I had a lovely conversation at the gym last week with my Republican lawyer friend, Bob. Bob is a Vietnam (shipborne) vet, an Annapolis grad, and a blustery, self-satisfied right-winger who likes to stir the pot at the gym, usually by making provocative statements of dubious provenance. Depending on my mood and how much time I've got to finish my workout, my willingness to be drawn into discussion with Bob can vary from "Don't bother me right now," to, "I can't wait to flay this bullshit talking point until it's just a quivering blob of bleeding protoplasm, leaking its poisonous bodily fluids into the dirt, all alone in a vacant lot under the blazing L.A. summer sun."
Well, last week I was in the middle of my stationary bike ride when Bob sauntered up and, after the usual brief pleasantries, said something like, "Well, at least no one in the Bush administration has actually gotten caught with their hand in the cookie jar."
I just looked at Bob and kept pedaling. Finally I said, "Uh - are you kidding me?" I could tell from the blank response I got that Bob had no idea where I was going with this. So I said, "Look, I'm gonna say just two words, okay? David. Safavian." Still, no response.
"Head of the White House procurement office?" I prodded.
Nothing.
"Tried and convicted?" Not a glimmer of recognition.
"Handled about $300 billion annually in White House procurement?"
From the blank look on his face, it was clear Bob had not the first clue about David Safavian. At that point, I knew the conversation was at an end, and I said so: "I'm sorry, but we've got nothing to talk about here." Bob wandered off, whatever fun he had had in mind for our conversation utterly ruined by my reality-based response to his totally bullshit-based gambit, and, no doubt, his feelings a bit hurt by my straight-to-the-facts abruptness.
I was probably a little abrupt, and I felt sorta bad - Bob is a friend, and a good-hearted guy (mostly), and I'm sure I could've handled my response more diplomatically (story of my life). But I resolved several months ago that I was going to nip Republican talking points in the bud wherever I encountered them - and Bob happened to be one of the most shameless talking-point regurgitators I knew.
But he wasn't done yet that morning, not by a longshot. Still looking to get a rhetorical rise out of me, his favorite political foil, he came back around a few minutes later, that wary look in his eye, sizing me up, trying to see which mood he would encounter: Leave Me Alone, or Let's Flay.
"I was reading in The Economist the other day," he intoned, significantly - he loves to cite the many erudite journals he peruses, especially the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal - "and our boy Tony [Blair] is one hundred percent behind us in all this stuff."
"What 'stuff?' " I asked.
"The war on terror," Bob said.
"So you believe the war in Iraq is about fighting terror?"
Bob could tell from my tone that that discussion was going nowhere. He wandered off again.
A little while later, while Bob was working on an apparatus nearby, he mentioned something about Scooter Libby. He derisively tossed off Valerie Plame's name: "She was as much CIA as I am," he snorted. "She wasn't really covert."
Oh.
My.
GOD!
I thought to myself; I think it's time to hit the showers before my head explodes.
As I stood in the shower, I was trying to find a glimmer of hope for our country in my exchanges that morning with Bob. I mean, here he was, a well-educated veteran, head of a successful law firm, gregarious, well-intentioned - and utterly ignorant about so many, many important things. And I wondered to myself, How is it that someone so seemingly intelligent can believe so many patently stooopid things, things that two minutes of Googling would show to be absolutely, well, wrong?
And - worse - if someone with as many advantages as Bob believes these things, what will it take to re-educate the even more ignorant mass of right-wingers who believe these - and even more outrageous - lies?
Well, seeing how so very much of what Bob "knows" is wrong, it becomes at least a little bit easier to understand how Republicans can hold so many groundless beliefs. And how they can swallow whole steaming turds like this:
One objective is to safeguard free nations from the possibility of a missile attack launched from a rogue regime. That's a true threat to peace . . . The enemy of a free society such as ours would be a radical, or extremists, or a rogue regime trying to blackmail the free world in order to promote its ideological objectives. And so my attitude on missile defense is, is that this is a purely -- it's not my attitude, it's the truth -- it's a purely defensive measure, aimed not at Russia, but at true threats.
Or this, uttered by our vice president three months ago:
"As we get farther away from 9/11, I believe there is a temptation to forget the urgency of the task that came to us that day, and the comprehensive approach that's required to protect this country against an enemy that moves and acts on multiple fronts," Cheney told the annual conference of the pro-Israel group, which interrupted his speech at least 27 times with applause.
"Iraq's relevance to the war on terror simply could not be more plain," Cheney said. He said al Qaeda terrorists have made Iraq the central front in the U.S. war against terrorism.
