I live and work in a non-fiction world, I do politics on the side so when I read, it’s fiction most of the time. So I am reading along in this book which has precious little to do with politics. It’s about a biographer who is hired to write a family history on a British family of renown (not Windsor and still fiction)
Then there’s this passage: “Well, it’s quite simple, really, said Henry. “The trick is to keep doing outrageous things. There’s no point in passingsome scandalous piece of legislation and then giving everyone time to get worked up about it. You have to get right in there and top it with something even worse, before the public have had a chance to work out what’s hit them. The thing about the British conscience, you see, is that it really has no more capacity than a primitive home computer, if you like. It can only hold two or three things in its memory at at a time…”
Now I don’t know if that is Rove’s plan in a nutshell or they are just making it up on the fly. Either way their house of cards is falling apart. Their strategy may have been to keep their machinations behind the flag curtain but it isn’t working anymore. It has all become too obvious to many of us. So I think they are counting on something else. I think they are counting on that home computer. And they may be right.
The casual American voter, the one that doesn’t pay all that much attention, the one that hears jingoist slogans and is suspectible to fear, they are counting on that voter. The one that doesn’t watch the news, doesn’t read the paper and avoids the discomfort that watching the news brings them. They just want their own piece of life and they want to be left alone with any unpleasant thoughts of American dead or wounded or 30,000 (more or less) Iraqi deaths. They want to ignore the corruption, the cronyism, the law breaking at the highest levels of government, the wholesale ignoring of laws, the spying on Americans, the torture, the fact that the USA, the leader of the free world has become the greatest threat to countries everywhere. And the person who ignores, discounts, tries to pretend the crap doesn’t exist?
That describes the public persona of one George Bush but as more people are beginning to recognize he’s not that good a liar. The blinking eyes,the twitching, the attempt at who me, aw shucks, 30,000 more or less like it’s a crowd estimate at a ball game, except this ball game has no overtime, the architect is about to get busted and the white hot panic is setting in for George. They are too far in and don;t have an exit plan from their own policies and actions. But we can expect more outrages, more plundering of the Constitution and the Treasury. They think they can brazen their way through. Our job is simple. Engage everyone we can and keep repeating the list..over and over, especially to the media. Write, call, fax, rinse and repeat. Keep the pressure on as individuals and collectively as part of the Dem party.