink slime burgers and pump memes for their big industry friends.

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback joined others in pumping the new, clever counterslogan: “Dude, it’s beef!” Iowa Governor Terry Branstad offered this passionate plea for rhetorical civility:

It’s time to end the smear campaign and to stop the use of inaccurate, inappropriate and charged words that are designed to scare people [Gov. Terry Branstad, press conference, South Sioux City, Nebraska; quoted in Pat Curtis, "Branstad: Time to End 'Smear Campaign' Against Beef Product," Radio Iowa, 2012.03.29].

May we assume Lt. Gov. Michels will bring that message home to ask his fellow South Dakotans to stop using the inaccurate, inappropriate, and charged term tenure in their advocacy for Governor Daugaard’s education reform plan?

May we assume that Branstad and his fellow Republicans are declaring their official support for a boycott of all conservative talk radio, whose stock in trade is inaccurate, inappropriate, and charged words?

May we assume that Branstad and Michels will call on all of their followers to stop shouting socialism, death panels, and government take-over of health care in reference to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act?

May we assume Rep. Kristi Noem is done talking about job-killing regulations?

Every party can slip into hyperbolic language in advocacy of its causes. Republicans are not immune to this weakness. But when folks apply a physically accurate description to a consumer product—it is pink, and it is slime—and that description helps frame consumer concerns about the industrial recycling of offal into dinner, Republican leaders suddenly feel they must stifle public discourse and market decisions. How very amusing.

Since his inauguration, I have struggled to like Governor Dennis Daugaard. I would like to believe that, while we have our policy disagreements, he at least represents a reasonably mainstream wing of the Republican party. Alas, the Governor keeps doing and saying things that make me think that South Dakota really is ruled by wingnuts.

Two weeks ago, the Center for Public Integrity released the results of its State Integrity Investigation. That 18-month study based on information gathered by local reporters in each state ranked South Dakota second in the nation for risk of state government corruption.

A constituent and occasional reader wrote to Governor Dennis Daugaard to express concern about the F South Dakota received on this report card. The Governor’s office responds with the same rebuttal offered by chief of staff Dusty Johnson in the report itself: South Dakota government has good ethics policies and enforcement, and even if government misbehaves, we have a “free and energetic press” to keep government honest. The letter appeals to “common sense” and poo-poos a state ethics commission as “another layer of bureaucracy,” a “board of experts.”

Remember, when right-wingers say “experts,” they don’t mean it as a compliment.

The defense turns hard right in this paragraph:

As you glance over the rankings of the states, you’ll see a trend: blue states outscore red states. For example, New Jersey and California are among the top five and the most conservative states—Wyoming, South Dakota, and Georgia—rank as the bottom three. Upon further investigation, I found that though this group labels themselves as “non-partisan,” many, like journalists from the Las [sic] Angeles Times and the New York Times, say this group is liberal. In fact, the Center for Public Integrity receives most of its funding from a well-known leftist: George Soros [Kelsey Pritchard, Director of Constituent Services, letter to South Dakota citizen, 2012.03.21].

Ah yes, George Soros, one of Fox News watchers’ favorite bogeymen. Harken to the echoes of that evil European-accented laugh. Brand the group as leftist. Crib the Wikipedia note about both the LA and NY Times using the word “liberal” (while failing to note that the cited mentions come from one article from each paper on the same topic from 1996).

Now the reader who submitted this letter is a rather strong right-winger, so it could be that Governor Daugaard’s office is simply selling its message to its audience in terms to which it thinks that audience will be most receptive, in this case, Soros-conspiracy fears and red-state-blue-state paranoia.

But I’m dismayed that, in communication with constituents concerned about corruption, the Governor’s first impulse is to attack the messenger in terms dear to wingnut hearts rather than focusing on South Dakota’s purportedly positive efforts to reduce the risk of government gone wrong. In such rhetorical tactics, the Governor casts himself as much less a uniting moderate and much more a right-wing warrior.

Referring Governor Daugaard’s destructive K-12 education plan to a public vote can’t be primarily about counterplans. A referendum can only repeal HB 1234, not replace it with something better. We’ll have to count on the new legislators we elect in November (like Pam Merchant and Mike Knudson) to do that.

