George W. Bush is enjoying his post-RNC bounce, but I can't for the life of me figure out why. Surely, I keep hoping, thinking people will see what a house of cards Our Sainted President and his Vice-President built during their acceptance speeches. Apparently, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but it's much easier to try and fool everyone ALL the time. WHY? Because, from where I sit, most Americans simply rather react than think.
The Manichaean Candidate sees the world only in terms of good and evil, black and white.
He scorns gray, nuance, complexity, context, changing circumstances and inconvenient facts. Real men make their own reality....
The Manichaean Candidate's convention was a brazen bizarro masterpiece. The case to sack John Kerry featured the same shady tactics used to build the case to whack Saddam - cherry-picked facts, selective claims and warped contexts.
W. took a page from Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Total Recall," a futuristic movie about inserting fully formed memories into the minds of unsuspecting victims.
The president and vice president ignored all the expert evidence now compiled indicating no link between 9/11 and Saddam, and no Saddam threat to U.S. security. After talking about "the fanatics who killed some 3,000 of our fellow Americans," Dick Cheney boasted: "In Iraq, we dealt with a gathering threat, and removed the regime of Saddam Hussein."
Though the convention mythologized Mr. Bush's bullhorn moment at ground zero, there was no mention of Osama, the fiend W. vowed to catch that day. The speakers did not acknowledge the brutal spiral in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the re-emergence of the Taliban, now finding sanctuary with our ally, Pakistan.
Mr. Cheney, king of hooey, bragged about a "Taliban driven from power," even though just as the convention got under way, at least seven people, including two Americans, were killed by Taliban fighters in Kabul....
The $445 billion deficit? Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney erased it. In their inside-out universe, the economy is blossoming, there's money to pay for Mr. Bush's to-do list and No Child Left Behind is more than an empty slogan.
W. suddenly proclaimed himself a compassionate conservative again, even though extra-chromosome conservatives, as Lee Atwater called them, were in closed meetings calling for a culture war to curb the rights of women and gays.
Mr. Bush even tried to implant in our heads that he is the son of Reagan.
Of course, what Bush IS good at is telling Americans what they want to hear, and doing it in a way that leaves his audience feeling righteous and blessed. We want to believe that we are making the world a safer place. We want to believe that we are the Chosen People. We want to believe that America is the Shining City on the Hill, a beacon of hope in a world struggling to find it's way to democracy and Jesus.
Of course, this blindered view ignores the reality that a good portion of the world intensely dislikes what this country stands for and how it conducts it's foreign policy. Of course, if you feel that you're doing God's work, do you really care what anyone else thinks?
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney may actually buy into the crap they are selling the American people. Or perhaps they're just talented actors who realize that this is the way their election campaign needs to be packaged. In the final analysis, though, Americans need to realize that all the Republican campaign machine is serving up is a healthy portion of Panem et circenses. Bread and circuses may quiet the stomach and occupy the mind, but it does nothing to address the very real and serious issues facing our country today.
Or do Americans really care that little for anything beyond their own narrow self-interest? When I look at the post-RNC polls, it is difficult not to fear for the future of our country. I fear that we in th very near future will become the victims of our own collective ignorance and arrogance. Of course, at least we'll be feeling good about ourselves. After all, the Son of Reagan is still working to convince voters that its Morning in America. Of course, that's what Americans thought BEFORE 9.11.
