April 27th, 2006
Glenn Greenwald, author of the new book How Would A Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok, has written an excellent post on the anatomy of the thought process of Bush defenders today. I often find myself reading message boards, comments and blogs with my jaw agape when confronted by the particular creature of Bush defender Greenwald describes, which is why I found myself relieved to know I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed that there seems to be a whole species of humankind out there (and mind you, I’ve noticed some liberal “moonbats” out there with similar traits) that seem to live in a world without facts or a world where the facts that conflict with their version of reality seem to bounce off of the fantasy-based rose-colored invisible field auras.
As much as anything else, Bush defenders are characterized by an increasingly absolutist refusal to recognize any facts which conflict with their political desires, and conversely, by a borderline-religious embrace of any assertions which bolster those desires. It’s a world-view which conflates desire with reality, disregards all facts and evidence that conflict with the decreed beliefs, and faithfully embraces any assertions and fantasies, no matter how baseless and flagrantly false, provided that they bolster the mythology.
Thus, things are going really great in Iraq - just as we predicted they would. When we invaded, Saddam had WMD’s and he was funding Al Qaeda. Oil revenues will pay for the whole thing, we will be welcomed as liberators, the whole war will be won quickly and easily. A large military presence is unnecessary because there is no insurgency. Bush is a popular and beloved President. All but a handful of radical fringe subversives in America support the war and believe terrorism is the overarching problem. Americans want to militarily confront Iran, want illegal warrantless eavesdropping, and are happy with how the country is being governed.
It never matters how much evidence arises demonstrating the falsity of these beliefs. They are not susceptible to challenge or reconsideration because they are the by-product of faith and desire and not a critical or rational assessment. They believe these things because they want to believe them, they have to believe them, because the whole world-view on which their identity and purpose has come to be based — the brave, heroic President leading the great conservative nation in glorious, epic war-triumph over the evil Muslim enemy — depends upon believing these myths. No facts can shake these beliefs because they aren’t grounded in facts and aren’t the by-product of rationality.
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Doesn’t that pretty much capture the whole sickness? “There are facts that suggest that what I am saying is not actually true. What is my response do that? ‘What-ev-eh.’” As in: “Some people claim there are facts that show that things in Iraq are not going really great. Something about civil war, sectarian hatred, anarchy, widespread violence, a total lack of security. What-ev-eh.”
Don’t they have somewhere lurking in their brain any critical faculties at all? For the sake of one’s own integrity and reputation if nothing else, who would read an undocumented assertion on Drudge — no matter how much of an emotional need they feel for it to be true — and then run around reflexively reciting it as truth, writing whole posts celebrating it and analyzing it, without bothering to spend a second of time or a molecule of mental energy trying to figure out if it’s really true?
This intellectually corrupt syndrome goes back a long way and has been festering for a long time. Nuggets of deceitful, fact-free fantasy get planted in some cesspool like Drudge and then mindless followers who want to believe it start repeating it as fact, and then it gets ossified forever as conventional wisdom and can never be dislodged from their minds. That’s how Al Gore came to “claim that he invented the Internet,” how Howard Dean became a far left radical pacifist, how Jessica Lynch had a heroic shoot-out with Al Qaeda and was then rescued by gun-blazing Marines, how Moveon.org produced commercials saying that Bush was Hitler, how Saddam funded Al Qaeda and personally participated in the planning of 9/11. It’s even how the lesbian, Hillary, killed Vince Foster in order to ensure that their affair (or whitewater crimes or drug-running landing strip) would be kept quiet and, to this day, it’s how Bill Clinton was a wildly unpopular president.
Soon after 9/11, the Bush movement became driven by much more than a set of political beliefs. It provides its adherents with much more than just a vehicle for political activism. It gives them purpose and a feeling of strength and power that they otherwise lack. In that sense, it is not dissimilar to a religion, and it is therefore unsurprising — but nontheless ugly and destructive — that their beliefs and convictions are not grounded in facts and reality but in a resolute faith that cannot be shaken by facts. Every event is interpreted so as to bolster the faith, facts are disregarded which undermine the faith and fact-free assertions are embraced which confirm the faith. [“The anatomy of the ‘thought’ process of a Bush defender” (unclaimed Territory)]
I’ve often thought the last few years that politics is the new religion or the new racism. Certainly I think that on either side of the political fence, it’s feeding into a need to believe absolutely in something or someone. This is definitely a very dangerous thing for those of us in the middle, particularly those of us smart enough not to believe in anything whole-heartedly and to take everything with a grain of salt. We may just get crushed or pulled apart in the resulting tug-of-war.
Tags: blogs, George W. Bush, moonbats, rightwingers, Faith, Glenn Greenwald