Here's some other stuff Republicans manage to believe - because they have to:
- Tax cuts for the rich help the economy
- Global warming isn't real
- Government is bad
- Privatization is the answer to everything
- George Bush will bring Osama bin Laden in dead or alive
- U.S. attorneys were fired for performance reasons
- Democrats hate Christmas
- Democrats are out to topple the white Christian power structure
- The Founding Fathers never intended for there to be a separation of church and state
- Abstinence-only is the most effective form of birth control
- Criticism of the administration emboldens terrorists
- We're fighting them over there so they won't follow us home
- The Brooklyn Bridge can be demolished with a blowtorch
- Islam is a religion of violence, while Christianity is a religion of nonviolence
- The Geneva Conventions are quaint
- Americans support torture
- The Constitution does not guarantee habeas corpus
- Gays are child molesters
- More guns will make campuses safer
Of course, there's a whole subset of lies about Iraq:
- The Iraq war will cost $50 billion
- We'll be greeted as liberators
- Iraq is just like Indiana (h/t Devilstower)
- Saddam had weapons of mass destruction
- The Middle East is more stable and secure now than when Saddam was in power
- The Iraq war is NOT about oil
- Soldiers in Iraq want to stay there
The ability to believe Things Which Are Not is a necessity in order to be a Republican in today’s world, a world so unrelentingly filled with Reality. Reality, inconveniently for Republicans, has a well-known liberal bias. But Reality has never been a concern of the current crop of Republicans – they have transcended it:
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
The Republicans’ War on Reality continues unabated – I speak to one of its foot soldiers every week at the gym.
And why shouldn’t it? So far, Republican rhetoric has proven triumphant, even among the people who should know best how to defeat it, those at the very frontmost of the front lines in the War on Reality - a war started, led, and perpetuated by the leading Republican politicians, their handlers and their enthusiastic lapdogs in the corporate media:
Democrats in Congress.
Somehow, the Republican Rhetoric Machine has convinced congressional Democrats – in spite of all evidence to the contrary – that it would be A Very Bad Idea to rein in this administration in its headlong pursuit of privatized oil contracts in Iraq, which it seeks to attain by way of a bloody, fruitless occupation. The Rhetoric has convinced congressional Democrats that reflecting the overwhelming will of the American people – and the will of our troops in Iraq, for that matter – will be A Very Bad Idea.
Republicans have, in other words, made Reality subservient to power.
In a breathtakingly brilliant piece that I was amazed to see get almost no play here (aside from chinchongchinaman‘s astute mention), UC Berkeley journalism professor and author Mark Danner gave a commencement address to Cal’s Department of Rhetoric graduates a few weeks ago that nailed it. Referring to the above quote from Ron Suskind’s piece in The New York Times Magazine, Danner said,
These words from "Bush's Brain" -- for the unnamed official speaking to Suskind seems to have been none other than the selfsame architect of the aircraft-carrier moment, Karl Rove, who bears that pungent nickname -- these words sketch out with breathtaking frankness a radical view in which power frankly determines reality, and rhetoric, the science of flounces and folderols, follows meekly and subserviently in its train. Those in the "reality-based community" -- those such as we -- are figures a mite pathetic, for we have failed to realize the singular new principle of the new age: Power has made reality its bitch.
You simply must read the entire thing; it is brilliant.
Danner goes on to dissect the current Republican War on Reality, citing the December 2000 appointment of George W. Bush to the presidency, and his subsequent hubristic behavior, as a seminal sequence of events (boldface added; italics in original):
In this singular condition, and with a Senate precisely divided between parties, President Bush proceeded to behave as if he had won an overwhelming electoral victory, demanding tax cuts greater and more regressive than those he had outlined in the campaign. And despite what would seem to have been debilitating political weakness, the President shortly achieved this first success in "creating his own reality." To act as if he had overwhelming political power would mean he had overwhelming political power.
Republicans have assaulted Reality non-stop since Bush took office. A major focus of that assault has been aimed at stripping rhetorical power from certain institutions, creating negative connotations where none might have existed before, or at the very least reinforcing those connotations in the mind of the Anti-Reality Faithful.
In the post-Cold War world, after all, as one neo-conservative theorist explained shortly after 9/11, the United States was enjoying a rare "uni-polar moment." It deployed the greatest military and economic power the world has ever seen. It spent more on its weapons, its Army, Navy, and Air Force, than the rest of the world combined.
It was the assumption of this so-called preponderance that lay behind the philosophy of power enunciated by Bush's Brain and that led to an attitude toward international law and alliances that is, in my view, quite unprecedented in American history. That radical attitude is brilliantly encapsulated in a single sentence drawn from the National Security Strategy of the United States of 2003: "Our strength as a nation-state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes and terrorism." Let me repeat that little troika of "weapons of the weak": international fora (meaning the United Nations and like institutions), judicial processes (meaning courts, domestic and international), and.... terrorism. This strange gathering, put forward by the government of the United States, stems from the idea that power is, in fact, everything. In such a world, courts -- indeed, law itself -- can only limit the power of the most powerful state. Wielding preponderant power, what need has it for law? The latter must be, by definition, a weapon of the weak. The most powerful state, after all, makes reality.
I know without even asking him how my Republican friend would respond to the sentence cited in the above paragraph: "Absolutely right! " he would snort. "Courts are for losers!" This coming from a lawyer – but one who delights in strutting around the gym in a T-shirt that features a depiction of an aircraft carrier and the inscription, "90,000 tons of diplomacy".
Reality? That’s for losers. Or, as Prof. Danner so succinctly put it, in the world Republicans have created for themselves (and which is still inhabited by many Democrats in Congress),
Power has made reality its bitch.
(Also available at My Left Wing)
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