The way that the the echo chamber of power in politics functions today is the cultural evolution of religious adoration through repetitive prayer. The American public turns on the television every night and partakes in what is essentially a form of mass worship, or invocation. This instinctual, and therefore extremely dangerous, muddling of the distinctions between secular and religious society is being inflicted upon the citizens of our country by an establishment that may not be aware of its more fundamental psychological implications.
There is a great similarity between the rote invocations of the assurances of our leaders and the recitation of prayers among the faithful of any religion. The mere act of their repetition constructs the mental foundation of acceptance and veracity. We are asked to accept certain fundamentals on faith, since, just as we are unable to know the nature of God, we are unable to know the nature of classified intelligence, or to see into the political future of any given candidate. "A smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud" can be repeated so many times that it begins to sound like "Holy Mary, Mother of God".
We are lured into the new religion of patriotic dogma by the same weakness that lures us into the old religion of creation myths. We are insignificant, and life is a scary and unsure place. The more we fear fire, brimstone, and WMDs the more we are open to the suggestion of the political prayer. And just like the high priests of old were cynical hoarders of power and domination at the hand of their myths, the incumbent political power uses this endless mantra of superstition to seal the security of its position. The only real way to be successful, as the high priests demonstrate, is to believe your own myth, and I think that this is the case within the core of the Bush administration.
What will Dick Cheney say to John Edwards when he shatters the public prayer session by asking what Cheney meant on May 20th, 1992, when he said at a press conference, "How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? The answer I would give is not very damn many."
That was a fine invocation, and it is no less valid today. Even more so, now that we have a real enemy that is not Saddam. Certainly more moral.
We have to remind these zealot zombies of the common sense that prevailed in 1992, even within themselves, before they sold out on the crossroads to the evil God of imperium. We need to show them how to be born again into a new political religion of logical scientific situational assessment by forcing new prayers onto the TV worshipping public. It is a language that they'll understand.