But when the time comes for counterplans, let me recommend proficiency in one foreign language as a high school graduation requirement. I recommended this idea among my six counterplans to HB 1234 back in January, because I can find more data that foreign language instruction improves student achievement than any legislator was able to offer that anything in HB 1234 would boost student scores.

Add to support for foreign language requirements this essay on how bilingualism makes kids smarter:

The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving [Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, "Why Bilinguals Are Smarter," New York Times: Sunday Review, 2012.03.17].

Planning, problem-solving… we’re not talking filling in bubbles. We’re talking serious brain power that will help students who study foreign languages and use them regularly perform better in any class and any job. Plus, they’ll stave off Alzheimer’s.

We have a spectacular, value-adding education reform staring us right in the face: rigorous K-12 foreign language education. Take that $15,000,000 Governor Daugaard wants to throw away on ineffective merit pay, hire two new foreign language teachers for every school district in South Dakota, and start teaching every kindergartner how to communicate in something other than English. Teach that language and use it in the classroom every year until that child graduates, and I will show you higher test scores and much, much more.

You couldn’t go with “Mugwumps“?

Rapid City right-wingnut Tonchi Weaver is calling for a really conservative rally in Pierre on March 19, when the Legislature returns to Pierre for one more day to consider any vetoes issued by Governor Daugaard. Weaver and her pals are planning an exclusive lunch at an unnamed Pierre restaurant with “invited core conservative legislators only” (that’s in red and all caps in the original, but I just can’t bring myself to shout as loudly as my radical neighbors). They’ll strategize for the primary and general elections and discuss the future of the conservative movement in South Dakota. Sounds like profound fun!

Then Weaver says this:

Conservatives from from the entire state should caravan to Pierre for the meeting of our “Clan” [Tonchi Weaver, "SD Legislature Veto Day," The Right Side, 2012.03.08].

Yes. We’re having a Clan rally in Pierre.

The ”Conservative Clan Caucus” will be in the afternoon after the close of the Session.

Conservative Clan Caucus. I’m not sure what’s funnier: how deaf Weaver is to the assonant similarity of her newly manufactured Potemkin crowd to the fellas in white hoods, or the mirroring of the actual abbreviation to one of the great icons of 1930s socialism.

And I can’t tell whether my radical Rapid City neighbors are just deaf to the connotations of their language or if they are deliberately baiting me.

Alas, poor December 2011 USD graduates. They hit the books, each incur about $20,000 in debt to get their degrees, and whom do they get to honor them at their commencement? Congresswoman Kristi Noem, an insecure anti-intellectual who thinks they should have stayed home and taken online courses.

Noem’s address Saturday to USD’s 474 December graduates epitomized her ongoing insult to higher education. First, Noem refers to the 21-year process it has taken her to bring her own college diploma within reach. She still doesn’t have it… and she continues to play dumb about it:

I have my fingers crossed because I’ve turned in my final paper and if it does well, I’m going to graduate with you in 2011 as well [Rep. Kristi Noem, commencement address, University of South Dakota, 2011.12.17, as quoted in David Lias, "Noem Tells USD Grads to Prepare for Life's Changes," Yankton Press and Dakotan, 2011.12.19].

Reporter Lias apparently declines to note the shrug and cheerleader giggle that almost had to accompany that line.

Is Kristi Noem really so stupid that she doesn’t know if her final paper is good enough to pass? She’s a 40-year-old Congresswoman, a former legislator and businesswoman. I would think she would have the confidence and self-awareness to assess the quality of her own undergraduate writing assignments… unless maybe she had spokesboy Joshua Shields write them for her.

Noem burbles on:

Boy, am I proud of you…. There are so many hurdles that keep you from getting a good, quality education, and you guys stepped through it [Noem via Lias, 2011].

A commencement address is the sort of oratory one practices and polishes. It is not an off-the-cuff chat with voters. “Boy” and “guys” are not marks of great oratory. If Noem had thought through her remarks, she also would have recognized before hitting the stage that “it” cannot refer to “hurdles.”

I think you are a unique generation. You don’t know of a world without the internet. If you wanted to know something or question something your professor told you over the years, all you had to do is Google it. This makes you much more perceptive … you can tell a fake when you see it — you know when a deal is just too good to be true [Noem via Lias, 2011].

