One of the worst side-effects of the Bush Administration's bald-faced lies and cynical strategies has been the rise of the PTSD Progressive community, a community so damaged by years of mendacious lies and incompetent management that they cannot believe in the change before their eyes.
My favorite logical fallacy is "The Pervert's Veto," the concept that something shouldn't be done because a bad person could pervert it. The reason it's a logical fallacy is that it can be applied to any situation. For instance: I love ice cream trucks. But the guy running the truck could be a sociopath who puts poison in every 20th ice cream cone he serves.
He could be. But he probably isn't. That's the nature of the pervert's veto.
Dick Cheney's "one-percent option"--the idea that a one-percent chance of a terrorist attack is enough to require massive, military response--is another example of the pervert's veto in action. It leads to over-the-top responses to events that do not require them.
Unfortunately for us all, eight years of the Bush Administration has passed Cheney's paranoid psychological tick on to the nation at large, particularly to many in the progressive community. And they are right to feel this way. The Orwellian nightmare of the Bush Administration makes thinking in terms of a pervert's veto seem wise, even prescient. How else can you describe an Administration who's every move can be put to the George Costanza (Seinfeld) test of "If that's what they want to do, the opposite would probably be the best idea"?
Eight years of lies about Iraq, terrorist alerts used to create fear instead of disseminate information, politicization of the Justice Department, etc., has left many with the impression that no matter what a politician says, he's probably lying and preparing to destroy your society as well.
You can see this dynamic play out with our Congress. Does anyone truly believe (outside of the Naderites) that our team of Democrats is secretly playing for the other team? When they lack the votes (see Blue Dogs on Iraq funding for details) they are called spineless. When they act strategically (see FISA for details), they are called spineless. Even when they act altruistic (working with Lieberman instead of punishing him and leaving a bitter bitter Senator working against us), they are called spineless.
Even more bizarrely to me, this dynamic is playing out with PEOTUS Obama. Some progressives--too long lied to, mistreated and abused--are unwilling and unable to believe that Obama intends to follow-through on the ideas, policies and campaign promises that he's spent four years and a whole book describing. They criticize every appointment not on the merits of the appointee's experience and effectiveness, but on the concept that somewhere in their history must be evidence that Obama is lying to us. That Obama is a secret Manchurian Republican who will be the third Bush term. (Yes, I've really had that said to me here, on dailykos.)
And that is the depressing thing. That Bush (and Nixon before him) has so convinced so many that our politicians can be so bad as to never be trusted to keep even their most basic promises. That despite Obama's amazing level of communication with us, from treating us like adults when he speaks to us about race, to actually writing an essay on Huffingtonpost describing the reason for his FISA vote, we still don't believe that his efforts are honest.
There is no panacea for this. From the outset I admitted that the Bush Administration has made this kind of "pervert's veto" political thought not only acceptable, but reasonable. After eight years of the worst, most cynical, most Orwellian, and least competent governance in US history, expecting our elected leaders to be altruistic, pragmatic and good is a challenge.
As an experiment I'm placing a useless paragraph here, one that only is to ask "did you read this far?" because so many people seem to have stopped reading well before my conclusion.
It's the challenge Obama asked us to take up when we voted for him. It's the challenge he describes when he tells us what change is.
It's a challenge I throw out to you once again, my dear friends:
I challenge you to believe that Obama can make a difference.
I challenge you to believe that you can make a difference.
I challenge you to believe in the American Dream once again, and to work hard to make it happen.
And most of all I ask you to not SYFPH, but rather to believe again that we are able to impact the future, to believe in Democratic principles and governance, to believe that we--purists and pragmatists, kool-aid drinkers and kvetchers--that we together can make this nation great.