Hello, He Lied

We see it in every campaign. A little distortion of the opponent's record, a little manipulation of the statistics and poll results, a little demonization of an innocuous stance or, more often these days, an innocuous off-the-cuff comment.

But the 2000 and 2004 presidential races, under the guidance of Karl Rove, cleared the way for an ever-expanding snow boulder to make its way down the slippery slope: the bald faced lie.

In the 2000 Republican primary race, it was the Bush campaign's intimation that John McCain had a child with a *GASP* non-white woman (BTW, heads up, Senator Obama – I hear they have actual documented evidence that you've done the same thing). Played very well in South Carolina, which, as a state, is today finally seeing its reputation catch up to that of the U.S., circa 1965.

In the 2000 election, it was the same campaign trying to make Al Gore look like a cheating husband who lied under oath to the U.S. Congress and now continued to lie every time he opened his mouth. Gore's now-legendary misstatement about the advent of the Internet notwithstanding, his real crime was having been Bill Clinton's veep. (Just as an aside, can anyone recall Bush's year 2000 promise to restore honor and dignity to the White House without wanting to laugh and vomit simultaneously?)

In 2004, the unapologetic-lie-as-political-art-form reached its pinnacle with what we now casually call “swiftboating.” A heroic war veteran, a volunteer, no less, finds himself on the defensive against a bunch of tough-talking cowards who hid behind family connections to prevent themselves from ever having to go into harm's way. Why? Because he spoke out against the war he fought and the unnecessary war we're still fighting while the same cowards told lie upon lie to keep the latter war going strong and to continue enriching their cronies.

And, with apologies to Bread, if you're wondering what this song is leading to, I give you the apparent strategy of the 2008 Republican presidential campaign: truncate one of the opponent's policy goals to make it flat out untrue, have everyone in the party hammer the idea into everyone's head until it becomes widely accepted as fact, and then use it to cut down the opponent and make him sound like the enemy of capitalism, economic growth and plain common sense.

It goes like this.

After the shellac job McCain endured from the Bush campaign in 2000, back when Ben Stein was praising Dubya to the heavens for being “a decent, honest man,” you'd think the senator would seek to rise above the strategy of the bald faced lie. But alas, he's a politician, and he's a Republican, and naturally he just can't help himself. But we can.

We can show him that we don't believe it just because the right-wing smear machine pummels us with it on television and radio 386,597 times a day. We can go to his oh-so-democratic town hall meetings and call him and his party on their favorite lie.

When called on, we can simply ask, over and over, “Senator McCain, Senator Obama has said he wants to eliminate the upper class tax cuts President Bush introduced, and his puppet congress approved, in 2001, and he wants highly profitable corporations and the wealthiest 2 percent of individuals to start paying a little more of their fair share. Why, then, do you and nearly every Republican politician who can get airtime insist and telling the bald faced lie that, if he's elected, Senator Obama will raise everyone's taxes?”

I borrowed the title of today's entry from producer Lynda Obst's book about surviving and thriving in the Hollywood studio system. I never read the book, but from the time I first heard the title, I thought it was spot-on perfect to describe not Hollywood, but Washington in the new millennium. (It also went a long way in describing a lot of people I worked with, and for, at the time, but that's grist for a different mill.)

I don't truly believe that, if Obama wins the November election and the Dems hang on to both houses of Congress, honor and dignity, or even a consistent nod to honesty and straightforwardness, will make their way to ol' number 1600. But if not a mad rush to the best of our better angels, how about at least a determined charge away from the opposite end of the spectrum?

At noon next January 20, we will have endured eight solid years of contempt, corruption, polarization and outright lies from those entrusted to be the leaders of The United States of America and all of its citizens. Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Gonzales, Lott, DeLay and especially Cheney have all demonstrated time and again how capable they were of pure, venal hatred for all Americans, but especially those who disagreed with their method of democracy via propaganda-flooded tyranny.

We're stuck with the current administration until then, but it's time for anyone who may be involved with either of the two potential incoming administrations to just stop it.