Note the dig at academia: professors are not to be trusted; they are to be questioned and fact-checked by diligent Googling. (Someone, please, get me a copy of Noem’s final paper: I want to read all the citations of Wikipedia.)

After reviewing several commencement speeches online, Noem decided to crown her speech with the profound wisdom of Conan O’Brien. Oh, the insecurity: instead of citing a statesman or philosopher, our Congresswoman tries to show she’s one of the cool kids.

I don’t have a full transcript of her speech, so I can’t tell just how much of O’Brien’s 2011 speech at Dartmouth she quoted, but she appears to have borrowed from O’Brien at length. She probably didn’t notice that her lengthy quotation included this passage

…[W]hether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality [Conan O'Brien, quoted by Noem via Lias, 2011].

Conviction and true originality. If only our Congresswoman could have mustered those qualities for our newest graduates.

I’m sure I’m not the first to offer this observation, but as a French teacher, I can’t let it pass. I’m staying this weekend at the luxurious Pierre Best Western Ramkota, where I am happily judging the 102nd South Dakota State Oral Interpretation Festival, taking place today in the beautiful Ramkota River Center.

Wait, did I say River Center? Au contraire!

Pierre Ramkota River Centré

That’s Centré, pardner, apparently intended to be pronounced /son-TRAY/. Everything’s classier with an acute accent mark (or accent aigu, as we call that little wingdinger over the e). Of course, the Frenchmen who visited this place in 1743, like today’s Francophones and (with practice) my French students don’t put an acute accent on that ending e. Center in French is centre, no accent, silent e on the end: /SON-tr/, with just a puff of air on that lovely throaty French r and no full vowel after it.

Then again, folks around Pierre have never been good at French pronunciation.

A Twitter spammer sends me a link to “180,” new online propaganda by God-prover and creationism flogger Ray Comfort. This “documentary” shows Comfort playing hypothetical word games with various individuals, analogizing abortion and the Holocaust to convince people abortion is wrong. Incredibly, some of interviewees Comfort targets claim not to have heard of Adolf Hitler, which by itself makes me doubt either their attentiveness or the veracity.

Comfort’s rhetorical rhetorical manipulation of these useful idiots reveals in full many anti-abortion crusaders’ view of women: quite simply, ladies, you are Hitler (or at least the 30% of you who have had abortions are).

Let’s dispose of this fallacy right away. Hitler murdered millions of autonomous human beings, not one of whom was inextricably attached to and deriving sustenance from his body. Women seeking an abortion are exercising a constitutional right to make their own medical decisions, control their bodies, and not be forced by the state into servitude to another being.

Author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has rejected the violence of “women are Hitler” rhetoric for decades:

I am uncomfortable with the language of this debate. I resent the violence of the language the words that they use like Holocaust no it is not a Holocaust. It is blasphemy to reduce a tragedy of such monumental proportions to this human tragedy, and abortion is a human tragedy. What should be done is to give back the human proportion to the abortion issue, and when we see it as such we may be able to have much more understanding for the woman who chooses it. Women who choose abortion are consistently labeled killers, and I personally have been compared to Hitler and called a great murderer.

A woman who feels she cannot go on, and with pain and despair she decides that she has to give up her child, is this woman a killer? Really really. But look, you cannot let these words hurt you. You have to be strong not to pay any attention because those who do that call you a Hitler and relate it to the Holocaust prove that they do not know what the Holocaust was [Elie Wiesel, in "'I Am Against Fanatics': A Dialogue Between Elie Wiesel and Merle Hoffman on Abortion, Love and the Holocaust," On the Issues, Spring 1991].

Comfort’s fellow propagandists are filling the Web with unsubstantiable claims that the 33-minute video is convincing people to change their minds about abortion. Not mentioned in this propaganda are the numbers of people turned away from Comfort’s willful ignorance and verbal violence.

Congresswoman Kristi Noem sends the world a happy little fundraising letter via Facebook. Let’s read:

Dear Friend,

On Monday, I had the opportunity to spend the day on my horse, Lexus, herding buffalo.

Kristi’s horse is named for a foreign luxury car. Good grief, if you’re a real American, wouldn’t you name your horse something more earthy and domestic? How about Caddy? Charger? Dakota? Maybe even Pinto?

