I mean, it’d be one thing if, like in a basball game, the team that scores the most runs wins. But in the sport of politics, being “right” counts for approximately…nothing. What counts is being on the team that wins – and never saying anything that could jeopardize the perception that you have won. Progressives have been “right” about just about everything ever since Bush stole his first election – but that matters less than wearing the right Ivy League Tucker Carlson bow tie in the Culture War. Being in the “mainstream” is all that matters. For a politician, it is far better to be “wrong” (Oh, we ALL thought the Soviet Union was a fearsome empire!) than it is to be considered outside the mainstream. Cuz the mainstream is always right, by definition. The mainstream are the ones who are still on the payroll when tomorrow rolls around.
The most obvious example, of course: W.M.D. in Iraq. The conventional wisdom is that “everyone got that one wrong.” But nothing could be further from the truth. There were people shouting at the top of their keyboards YEARS before the war that Saddam had no WMD. They never got on TV, they never got interviewed on NPR, never had their op-eds run in the NY TImes. But does anyone say, “Gee, Scott Ritter was right. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone to war”? Nope. They say, “Well, we’re in it, we better win it,” or they say, “Well, Saddam was a bad guy, we’re better off without him,” or they say, “Uh, Scott Ritter, didn’t he molest a girl at a Burger KIng or something?” Or they rattle off any of the myriad other rationalizations this adminstration and its’ spinners have put forward as the war has spiralled further and fruther out of control. And it makes you want to smack your head against a wall over and over and over again, as if that might make the mainstream world and your world more closely resemble each other. But no. The conventional wisdom holds: “everyone” got it wrong. Everyone.
How can a statement, so absolutely false on its face, emerge as the “consensus”? The answer is in the definition of the word “everyone.”
We don’t exist. The only people who exist are the ones who have “credibility.” And “credibility” is a code word for somebody who’s proven that he’s on the bus. John Kerry voted to give the president authority to declare war to preserve his “credibility.” It looked like a stupid thing to do from where I stand – the far-flung province called Oregon – but to an insider, it was a no-brainer. His “credibility” had been damaged a generation ago…by being RIGHT about Viet Nam!
Nobody knows better than a member of the Senate that the most important thing you can ever do, in every situation, is to affirm that the Emporer’s clothes are indeed splendid. Once you have proven your bona fides by procaliming his majesty, well then, you may start politely splitting hairs about whether this or that item of apparel is, perhaps, not quite “sending the right message.” But anyone who simply points out the obvious – that the Boy KIng is fucking NUDE – why, that rube will never make it off the farm.
Scott Ritter has been right as rain for years now. For YEARS. You might think that’d win him some “credibility” with the national media, not to mention the administration. Some kind of mea culpa, in which the powerful are forced to acknowledge…”mistakes were made.” Poor Scott. He was suckered by the old-fashioned notion that being right “matters.” Good luck, Scott! What was that epithet the salesmen in “Glengarry Glen Ross” fling at anyone who doesn’t know what the con is? “You fucking CHILD!” They say. “You INFANT! Can’t you see MEN are trying to WORK here!?”
Of course, eventually the conventional wisdom is forced to change, simply to keep from seeming utterly removed from reality. Muhammad Ali keeps on beating his opponents, including the government…Oh, now we all LOVE him! We ALWAYS loved him! Politicians start blow-drying their hair to show how hip they are. That Kennedy Hair is still all the rage, 45 years later. Martin Luther King gets his portrait printed on stamps, gets his own Day…Oh, we all love him! WE ALWAYS loved him! Slavery is abolished…oh, we were ALWAYS against THAT! States’ rights, that’s what we were upset about….
Some day soon, it will be the conventional wisdom that America went temporarily insane after 9-11 and re-elected a drunken hard-on named Bush who took us into a disastrous war. It will be universally accepted that America sometimes loses its way, like it did during the McCarthy era, but that eventually, the fever subsides and our essential decency prevails.
But will that mean that “we” were right and “they” were wrong? Nope. One day the Emporer will simply be wearing a different suit and those who understand how the game works will once again be falling all over themselves, David Brooks-like, to come up with the most flattering way of complementing his sense of style. We poor schnooks on the outside can never, by definition, be “right,” no matter how many blogs we write or how many millions of people we turn out to protest in the streets. We don’t exist! We have no role in what our leaders have the nerve to call…spreading DEMOCRACY.
