“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

— Mark Twain

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

— Benjamin Franklin

Call it cognitive dissonance, semantic illness or loony tune logic; the Bush administration is infected with a form of insanity for which there seems to be no viable cure.

Under the fold: Dubya talk and mala-propaganda

For a long time, I dismissed much of the administration’s self contradictory rhetoric as garden-variety political blather.  But I started getting worried back in summer of 2005 when young Mister Bush said of the terrorists, “I think they’re losing.  That’s why they’re still fighting.”

By this line of reasoning, the second the terrorists stop fighting they’ll have “won.”  I was willing to dismiss Bush’s statement as just another one of those dopey things that belly flop off the guy’s tongue when his handlers let him off his leash until I caught this snippet a week or so later from an interview between Bill O’Reilly and retired Air Force Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney:

O’Reilley:  Insurgent attacks on a daily basis have almost doubled from 2004 to 2005. What does that say?

McInerney:  It says that the terrorists, the insurgents, are fighting even harder because they know they are losing.

That’s when it hit me.  This “still fighting because they’re losing” business wasn’t just some misstatement that belly-flopped its way off the end of Mister Bush’s tongue.  It was a carefully crafted talking point invented at a conservative think tank and blessed by Karl Rove for distribution to the administration’s anointed echo chamberlains.  

And I realized that the core essence of the neoconservative cabal is out-and-out March Hare madness.

Mad Dogs, Englishmen and Neocons

The “fighting because they’re losing” mantra is still a centerpiece of this administration’s mala-propaganda.  As conservative commentator George Will noted on July 18th, Condoleezza Rice’s arguments against calling for an immediate cease fire between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon make, “instability, no matter how pandemic or lethal, necessarily a sign of progress.”

In other words, Rice asserts that the longer the fighting goes on, the better the prospects are for a permanent peace.  That’s more than a bit like saying the longer you live beyond your means by charging your lifestyle to a credit card, the sooner you’ll get out of debt.  

At a Friday White House press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mister Bush said he hoped to turn the Israel-Hezbollah crisis into “moment of opportunity and a chance for broader change in the region.”

With a “moment of opportunity” like that, who needs a lack of options?  Heck, if you look around at Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere, we have more moments of opportunity than we can shake a big stick at.  Things have never looked rosier for the New American Century!  

Do the so-called leaders of the English-speaking world really swallow their own road apple rhetoric, or are they just putting us on?  Do they really think following the same failed policies will produce different results, or they insane enough to think that the wisdom of ages doesn’t apply to them?  Or have they fallen head over heels for the Machiavellian notion that power is its own objective, and that any ends that preserve power for them and their inner circles justify any means that will preserve that power?

It really doesn’t matter what they’re thinking or not thinking any more.  We need to vote them back to their own private Idahos before they jack our entire planet into the next solar system.

Who do we replace them with?  Right now, I don’t really care, but I’ll tell you this.  It will be a cold day in whatever corner in hell that Bill Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of them wind up sharing before I vote for a Republican again.  

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

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