Stop the contempt for anyone who speaks a disagreeable truth. Stop the blatant corruption that comes from lobbyists, perhaps the world's most self-interested individuals short of dictators, being top advisors on how to con the most votes and then serve the entire populace in a way that primarily serves their own interests. Stop the cynical polarization of 300 million people who all have to face the same collective obstacles.

And, to Senator McCain and his supporters, stop trumpeting from the mountaintops that Barack Obama wants to raise everyone's taxes. You know it's not true, even if there are plenty of voters willing to believe it. I promise there will be no glory in winning this election using any of Karl Rove's tactics. I, for one, will promise only to hate you and all you stand for throughout every minute of your administration. I will never hesitate to let you know how much I hate you, and I will never cease to do so. And I have a feeling I'm not alone.

I don't want to hate the next president, whoever he turns out to be. I want to support as many of his decisions as I'm able, in good conscience, to do so. And if it becomes necessary to declare war on a foreign nation that truly threatens our national security, I want to feel that it's a necessary action and that I can support the war and its aims. I want to support ideas that will revive the economy, reinforce our security and, ultimately, reunite us as citizens of a country we can cherish and be proud of, no matter our different ideas and ideals.

But for this to happen, we have to get beyond the fog of the worst president and worst administration in our country's history, and the candidates have to abandon the tactics that put them in power.

In simplest terms, to all sides: Just stop the lies.

How to Vote (pt. 2)

I want an elitist to be President. And if you're smart, so do you.

And if you're not smart, you're probably part of the reason we have our current President. You might've thought, “Here's a cool, down-to-earth guy, the kind of guy who speaks to me on my level, the kind of guy I'd like to sit down with and have a burger and a beer.” I don't drink beer – just never acquired a taste – but I have had a lot of burgers in my day with a lot of people. And a lot of them were nice people. Good people. Smart people. People with good ideas and valuable insights. But I can't say I'd ever want to see any of them elected president (or, alternatively, see them in a position to steal a presidential election from the person the voters elected).

And now, for seven years, five months, we've had a president who isn't an intellectual or academic elitist. Who isn't an ivory tower snob. Who isn't even that smart.

I guess it's good to have a leader who doesn't make you feel inferior, who gives you the chance to say to yourself, “I may screw things up a lot, but he's the leader of the free world, and he and his administration screw things up a lot worse and a lot more often, so I can feel better about myself.”

I'm kidding. It's not good. Frankly, it sucks. I want a president who's smarter than I am. A lot smarter. Someone who can take on problems I can't even conceive of and either solve them or at least treat the symptoms to an effective degree long before they have any adverse effects on my insignificant little life.

I know Hillary – sorry, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY – is out of the running (for now), but she’s largely to blame for the professed (disingenuously, from most circles) desire for a leader as poorly read, poorly informed, self-centered, ethnocentric and alcoholic as the rest of us.

Should Barack Obama have called rural small-town denizens “bitter” for their ionic bonds with guns and religion? Probably not. It was condescending and demeaning, and it pigeonholed a diverse populace by defining it exclusively by the stereotypes with which it’s most typically associated. And exceptions noted, that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Should we all try to deny that the fear of the unknown engendered by such an enormous segment of the voting public at large is pretty much the reason we got four more years of the worst leader in modern history? (Some still insist on saying President Bush was “re-elected” in 2004, but I maintain it’s impossible to be re-elected to a position when you were never elected to it in the first place.)

True, the current administration also pandered endlessly to that segment’s love of large phallic symbols that can inflict great damage (also not an unreasonable explanation for the explosion in sales of Hummers outside of the military, which is pretty much the only environment in which such vehicles are justified), as well as its need to have all of us believe the myths its members have had ingrained into them almost since birth and to further insist, the flood of evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that it’s what the founders wanted.

But cynical, weathered pols have pandered to these interests since some guy named “John Smith” took a room with a dark-skinned native teenager in pre-colonial Virginia half a millennium ago (and even with that black mark on his record he still got elected and never faced impeachment, although one wonders if that would’ve been the case had the Jamestown Post run headlines like “SMITH FACES POKEY FOR POKING POCA”). It still doesn’t account for the Republicans’ entire margin of victory in 2004.

