Now we face a similarly outrageous meme: The Democrats started the Iraq war. Alas, this idea -- like "intelligent design," Milton Friedmanism, "CD" theories of 9/11, the Roswell crash, Left Behind and a host of other bizarre notions -- has taken hold of the American imagination.
The most important piece of the day is by a DU journal writer named McCamy Taylor. I'll take the liberty of quoting large chunks:
Ever since Karl Rove declared to the world (and Republicans hurried to get in line with the Big Lie) that Senate Democrats were really responsible for the 2003 invasion of Iraq by forcing the war resolution vote before they left session in the fall of 2002 (for political purposes), the Republican Party and its minions in the corporate media have been working hard to portray the War in Iraq as a Democratic War.Even Randi Rhodes, bless her, understands that last point. Unfortunately, most progs do not.
On TV, we have seen Chris “Tweety” Matthews, good little General Electric employee and John McCain water carrier discuss Hillary Clinton’s personal culpability, while muttering the phrase “Democratic War”, presumably for subliminal effect. We have seen Freepers, disguised as Obama posters, accusing Hillary of single handedly planning the war, launching the ships, feeding W. the lies and planting the IEDs. We have even seen real Democrats get behind Karl Rove and claim that this is now a Democratic War, because they do not have the 60 Senate votes necessary to overcome a filibuster or presidential veto and they do not trust Bush to protect the troops should they defund the war.
Given the Madness of King George, should they call a showdown over Iraq by withholding money, it is quite possible that he would keep troops on the ground and simply cut off supplies, gambling that by the time the first soldiers began to fall, Congress would have bowed to public pressure to supply funds, which can be done more readily than troops can be withdrawn.
Google “Hillary’s War” and you get over 7000 hits. People who despise Hillary are probably happy. Google “Democratic War in Iraq” and you get almost 4000 hits, most of them recent, many from DU. That should make no one happy, except all the Republicans getting in line behind John McCain.Precisely. Precisely.
John McCain’s biggest weakness is his loyalty to Bush and his well known “100 years of war” statement. The only way he can defeat the Democrats this fall is by convincing the American public that the war which Bush-Cheney-Rice-Powell lied about and which Congressional Dems tried to end as soon as they got a majority but which Congressional Republicans supported with filibusters is a Democratic War . The twisted reasoning behind this Big Lie is that Republicans always want to start wars (sometimes for no reason) and God or the Founders invented the two party system so that Democrats could serve as a check on their hawkish brothers to prevent them from rushing into war. If the nation went into an unnecessary war, it is because Democrats took their eyes off the ball . Republicans were just doing their job. Think Good World’s Cop, Bad World’s Cop.
And what happens when this becomes a Democratic War? Then McCain says “I’m a military man. I know how to end it.”
Every time partisan politicos at DU (or some Freeper posing as a partisan politico) claim that this is Hillary’s War or Edward’s War or any other Democrat’s War, they are shooting the Democratic Party in the foot. The Clintons inevitably counter that Obama’s position is not so different from Hillary’s, given their near identical voting records on funding, which means another round of bird shot between the toes.
Skinner and (to a lesser extent) Kos should be ashamed of themselves: Their sites have become important cogs within the grand mechanism of Republican propaganda.
And I'm not just talking about the battle for 2008. I'm talking about the battle to rewrite history.
Am I the only one who recalls how Reagan, shortly after his election to the presidency, brazenly lied about the origins of the Vietnam war, which he called "a noble cause"? Did you ever think you would live to see the day when a highly-publicized book by a well-known pundit tried to rehabilitate Joe McCarthy? Do you realize how many millions of Americans bought into the widely-heard propaganda line blaming 9/11 on Bill Clinton?
Twenty, forty, fifty years from now your grandchildren will crack open a history textbook and read about how those awful, awful Clintons saddled George W. Bush with a war he did not want to fight.
And who knows...? If the ideological tides shift and the evangelical right reverts back to its traditional anti-Semitism, your grandchildren may also read about how the Jews started World War II.
(Note: To increase readability, I added paragraph breaks to the first quote.)