Each year, with the help of hundreds of volunteers, Custer State Park officials corral 1,200 buffalo into a large pen for health inspections.

Yes, indeed, the roundup is a great program for protecting buffalo and generating positive press and tourism dollars for South Dakota… made possible by effective government.

To me, I can’t hardly think of a better place on earth, than being on my horse, with the sun on my back, in beautiful Western South Dakota enjoying the land.

Grammar: To me is a grammatically superfluous outburst of egocentrism. We know you’re speaking, Kristi; you don’t have to preface your opinion with to me to say that it’s your opinion. And can’t hardly is a double negative. You should properly say can hardly or can’t easily. Josh Shields may tell you errors like this make you sound all Palin-faux-folksy, but they really make it sound as if you can’t think.

It’s days like Monday that re-energize me and remind me what it is we’re fighting for in Washington, DC.  Most South Dakotans I know aren’t afraid of a hard day’s work.  Their main request from Washington, DC is to be left alone.  No more burdensome regulations.  No new tax increases for programs that don’t work.  Just let them be.

Notice the implication of some false bogeymen here. There are South Dakotans Kristi knows who work hard. There must thus be some lazy group outside her clique on whom we can blame our troubles.

Notice also the interesting shift in rhetoric here. Kristi usually just says no tax increases and government doesn’t work. But here she slips and joins the two. With this complex fragment, Kristi acknowledges that there are government programs that do work, like GF&P activities in South Dakota, and the various government handouts she supports for her family business and favored constituencies, and that she must must thus be willing to consider voting for tax increases.

I get that.  I get it because that’s where I came from and it’s who I am.  I am as frustrated with Washington as most of you.  We still have a lot of work to do.  Sometimes it’s hard to stay motivated for the fight but we have to remember that if we don’t fight for our freedoms, who will?

Notice that the only freedom Kristi has explicitly mentioned here is Grover-Norquist anarcho-capitalism… and maybe horse-riding at government-sponsored tourism events. And what is “the fight” that “we” are waging? And who is “we”? Isn’t that the “Friends” to whom this letter is addressed? Isn’t that “all South Dakotans”? Either Kristi is dividing South Dakotans into her vague freedom-loving friends and a bunch of lazy layabouts, or her last sentence above (which she also awkwardly repeats verbatim in her p.s.) is stunningly empty.

That’s what you get, Kristi, when you don’t think about what you write.

Just this last week, some on the other side—

Ah, so “we” isn’t all of us. There is some vague “some” on the “other side.” Every cowgirl has to believe in bad guys…

—started pushing a Democrat “poll”—

No, Kristi, your scare quotes don’t negate its existence, and the Nielson Brothers are not Democrats.

—that isn’t really worth the paper it’s printed on. It showed me losing to former Congresswoman-turned-Lobbyist Stephanie Herseth Sandlin.

Oh, snap! And with a capital letter! I’ll bet she used that scarlet capital L when John Thune took the same career track in 2003.

The “pollster” refused to release who paid for the poll or even the background information about how they got their numbers, but it shows to what lengths the other side will go to gin up their base and make them believe they have a shot at re-taking South Dakota’s lone House seat and restoring Nancy Pelosi.

Scare quotes and bogeymen galore! Noem recycles her constantly catty politics of personality and continues to dodge the actual policies (or lack of policies) that she and her boss Speaker Boehner stand for.

That’s why I need your help.  We have a fundraising deadline on September 30th and I haven’t yet reached my fundraising goals for this quarter.  We need to raise $20,000 online between now and Friday so that we can post a strong number and show the other side that we’re serious and it will take more than a cooked up “poll” to discourage us.

Uh oh. What really ought to discourage Kristi’s “friends” is that the Congresswoman apparently takes this “poll” seriously enough to make it the centerpiece of her fundraising plea. She spends two paragraphs fixating on a poll that she says doesn’t matter. At the same time, Kristi fails to point to any specific legislation she has passed or even advocated that warrants your donation. The only specific action she mentions is riding her horse. You don’t have to spend money to see a lady riding a horse.

It’s this kind of feckless writing from Kristi’s staffers that makes me think the scare quotes belong on “Congresswoman” Noem.