No, by all accounts (i.e., polls of questionable accuracy), in spite of President Bush's already plummeting ratings 20 months into the War on Common Sen….uh, Terrorism, Karl Rove’s scorched-earth strategy of “Scare the facts right outta them hicks!” was what did it. Groups with names like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, launched by fatuous chickenhawks who never served a day, propagating a series of disgusting lies about a brave veteran candidate daring to run against our chickenhawk sitting president and VP, made it seem as though opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion meant a person was in favor of terrorists torturing and murdering our children in the village square. Their barrage of TV ads was meant not only to make us all forget the way the administration lied its way into a war with a country it just really had a hard-on to invade, but to make us believe that now that we were there, we were suicidal anti-Americans if we were foolish enough to elect a candidate who didn't want to stay there until the entire countryside was littered with the corpses of three generations of insurgents and their offspring (a strategy, by the way, that John McCain also seems eager to pursue).

And so, not too surprisingly, we got four more years of a leadership that never heard the expression, “When you're already in a hole, quit digging.” Or they've heard it but, much like news from the real world that doesn't jibe with their own masturbatory fantasy about how great a job they're doing, chose to pretend it didn't exist.

Fact is, if you're not in denial so deep you'll probably implode soon, you have to allow that things are pretty bad now. I won't belabor the discreet details, but the economy, the environment, foreign affairs, even the general public mood are all in bad shape. Maybe you voted for Bush in '04 because you genuinely believed he'd keep us safer. Maybe you learned something. But Bush and Cheney and their minions haven't. They never learn anything. Why? Because they know better. Or because they were right all along, and we mere voters just don't see it yet. Or because the President never, ever reads a newspaper or other current news publication, and all his briefings are filtered and censored to ensure he has no earthly idea how bad things are.

In other words, a completely different, but far more insidious, form of elitism. The elitism that says, “I don't have to face the harsh realities that have resulted from my endless flights of ego and other fancy.” The elitism that at one time denigrated opposing viewpoints and now just discounts them completely. The elitism that replaces “....of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this Earth” with “I'm the decider.” The elitism that by default grants “decider” power to the person with whom more people wanted to have a beer and a burger.

And all this elitism comes courtesy of a leader who would never, because he could never, aspire to intellectual elitist. Because he's simply not that smart.

Barack Obama worked hard throughout school and eventually earned a J.D. From Harvard Law School without having a well-connected family to pull any strings. He's worked in Chicago's inner city and studied the problems faced by the working class, and he's studied and appears eager to continue studying the economic and social problems facing all Americans (save for those whose biggest problems is getting those evil labor unions and commie tax legislators off their backs long enough to pick out a new yacht). And he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

John McCain was admitted to, and graduated from, the U.S. Naval Academy, feats that demonstrate exceptional academic, athletic and leadership prowess. He fought in a war and endured five years in a Vietnamese POW camp. He adhered to his principles in crafting legislation and fighting for support, even when it meant taking on his own party's very powerful interests. And he was elected four times to the U.S. Senate.

I support Obama over McCain for the presidency because I think he has better ideas on how to improve the economic and social problems facing the nation. Because he supports a woman's right to choose while McCain opposes it. Because he believes in equal rights for all Americans, regardless of sexual orientation, while McCain favors some limits on those rights based upon one's sexual orientation. And because I think Obama will make a better leader in the current national and global environments.

I don't want to have a beer and a burger with either man. Nor with the current occupant of the White House. And neither should any voter. We should want whoever becomes President to have his beers and burgers and cocktails and state dinners with domestic and foreign leaders and people with good, workable ideas on how to tackle and possibly even solve our macro problems, which in turn should lead to a better climate for most of us to tackle our individual problems. We should want the candidate who doesn't become President to go back to the senate and work just as hard and harder to legislate and implement the aforementioned ideas. And while I won't speak for anyone else, I want the current occupant of the White House and all his cronies to stand up in front of Congress and answer for all the lies they've told and all the abuses of power they've committed, to serve time in federal prison, and then to go back home and live out the rest of their years before they head for an eternity in the deepest level of hell.