5 comments:
joe, this point is so badly in need of exposure. in fact, we need to pound the fact of it repeatedly. that's one piece of their 'fixing' reality push; they know that if you repeat something enough, it will become reality. may as well be the truth we're repeating.
reading over your quotes and references, i could not help but be reminded of the deep pathologies this problem exposes. any individual will try to rewrite their 'reality', and get away with it, to one degree or another.
the whole thing, though, is so reminiscent of the rewrites we see in clinical settings of domestic and drug abusers. i know i've mentioned this experience in these comments before, likely long ago, but during training i saw a couple whose daughter had been sexually abused for years...by the father!
needless to say, the wife/mother was sick with fury and confusion, and vacillated between the divorce/homicide end of the spectrum to the reconciliation/recovery end. i don't know how it turned out for them (my rotation ended), but the specific incident i'll never forget was one when mother confronted him so directly, spewing her daughter's accusations at him and demanding to know how he could have done such a thing.
instead of responding directly to her, he turned to me and my supervisor (who was male; the rat spent more eye contact with me, however); he wanted to present to us his 'reality', his 'truth', in order to be validated. he either did not care about his wife's feelings or opinions, or he knew he could not 'reason' with her in that state of mind, or he felt he could deal with her in his customary way when they got back in the familiar comfort of their home setting.
(i feel it important here for everyone to draw their own analogies to the current state of political affairs; you don't see bush trying to convince the iraqi people of the importance of our staying there, for example, nor do you see him talking to the poor to convince them (us!) of the need for the rich to have permanent tax cuts. no, he goes to the press and the faceless masses who must be convinced in order for him to feel he's done what's expected of him. but he doesn't really care about anyone's opinion, in the long run.)
in any case, i'd give anything if i had transcribed this man's little speech, because it was shockingly unbelievable. here was this guy who had slithered into his daughter's bedroom almost every night for six years and forced himself on her, threatening to tell her mother, her priest, her grandparents that she'd initiated it if she told anyone. he even told her god would deny her if she told!
and in the face of these (likely) facts, he presented himself as the victim, knowing it was 'wrong', but he didn't do this with malice or hurtfulness, but with love, and surely we could all see how much he loved his daughter and his wife. he was misunderstood, and so was his darling daughter, who had just allowed herself to become so unraveled over such a small intimate matter.
(analogies again: after being forced to admit that we have tortured detainees, in the process threatening and retaliating against any number of reporters and lawyers who have chosen the truth, bush's henchman bradbury tells us we don't torture, but it's really necessary, and besides it's not like the spanish inquisition but more like khmer rouge, but we really love our country and do this in order to save us from those who would hurt us and rob us of our way of life, which presumably includes freedom from fear of torture and all it represents. 'scuse me while i try to unscramble my haid.)
at first they guy came off like those insurance salesmen who sit on the edge of your sofa with their elbows on knees spread wide, head ducking low and bobbing like a turtle's, eyes - forced by this stance - to look upward in an almost imploring manner, hands open to the skies as if to catch any mercy thrown his way. 'please, you really must buy this policy/story, not just for the sake of your children, but for the sake of mine.'
but the more he talked, the more incredulous his wife, my supervisor, and i became. we stiffened with disbelief, and then with horror, as it became clear just how dangerous he had become; he'd pretty near lost complete touch with reality.
before the hour was up, he trailed off into some pathetic hypocrisy, and any shred of sympathy any of us might have ever had for him vaporized into dark pity. and i think he could tell.
all that to make this point: these pubic political rewrites are indications that (1) these people know the truth and fear deeply it won't set them free, but imprison them; they know on some level they're culpable, yet they're also so pathological they don't know anything else but lying to try to rid themselves of shame. And (2) these folks are not just running from shame, they're desperate; these are the rants of the desperate abuser, be the abuse internally with drugs or externally toward others.
because they have for so long abandoned all manner of human decency, they have lost any skills for knowing the truth, much less addressing it.
so where does that leave us? it's not enough to just sit on our high horses and watch them destroy every notion of honesty and decency there is. we actually have to DO something about it. and you're right, we canNOT follow the extremist prog lead and become just the flip side of this same pathological coin. the one thing these extremist progs do not exhibit is foresight, nor is insight wasted on them, either. they fail to see both the similarities between their enemies and themselves, as well as the damage they're doing to everyone in the wake of their tirades.
and intolerance of lies does not mean we dispense with compassion for those who tell them; these folks really are really sick, all of them. people tell lies like this because they are deeply afraid.
we'll get much further if we can keep this in mind when we are attempting to persuade them back into the light.
