Just as Mike Moore started his movie with a look back at "the dream" of Florida in 2000, I have to go back to the moment when objective reality was obliterated -- when the GOP's version of Michael Palin, James Baker, told us all with a straight face that you can't trust any human being to count a ballot.
"Bias" will inevitably seize control of the moment, Baker claimed, and your party affiliation will transform the ballot in your hand from the objective manifestation of a citizen's choice for President into a tool for imposing your will upon the outcome of the election. This echoed the infamous reasoning of Joe Stalin who suggested that voters do not determine the winner of an election -- the people who count the votes do.
It was also a self-revealing projection of the work that Lawyer Baker had taken on from the Bush Family Business. His argument of convenience at the time was to proclaim the superiority of a machine count to a hand count -- a proposition that contradicted the prior position taken by his client. As Governor of the Great State of Texas, George Walker Bush had signed into law a statute that called for the hand counting of ballots as the final step in resolving disputed close elections.
In good lawyerly fashion, Baker in Florida argued the superiority of the machine count for the logical if unprincipled reason that the machines had named his client the winner, and Bush's prior position was simply junked. This is how lawyers make their living and it also explains the popularity of lawyer jokes.
Speaking of lawyer jokes, that 2000 election as everybody recalls was ultimately decided by lawyers, for once proving Stalin wrong.
The ludicrous reasoning of
Bush v. Gore amounted to a national re-enactment of the Pythons' Parrot Sketch -- with Al Gore playing the part of the hapless John Cleese maintaining the objective reality of the parrot's death in the face of implacable mendacity. "Beautiful plumage," exclaimed the lying sack of shit played by Michael Palin -- an excruciatingly obvious effort at diversion that affected Cleese like fingernails scraping on a chalk board.
Baker and Scalia and Rehnquist in unison blew a big raspberry at Gore and neutral principles of law. The GOP and its lying sacks of shit have been blowing that same raspberry in our faces ever since, over and over and over again.
Weapons of mass destruction were stored in Iraq, and we knew exactly where they were. Then Bush made it into a comedy bit, searching for the weapons of mass destruction in the White House.
Social Security will go bust in a few decades so we need to "reform" it in a way that does nothing to change its solvency.
Teri Schiavo can communicate with her family and has a chance to recover from brain damage. Then we hear that the autopsy demonstrated that she had been brain dead for years, and they can't even come up with a non sequitur for this one, so they just pretend it never happened.
And, by the way, in 2004, machines counting votes still chose Bush as the winner while the actual ballots have been legislated out of existence in about one third of the country.
So, the question is when do you have that Monty Python moment? When do you have that slow burn that sends Cleese into a poetic rhapsody on all the ways to speak the plain truth while the grinning sack of shit continues to lie in your face, daring you to knock his lights out?
Will it be the Karl Rove case? Will America, collectively, turn its face to the camera in frustration as these lying sacks of shit prattle on about the "beautiful plumage" on Karl's carcass? Here is a nice summary of the GOP talking points from Josh Marshall:
Joe Wilson's a liar. Plame's covert status wasn't protected well by the CIA. It was just a short phone call. Rove really wanted to speak about welfare reform. Wilson said Cheney sent him to Africa. Plame sent Wilson to Africa. Rove leaked Plame's identity in the interests of good journalism. Wilson went on too many TV shows. On and on and on.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_07_10.php#006117 Beautiful plumage indeed.
The common thread running from Florida through the Plame case is the very post-modern concept that "reality" deserves quotation marks around it because it is socially constructed. Whoever has the power to say what's what has the power to rule the world.
Many opponents of Bush look forlornly to "the media" for help in "exposing" this perpetual scam. Others consider that "the media" are owned by corporate interests who do not necessarily see a problem with the logic of advertising running the world, and then succomb to despair.
I say quit worrying about the media. Quit worrying about who is buying the story that the parrot is "just stunned." Just get mad, like Cleese. Just shout it out, to anybody -- whether they want to listen or not.
Karl Rove is an ex-brain!
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