Who has the “Moral Authority?”

November 03, 2009  |  Posted by Danielle Belton

It was bad enough that Liz Cheney's outfit "Keep America Safe" attacked the efforts of 20 musicians to close Guantanamo Bay by calling them "laughable" and "pathetic," but the group also claimed that bands like Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine don't have the "moral authority" to speak out.

But we all know what's really laughable and pathetic -- That charge.

The Cheney brand doesn't exactly have the ring of "moral authority" to it, with Liz Cheney's denials that America tortured (When members of her own father's administration said we did!) and Cheney's continued support for holding people, indefinitely, without trial or charge. This, after all, is a group that uses fear, distortion and misinformation to spread its message. Now some Nine Inch Nails fans have joined the fight against Cheney and her group's rhetoric to support the band's frontman, Trent Reznor.

The NIN Hotline, one of the Internet's largest Nine Inch Nails fansites, is demanding an apology from Liz Cheney. The site started an email and call-in campaign in support of Reznor, arguing that Keep America Safe's divisive rhetoric "is an insult that goes too far."

"I guess they don't think there's anything immoral in using someone else's creative talent and output in a way the artist finds reprehensible," said a member of the site.

Last week several musicians, including Reznor, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, R.E.M., Pearl Jam and many others, joined together to speak out against torture and for the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Learn more about the musicians' efforts by clicking here.

Here's what the NIN Hotline had to say about the "cheap shot" Cheney's group made.

From NIN Hotline:

It's perfectly fine and healthy for our national debate to disagree with the politics of the issue and to disagree with the President or the Democratic Party. But it's another thing entirely to attack Trent and other artists as having no moral authority -- in our minds, this implies a view that they are immoral -- and to claim that Trent and the others therefore have no right to complain about the unauthorized use of their music to torture people.

We applaud the efforts of the NIN Hotline in fighting back against Cheney. Everyone should have their say in this debate, including those who's music is being used to torture people. As a show of solidarity, we have NIN's "March of the Pigs" playing on our MySpace page now.

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