At least one clever poster at DU—whose screenname escapes me at the moment—is now using a cartoon rendering of a guy shooting himself in the foot as the avatar for his posts. It's not exactly cause to jump and sing, but I smiled when I noticed it yesterday.
Joseph,
Thank you so much for your writing on topics that are of great interest to me. It is a regular part of my research and educational diet, and I so appreciate how you distance yourself from the usual media pundits' and bloggers' habits of plagiarizing each other for their attempts at substance.
In William Gibson's most recent book one of the characters made a comment something to the effect that "America is suffering from a national case of Stockholm Syndrome." Yeah, maybe so. Why else would Dems/progs waste time in pissing matches with each other in the horse race while the Repugnicans stand shoulder to shoulder on every major issue? Why would the Dems/progs elected to office (presumably) to change the status quo continue to cross over and side with their abusers in the legislative and executive branches?
(Don't even get me started with Gay or Black Republicans.)
As to "rewriting reality": My belief and observation is that the majority of Americans alive today have been systematically lied to from the day they were born (and of course never exposed to the disciplines of critical thinking or questioning authority.) I'm not a psychiatrist, but that seems like a prescription for schizophrenia.
And when lies are the main substance of your brain's diet, the path of least resistance for most people is to believe any Big Whopper that comes along rather than truth of any size.
One clear result is that events and rhetoric and opinion that logic alone should expose as faulty and implausible are instead quickly accepted as facts.
Thus it seems that no matter what horrible offense is committed against the American public (and the rest of the world), we as a people invent some ridiculous and implausible reason to excuse those offenses.
And so, not ignoring the many shades of grey in between, we are shaped into a people today divided not into red vs. blue, nor progressive vs. conservative, but pollyannish ignorance vs. pure evil (both led by their delusional variants.)
In a Rovian and Bushian and Cheneyan and PNACian sense the value of these divisions is clearly lucrative, and is cultivated and promoted for the benefit of the plutocracy. (For heavens sake, the head of Homeland Security has endorsed Obama!) And so "progressives" (apparently scared to identify themselves as "liberals") are being led into the perfect defeat scenario once again. Have they forgotten that old chestnut that the Road to Hell is paved with good intentions?
As Liberals (Webster's dictionary definition: "A person who favors a political philosophy of progress and reform and the protection of civil liberties.") we've been insulted and kicked and beaten and raped and robbed and murdered for subscribing to the very same concepts that led the Colonists to rebel against King George and found this country. As I recall, it required a Revolution to break free.
My dear pollyannish "progressive" citizens, that kind of change isn't going to come by waving signs at rallies once every 4 years. We're in dire straits, and there is no magical superhero who is going to save us. Only We The People can do it, and we'd better get informed and act quickly. We must stand together and insist on our rights or hand them over to our abusers on the silver plate of our enslaved backs.
It is interesting to note that an international statesman, Allied leader, and later a Nobel Laureate in Literature, awarded in part because of his six volume memoir of the second world war, himself alleged that it was crossing the international bankers that indeed caused Hitler's troubles and sealed his doom.
It's right there in the first couple pages of one or another of these memoir volumes, wherein the author describes the Hitlerian/Hjelmar Schact (sp?) economic scheme as disassociating Germany from the international banking lending and debt incursion racket, in favor of a nationally issued currency, not borrowed from the int'l bankers, but issued against the productivity of the German worker and workplace.
It was this act that 'sealed his doom,' or 'made the war inevitable,' some kind of description of that sort. (I've only found this source once, and I cannot relocate it now despite significant searching).
The author? Probably gave it away with so much description above, but in case you didn't guess it, one Winston Churchill.
...sofla
this.bull() said: - As to "rewriting reality": My belief and observation is that the majority of Americans alive today have been systematically lied to from the day they were born (and of course never exposed to the disciplines of critical thinking or questioning authority.) I'm not a psychiatrist, but that seems like a prescription for schizophrenia. -
In practice, how can the majority be lied to but not everyone? Maybe you mean 'the majority' believe the lies, while a minority don't? Your sentiments echo some of Plato's (Allegory of the Cave), and the records don't go back much further than that in non-poetic style.
Up to the time he died, Marshall McLuhan had been researching the links between phonetic literacy and schizophrenia (a notion he wondered about in "The Gutenberg Galaxy") and got very serious about when psychologists began mapping and mining the brain's hemispheres.
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