I just read a story in the New York Times,
the Pentagon weighing the use of deception in a broad arena, that should have shocked me. But I wasn't even particularly angry about it. I just shook my head again, wondering how we have so lost our way.
There's obviously quite a few angles to this story, but the following quote caught my eye, distilling, I think, the primary moral failure of the Bush administration: their Straussian, morally relativistic approach to everything from Social Security to foreign policy, that allows them to justify anything to themselves because they 'know' that it is all for the greater good.
"In the battle of perception management, where the enemy is clearly using the media to help manage perceptions of the general public, our job is not perception management but to counter the enemy's perception management," said the chief Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita.
So our job isn't to spread the word about all the good works we're doing, but to sucker as many people as we can in order to further our short term interests. How fucking sad.
This attitude pervades their entire strategic approach to enacting their policy goals in every arena: taxes, health care, social security, foreign policy, missile defense, energy, you name it. They have decided, unilaterally, that reality is on their side; and since they 'know' that, they have given themselves a free pass to embellish, extrapolite, extend and exaggerate the truth in any and every case because
you are too dumb to understand just from the facts why they are right.
Of course everybody does a certain amount of this when they're trying to convince other people that they are right--but the subject being discussed in this Times article is not on par with poetic license. It's outright lying. And there are definitely arenas where this trick is their only way to win, such as talking up the costs of medical liability insurance and cherrypicking the middle class exceptions to the tax rules they ram through for their corporate buddies.
But in this case it's especially sad, at least to me, because I believe that if much of the world could actually be presented with more truth about America, they would like what they see. Call me a starry eyed optimist but I think the truth is we DO get a bad rap around the world, and even if a lot of it is earned, the good truth about America is simply not finding its way into much of the world. And it needs to, desperately. But they aren't interested in the good truth, they are interested in the expedient lie. And our credibility will suffer for generations because of their short sightedness.
If only the conspirators at the Pentagon understood that their intellectually insulting campaigns aren't going to fool anyone, and are only going to make matters worse.
But the really disgusting implication of this story is this: if the Bush administration truly believes that masking the facts is the only way to further our supposedly righteous goals, it can only mean that he in particular knows just how evil his methods have been. I can only wonder what goes on in his dark heart in the middle of the night. What a sad man.