The pack of lying deceivers is stonewalling and slandering again, caught in their own landslide of deceit and lies. Frank Rich here (pointed out by Mike James in his post yesterday ) has a Times piece that explains how this Rove-Plame case is just the tip of the iceberg of a much larger web of deceit and manipulation. In other words, an absolute sham of the “democracy” to which they give lip service.
“Outside Murdochland” (a phrase Rich uses within this article to refer to the self-imposed factual ghetto in which the right has encased itself, led by Fox News and its denial of “spin”) is another gem from this article, in the second quotation below
Follow the Uranium – New York Times
Once we were locked into the war, and no W.M.D.’s could be found, the original plot line was dropped with an alacrity that recalled the “Never mind!” with which Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella used to end her misinformed Weekend Update commentaries on “Saturday Night Live.” The administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost “in the bowels” of the bureaucracy or that it was all the C.I.A.’s fault or that it didn’t matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war. But the administration knows how guilty it is. That’s why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.
On “Murdochland”, the cultural ghetto in which right-wingers isolate themselves and find plenty of talking points in which to revel, armed with “truths” with which to use against the “reality-based” community. I see it as a retreat of sorts, fueled by a self-deception that has increasingly been imported into the philosophical framework that has been constituted as a community.
last week’s erection of the stonewall manned by the almost poignantly clownish Mr. McClellan, who abruptly rendered inoperative his previous statements that any suspicions about Mr. Rove are “totally ridiculous.” The morning after Mr. McClellan went mano a mano with his tormentors in the White House press room – “We’ve secretly replaced the White House press corps with actual reporters,” observed Jon Stewart – the ardently pro-Bush New York Post ran only five paragraphs of a wire-service story on Page 12. That conspicuous burial of what was front-page news beyond Murdochland speaks loudly about the rising anxiety on the right. Since then, White House surrogates have been desperately babbling talking points attacking Joseph Wilson as a partisan and a liar.
Self-deception is what I just read about in The Hauerwas Reader (essay 10, Self-Deception and Autobiography, pp. 200-220. Hauerwas and David Burrell here use the story of Albert Speer’s analysis of his self-deception which allowed him to “do his job” without questioning what was happening. The fact that we have today a politics that is rightly considered “less evil” than the Nazi regime only serves to increase the propensity to self-deception, since comparisons and analyses of the causes and symptoms of self-deception cannot be drawn from cases like Speer’s, since that comparison seems to imply that we putting this on a par with the Holocaust. But this only obscures the similarities. Later today I want to try to summarize some of the insights from this essay, which centers on the critria of “strength of story”; having a story sufficiently strong to combat the tendency to “fit into our commitments” the various requirements of our associations and activities.
a sample:
We can afford to let go of our current story only to the extent that we are convinced that it does not hold the key to our individual identity. So we will remain subject to those propensities that lead to a state of self-deception as long as we feel ourselves to be constituted either by by the conventional roles we havce assumed or by the level of awareness we have been able to articulate
