Suckers
by KevinApril 13th, 2006
As you know by now, the US government new that the mobile bio-labs were not bio-labs, and they knew while they were saying hat the labs were the long lost weapons of mass destruction. Even if you want to accept the notion that the White House would not find out such critical information before Bush’s first mention of the trailers as proof, it is impossible to believe that they would not know in the months afterwards, when they continued to make the claims.
They lied. Blatantly.
But that is not what I want to talk about. What is truly depressing about this story is how so many in the right wing blogosphere — and to a lesser extent the talk radio denizens — have tried to dismiss the lies. Mahablog, among others, dismantle the poor attempts at rationalizations. But it is depressing to realize how many people still cling to the Cult of Bush.
The Bushies lied to the country. The told us Saddam had WMDs and serious ties to al Qaeda, knowing that those claims were questionable, at best. Then they told us they had found evidence when they knew that evidence to be false. They took the public for a bunch of suckers and rubes, marks unworthy of anything but a con. And they were at least partially right. Today people are looking desperately for reasons not to believe the truth. Cops often say that grifters are hard to prosecute because the marks don’t want to admit that they have been taken. I think we are seeing something similar here.
It does no good to claim that you wanted the war for your own reasons and so the lies don’t matter to you. You are still a mark, left desperately hoping that the reasons you went to war are close enough to the reasons the Administration went to war so that your aims have a chance to be met. But because you cannot know why the Administration went to war, since they lied to you, you cannot say with any certainty what their long terms steps will be and you can never take them at their word. This means you have no way of really knowing if they intend to move in the direction you want them to. You are left to deny reality in the vain hope that your wishes line up close enough to theirs so that you get what you want. You are the mark who thinks that if he just plays one more game, he will find which cup the little ball is under and everything will come out all right.
You got taken. It happens. A lot of us believed Clinton when he said that he hadn’t had sex with Lewinsky. The trick is to admit that you have been taken and move on. Pretending that up is down and black is white because that is the only way to convince yourself that you haven’t actually been rolled is not good for you and, in this context, not good for the country. Democracies require the good faith efforts of their citizens to come to the right decisions given the information they have at hand. You cannot do that if you refuse to admit reality.
Sometime soon, in the run up to the November elections, Bush is probably going to come to the country with tales of a nuclear Iran and ask to be given a free hand, as he was in Iraq. The country is going to have to decide if it can believe Bush or if believing Bush leads to another unnecessary disaster like Iraq. That decision will be much easier if people stop being suckers and start being citizens.
