Cheney and Bush -- Words, Words, Words

[DaveT]

Our little anthill on the left side of cyberspace has been kicked over again as first Cheney then Bush have done it again -- this time putting forward the proposition that the President and the Vice President are not part of the Executive Branch of Government. There are several threads here at DU citing the appropriate legal references with venting both comic and grave. More than a few posters have parsed the logic of this latest line of bullshit and exclaimed "A HA! -- now we got them where we want 'em! If they aren't members of the Executive Branch, then -- as a matter of logic -- they can't claim Executive Privilege!"

I am sorry to say that most of the responses I've seen just depress me even further -- even Will Pitt's beautifully written and hilarious screed.

Why? Because this is nothing new. Not remotely. It is how these guys have operated ever since Florida 2000. Do you remember Jim Baker's pompous and sarcastic message? He said that a human being cannot be trusted to look at a ballot and give an honest assessment of what she had in her hand. Her "bias" would interfere with her sense of objectivity. For that reason, he claimed that machine counting was the only way to get a fair result in an election.

Baker was un-fazed by the fact that Governor George Walker Bush had signed into law a Texas statute that required the hand counting of ballots in a close election recount. His dead serious aura of absolute certainty simply ignored the contradiction -- a classic example of that was then; this is now.

You could see the same method at work on both ends of the Baker formulation. Facts do not exist -- there is only the power to declare something to be a fact. The ballot counters had the power to determine the outcome of an election by substituting their bias for their sense of objectivity. He claimed that this tendency was inherent to the human condition.

He then turned around and applied his own doctrine to the question of the Texas statute. Instead of it being a fact that demonstrated his own hypocrisy and the fraudulence of his argument in favor of machine counting, he simply ignored it, because he had the power to do so.

This is an incredibly radical doctrine -- that facts are what you choose them to be. And it has been applied again and again and again since Florida: the non-specific warning about Osama bin Laden attacking within the United States; the weapons of mass destruction; the notion that enhanced interrogation techniques are not torture; the idea that the Commander in Chief can ignore the Acts of Congress and the Constitution; and overhanging it all, the original absurd assertion that we are at "war." All elaborations on the theory expounded by Baker -- that power determines reality.



So here we are in early summer 2007 -- and we are shocked, shocked to see bullshit coming from these serial liars.

Now is a good time to go back and review one of the most telling quotes to come from the Bush Administration -- the famous line about how the Bush Administration lives apart from the "reality based community." It was printed originally in a long New York Times piece that appeared just before the 2004 election. Here is the quote, along with the paragraphs that came before and after the infamous taunt:


http://www.cs.umass.edu/~immerman/play/opinion05/WithoutADoubt.html

Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND


In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

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.''

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: ''Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you.'' When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ''Look, I'm not going to debate it with you.

You cannot debate with someone who refuses to respect the idea of objective reality. These guys just make it up as they go along. If you think you have them pinned by the logic of today's lie about them not being in the Executive Branch, all you have done is set yourself up for another derisive horse laugh.

What is at stake remains the same thing that was at stake in Florida. The hard core of the modern neo-conservative brain trust realized that demographic changes in America have upended the Nixon/Wallace/Reagan coalition's ability to dominate electoral politics. People of color allied with the white liberal minority in America can now win elections and the current corporate stranglehold on the Multi-Trillion Dollar gravy train called the Federal Government is at grave risk.

So now we live in a world where the fact of who won an election is no longer a function of who got more votes -- it is now a question of how you count a ballot. The fact of what a law requires is no longer a function of what words written down on paper mean -- it is a function of who says what the law means. Today's truth means nothing tomorrow as they go on to create another reality.


How can this have happened? How could a nihilistic theory hatched by smart-assed French intellectuals called "deconstructionism" become the driving force for American government?

At the heart of this unprecedented crisis is the bamboozlement of Christians. Susskind's article goes on at length to discuss how the Bush contempt for fact based thinking resonates with the GOP base:

In the series of televised, carefully choreographed ''Ask President Bush'' events with supporters around the country, sessions filled with prayers and blessings, one questioner recently summed up the feelings of so many Christian conservatives, the core of the Bush army. ''I've voted Republican from the very first time I could vote,'' said Gary Walby, a retired jeweler from Destin, Fla., as he stood before the president in a crowded college gym. ''And I also want to say this is the very first time that I have felt that God was in the White House.'' Bush simply said ''thank you'' as a wave of raucous applause rose from the assembled.

Think about this notion for a moment: God is in the White House. God does not care about facts or logic. God says I am that I am -- and does whatever He pleases.

Luckily a good 70% of America can see the difference between the GOP and the Lord of Hosts. But until we get clarity about what we are up against, this farce will be repeated again and again -- and long after January of 2009.

Al Gore's latest book is aimed at this problem. I believe he will run for President, but whether he does or not -- it is up to us to put an end to this regime of Rule By Bullshit.

And you don't beat bullshit by arguing with it. Don't forget the lesson of Monty Python's Parrot Sketch:

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~ebarnes/python/dead-parrot.htm

[acmavm]

1. Take a look at our illustious representatives in the House and the Senate

Except for Kucinich and five or six of his comrades, the rest refuse to do what's right for the country.

Why? Because then they would be thrown out of the club of the corporate choses 'rulers' of America in the 21st century. Once upon a time we had reps who would fight for us, lay it out and lay it on the line.

Now we've got secret deal makers and enablers. And a f**king public that finds it easier to ignore the situation than it is to do their duty. And it's gotten so bad that it's not just a duty to the country, it is a duty to the world. Because these bastards are killing people not only in this country. That's not new either, of course (see The School of the Americas). But blatantly lying to invade a foreign country and to occupy it is.

[tbyg52]

2. *God* says I am that I am -- and does whatever He pleases....?

I thought that was * !

[BadGimp]

3. excellent post

This is what makes DU a community..

[enough]

4. "You don't beat bullshit by arguing with it." This reminds me of one of the first rules

you learn when dealing with a person with Alzheimer's/dementia.

The rule is that you cannot reason with, argue with, or convince a person with Alzheimer's of anything. This is very difficult to learn, because all of our conditioning tells us that if we can come up with enough good reasons for something, and explain it clearly enough, the person will see the light.

But with dementia, that process no longer works. You have to come up with various alternative methods of communication and direction. This may be the same thing we are dealing with in our larger society. Thanks for pointing this out, DaveT.

[sicksicksick_N_tired]

5. I'll never forget that, "we create reality" quote. I knew we were living under a dictatorship when,

,...I heard that. Moreover, this arrogant, despotic lot are worse,...they are GLOBAL dictators,...or rather seek to be.

You're right. It doesn't matter what the facts or logic. They will ALWAYS twist both to their OWN design without regard to the practical implication that, in so doing, they are monstrous criminals.

[DaveT]

6. Self Kick

I have been posting various applications of this insight for years on this and other boards, and almost never does it get much in terms of response. I guess it is a little on the vague and abstract side as it tries to tie together the whole Bush package into a single idea -- the proposition that there is no objective reality.

Nevertheless, I still believe that very few Americans have thought through what it means to deal with people who don't care about objective reality.