Repeating Lies Can Make Them Truth
Back to the subject of Bushian denial of the old, bad world outside, it appears that, even though the maxim above does not properly exist as a "truism," it could well apply to the Bushians. With the onset of the Iraq war we were repeatedly told that the evidence that "weapons of mass destruction" was irrefutable, and that once Iraq was invaded that we knew exactly knew where to look for them. There is no question that these weapons would be found, and that Saddam Hussein would be exposed as a major trafficker in global terrorism. And this would justify our effort.
Of course, the weapons of mass destruction were never found in the months to come after we invaded. It is unlikely that Iraq would’ve been able to dismantle and destroy them all in the time it took between the subject first was first briached in congress (just after Afghanistan was "pacified" and the Taliban destroyed) and our entry into Iraq. In England the lack of WMD’s was a major issue in parliament and led to the loss of confidence in the Prime Minister in both the governing body and his own political party. But in the United States the Bush Administration pressed on, insisting the WMDs would be found. When it became obvious that there was nothing to find, we were told that the point was ultimately irrelevant and that the world was a safer place, since Saddam Hussein was now out of power. At one point Donald Rumsfeld even publicly mused that he didn’t recall anyone in the Administration insisting that the WMDs would be present, as if their initial justification for going into Iraq never existed.
Many have expressed weariness with the whole topic expressed in the last paragraph, but I have introduced it as it is a direct example of another Bushian maxim: Lying is good if it justifies the means to an end. Pollsters working in the wake of the Bush’s re-election stated that "values" were the main reason that so many Americans voted for Bush. Are these the kinds of values that you teach you children? I teach my daughter that lying is wrong, and the best way to undo the harm a lie creates is to tell (and to accept) the truth and to face up to the consequences. I do not teach my daughter to just keep on repeating the lie until it seems like the truth and then engage in actions to cover her tracks.
Which "values" do you hold dear? How is the moral character of a compulsive liar held in higher regard than that of man whose proclivity towards the truth is yet untried? It is only so if you believe the lie.
Another lie sold with impunity to the American public in the wake of the election was the notion that the country was terribly divided and that the President needed to take steps to "bring the country back together." The lie was not in that this was so, but in the President’s public acceptance of this notion. Get real – that lasted only about five minutes. It was Bush’s intention all along to split the country along lines of controversial issues, particularly on the paper tiger that was gay marriage. In many to most states, measures against gay marriage were already on the books, and in ten states ballot initiatives were introduced to toughen further still the language against gay marriage. These initiatives mostly passed, although go so far that they tread on constitutional guarantees in most states and likely won’t survive the Court of Appeals.
These measures were a useless waste of money, the time and effort of the electorate, and the courts. But they did their job; they made it look like under a Democratic president that somehow gay marriage would become the law of the land.
Divide et impera. Divide and conquer. This country is now more divided than it has been at any time since 1860.
Uncle Dave Lewis
(there's more to come...)