I love war! Don't you?

It's obvious I need to look into more news sources than cnn.com. I seem to miss the really wretched stuff.

From Molly Ivins's column of 23 October:

"...there was something so sad about the episode last week in which it was discovered that 500 letters had been sent to American newspapers in the names of serving soldiers without their knowledge or permission. That's not so much horrific as it is low."

There is something eerily familar about all this. Lies piling on lies, increasingly desperate attempts to prop up support for an increasingly unpopular war and to cover up burgeoning scandals in the White House. Richard Nixon and his cronies did this with more class.

The parallels of the wars do not bother me as the aftermath of the wars. The end of the Vietnam War left a entire country emotionally exhausted, cynical, and contemptuous of the government. The low treatment of those who served in Vietnam has led to a situation where our current Prez (and previous ones) can slash veterans' benefits and programs with nary a protest from the public. We were so accustomed to hearing lies from the government, we expected them, no matter who was the source. We became addicted to them; we began to elect people with better lies than their opponents. Jimmy Carter was our last honest president, and we tossed him out on his ass the second we had the chance.

Overall, the American people do not want honesty in their leaders. It's too depressing, too earnest, and frequently dull. Reagan's defeat over Carter in 1980 and his subsequent trashing of Mondale proved this. We don't want the truth; we want lies we can rally around, lies that make us feel cozy and safe. If we really wanted honesty in our leaders, do you really think Bush would be our president? No. Gore? No. We would have voted for Nader. Or McWilliams. Even Buchanan would have been a more honest pick than the two major candidates.

There are signs of change in this attitude. People aren't outraged with the lies; they're merely tired of them. It's like watching the same rerun over and over. Nowadays, the truth isn't some ideal but something that actually sounds refreshing and new. Who knows where it will lead to in next year's elections.

For now, however, the Lie is The Word. Illusions are exciting and positive; the truth is neither. So if soldiers write letters to newspapers without knowing they did so, what's the big deal? As long as we can wrap the lies around us and pretend we feel all warm inside, we don't have fret about the cold, hard truth: the blanket of lies costs plenty, and the first item we'll have to hock is our democracy.

Comments

[Myke]

The administration doesn't just act like Nixon cronies; they *are* Nixon cronies. Cheney and Rumsfeld, among others, held high positions in Nixon's administration. From the start, Bush has followed a plan of saying nice things and then doing something dirty. I think the most egregious example was his press conference to announce the "Clear Skies" initiative: he praised the Clean Air Act, but his misleadingly-named Clear Skies plan would gut it and roll back its progress. And he made his announcement at a power plant that had been penalized multiple times for environmental violations.
The latest one on the wires is that the "Mission Accomplished" banner he posed under last May on an aircraft carrier off the coast of Iraq was put up by the crew of the ship, so he can't be responsible for it. This, after nearly 6 months of trying to spin the meaning various ways, and convince the world that really it will just be a few days until we're done mopping up the last of Saddam's henchmen.
The Bush presidency depends on the American people listening to nice words and not really paying attention. Whether or not this works remains to be seen.

[Myke]

p.s. www.salon.com runs various wire service releases that you can read for free. Their choice of what to run shows an obvious left-wing slant, but you'll see stories that CNN never runs.

[The Lizmeister]

Did you read that article that Fox almost sued itself because of a parody of Fox News on "The Simpsons"? I don't know why I'm mentioning it, but it seems fitting. Plus, it's funny as hell.