Let's review what we have so far:

From part 1, think for yourself when you make your voting decisions.

From part 2, we'll likely survive the most egregious electoral mistake we as a nation have ever made, but let's learn from the mistake and never make it again.

And stay tuned for part 3.

How to Vote (part 1)

Here, once again this seemingly endless election season, is a hapless plea to all those capable of doing so to think for themselves. Listen to friends if it seems socially prudent, to the media if you must, and to the TV and radio bloviation generation if you've been constipated for quite some time and really need help clearing out your system (as always, I offer an alternative in the form of a thousand laxatives). But in the end, decide who you're going to vote for based upon two things, and only two things:

1) Given the current domestic and international environments that currently prevail and how I and/or people whose opinions I trust anticipate those environs will develop and change during the next four years, do I believe this person will make a good leader of the United States?

2) Given that this person will have an extraordinary amount of power, to influence national legislation, to issue short-term executive orders that can have a dramatic effect on my life and the lives of those around me, and to appoint federal court and Supreme Court judges who can interpret the U.S. Constitution in ways that can have a dramatic and indefinite effect on my life and the lives of those around me, do I agree with this person's stances on various issues that I deem important, and can I trust this person to adhere to his/her stances and act accordingly?

Much as you may be tempted, you're going to want to avoid following the media blitz of jumping on every regrettable comment or misstatement (or deliberate misinterpretation thereof) made by any of the candidates. Regardless of their respective strengths and weaknesses, the three front runners are irrefutably human, and when pontificating in public 20-30 times a week for a year and a half, any human is going to make a gaffe, and likely several.

While I can't confirm this for certain, I'd be comfortable making the following assumptions:

-John McCain does not actually want to keep 130,000 U.S. troops stationed in Iraq continuously through the year 2103;

-Hillary Clinton does not believe she faced the same magnitude of danger during her visit to Bosnia as a commissioned soldier;

-Barack Obama does not agree with every statement the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has ever uttered (I'd be inclined to believe no one agrees with everything ever said by the spiritual leader of his/her church, synagogue, stake, mosque, etc., and I'd be far more worried about anyone who does so than I would about some inconsequential, hate-spewing bloviator who reaches a couple thousand Chicagoans from a local pulpit once a week);

-Michelle Obama, having reached legal adulthood in 1982, has not hated or been ashamed of the United States every moment, or even a majority of the moments, of the last 26 years.

Try to keep this somewhere at the forefront of your mind: all humans are irredeemably imperfect. Jesus Christ, at least to Christians, was as close to perfect as a human ever came, and he ain't on the ticket this year. And if he were, you know darn well the media and the Democratic surrogates would be all over him for his frequent interaction with a known prostitute, while the Republican mouthpieces would lambast him as not conservative enough because, while he was a religious conservative and staunchly pro-Israel, he was also reportedly a liberal when it came to social welfare (and he well may be the last person who honestly achieved this dichotomy).

Of course, were the aforementioned savior to return to earth tomorrow, it would still take too long for the 38 state legislatures to ratify an amendment to the Constitution allowing someone who is not a natural born citizen of the United States to run for president. And then there's the whole issue of his being Middle Eastern, which means you know damn well he'd be profiled every time he tried to board a plane, a pretty glaring inconvenience when you're trying to campaign across roughly three-and-a-half million square miles. Still, the prospect seems unlikely; launching a grass roots presidential campaign this late in the game would be almost as crazy as telling people you're Jesus Christ himself.

So that leaves McCain, Clinton and Obama, as well as a handful of third-party sacrificial lambs whom the press will give the opportunity to make statements for their respective causes.

Now as always, there will be those who will point out the flaws in my argument, the most glaring of which is the inherent paradox: if you tell me to think for myself, and I do so because I followed your advice, then which am I actually doing? For you, I offer the obvious out: Vote for Obama. Because I said so. Baa-a-a-a-a!!!

{to be continued}

{like it or not}

{and don’t blame me – it takes more than one neglected blog to change a system that would drive M.C. Escher into an asylum}