The Separate Reality:
…and besides, unlike the wife, I’ve never gotten through his works.
Regular readers will note that the tags I put on posts are plentiful and sometimes sound goofy; that may be because it’s conceptual shorthand to me. ‘kubler-ross’, ‘renmin’, or ’sep_reality’, for example. The first has to deal with posts on death and dying, the second has to deal with the corruptions of the Chinese Communist Party system, and the last has to do with who think they can make up their own reality as they go along, and has most pointedly been used against George W Bush and his pals for this sort of thing:
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.” … “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.
I have studied this at length. Maybe it’s because of my love of understanding The Big Picture, maybe my love of historical alternates, my love of politics, or a number of allied areas. Certainly, it’s from my deep dislike of people’s approaches to life that involve huge amounts of denial and fantasy to avoid things. I can understand a little of it; but I’ve seen too many that let it take over their lives.
The central component of the Bushian approach is to use propaganda, PR and control of the methods and means of communication to build up a shining concept of what they’re doing that will ensure, as my grandmother would have put it, that ‘their $h!t don’t stink’. If someone calls you on it, pull out the blackjacks (metaphorically speaking) and either pressure them into silence or drown them out in loud catcalls.
Of course, the problem with this approach is that such people are sure of their situation, sure that they’re going to get away with whatever, and will scrap to the end to push it. They are not terribly interested in doing something for the public good, but for the good of their bloc of supporters and their internal safety net, and loyalty to The Vision, whatever the party line happens to be today, is paramount.
Which means that while they can and will hire good, expensive lawyers to throw at you as necessary, anyone inside that group tends to have a poor and unclear notion about what’s *really* going on. Competence isn’t important if loyalty is, and having your internal idea that the world is supposed to work this way because the party line requires it will blind you to the oncoming truck on your side of the road.
Another element here is that you can’t deal with Bad News. You don’t admit that it exists. If the house is on fire because you were smoking in bed, you can either deny that the dropped cigarette and lighter caused it, or blame it on an outside plot, or deny that the house is on fire at all.
It’s a funny sort of morale thing. Bush has said over and over that he doesn’t admit to mistakes except in the most empirical manner possible, and admitting defeat openly would cause everyone in Bushco, troops, whatever, to lose hope in the greater vision, so you don’t admit that either. There’s no recession coming, no oil crisis, no failures in Iraq, no nothing. Unless he can figure out a way to blame it on the people he opposes.
When it was pointed out that drilling in the coastal regions and ANWR would not produce any extra oil for many years, and not much at that, McCain said - well, yeah, but the psychological impact of knowing that that oil would be on the way someday would cause everything to be all right in the oil markets now, so it’s the only answer to the crisis. (Bush has said that sort of thing tons of times before, as if believing that there’s no crisis will fix things.)
Going over McCain’s campaign stuff, it’s obvious that there’s a major disconnect in what he says to which people. The only things that seem to be constant are re-iterations of Bush’s policies - which he gives to red-meat Bush followers.
To the rest, he throws out references to his older stands in an oblique ‘trust me, you know I’m a good guy maverick’ manner that leans on his 2000 race. But if you start trying to pin him down to specific policies, especially ‘what do you do to fix Bush’s mess’ or ‘how do you differ from Bush’, the specifics vanish. Everything becomes very vague or aspirational (”I’d like to have the war over by 2013″ ) with no plan as to how you get there.
Even how he intends to maintain the burden of the tax cuts (and more tax cuts) and the war and whatnot is vague. He keeps going on about cutting pork, but so did Bush, and it sure didn’t happen.
Solving any problem becomes a matter of applying message control. Tell the EPA you don’t want to read their email that says CO2 needs to be regulated. Set up a photo-op but neglect to send help. Deregulate to ‘get the government off the backs of business’ to the point that business can do anything it wants - put out contaminated food and drugs, inflate the price of oil, you name it.
Right now, hearings are going on where the the regulators of oil and other commodities are admitting they haven’t a clue as to what’s the ‘real’ price of oil or how much the commodity traders and hedge funds have pushed the prices into the stratosphere. Part of it is that they’ve been told at the highest levels and through controls placed on them by Bush and McCain (such as the ‘Enron loophole’) that they’re not really supposed to regulate or enforce the regulations in any meaningful way, so why should they keep that close track of things?
But the real situation comes back to bite at the worst times.
Spend no money on government programs that don’t include sizable rakeoffs for your supporters…and borrow rather than tax. If you can endlessly spend and borrow more, who cares about paying it off someday?
But no money for vital infrastructure, and roads, bridges, canals, levees, dams and whatnot fall apart. No money for education, and the level of the schools goes to hell.
Ignore the injured and damaged warriors, and you don’t have to spend any money on the saps that bought the part about ‘fighting for freedom’ while you gut the Constitution and let your pals get rich from war profiteering. Ignore the hurricanes and the floods and the damage therefrom and have your battier supporters blame it on God’s Wrath that we don’t toast faggots over an open fire and let them Parade In The Streets - rather than spend money on the little guy.
This isn’t Republicanism. This isn’t Conservativism. This is just blind greed and a sloppy, stupid will to power. This is ’screw-you-jack-I-got-mine’ at its worst.
And there’s a very good chance that people are seeing through this because it’s gotten pretty damn obvious enough that they can’t run the country anywhere but into the ground. Now, if we can just keep people from going on about Flag pins or who-knows-Osama-might-kill-you-if-you-don’t-vote-for-us out of the airwaves and people’s heads, we may actually get a Congress and a President interested in straightening out this mess. And since McCain is not interested in bucking the real Bushco system, his only way through is to (as Charlie Black, his campaign manager said the other day and McCain himself has said in 2004 and the more recent past that) think that a real terrorist attack will be a huge boon to the campaign.
Or if it isn’t coming, scare people into believing it might, and that a black guy with an ay-rab name might just join in and show his deep moo-slim self.
Some issues-oriented campaign.