Calhoun’s Can(n)ons for August 31, 2012
The demagogue is one
who preaches doctrine he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
H.L. Mencken
Are you kidding me? That’s all I could think of as I watched hour
after hour of the brain-scrambling Republican convention. Are you
kidding?
True, when someone starts out
with a lie, it’s always fun to see where they’re going to go from there without
constantly stepping in it, unless they’re a Republican and stepping in
something as mundane as a “lie” has apparently ceased to be a concern anymore.
But three
days of cynical mendacity combined with collective amnesia turned the convention
into one long Saturday Night Live Emily
Latella skit. You remember Emily, Gilda
Radner’s loopy old lady who kept getting things wrong, but that didn’t stop her
from steaming off into outrage about some misperceived topic, like “violins in
the street.” When corrected that it was
“violence, not violins,” she would squint unrepentantly at the camera and
blithely change the subject.
Only the
Republican Party is no loopy, addled Emily.
Instead, what was on tap was a convention cynically built around a lie –
the repeated and deliberate misstatement of a reference made in one of President
Obama’s speeches. In that speech, while the
President lauded individual enterprise, he also pointed out the obvious: Success isn’t strictly singular, that
businesses benefited from communally built infrastructure and the “that” in “you
didn’t build that,” reference was to “bridges, roads, etc.” which were built by
taxpayers.
True, it
was an awkward sentence, but the meaning was absolutely clear to anyone not
language challenged. Or a political
party willing to disgracefully take that clear meaning out of context, twist it
into a lie, brazenly plaster signs saying “We Built It,” all over the
convention center and make that lie the
singular leitmotif on the lips of almost every speaker at the podium. And
even though they had to know it was a
lie, they spoke it anyway. Which raised an awful question: Who could possibly trust anything those guys say?
But that
wasn’t the worst of it. What became
truly creepy was the collective willingness of everyone to go down the memory
hole. (It’s the internet age: does no one google FactCheck anymore?) This
signal amnesia wasn’t just hypocrisy, like Delaware businesswoman, Sher
Valenzuela, who lauded her “I Built It” successful business but “forgot” to
mention it was aided by $2 million in (government funded) SBA loans and $15
million in (government funded) contracts.
Or the parade of “I Built It” governors
crediting their state’s recovery on their own singular efforts while ignoring
the GM taxpayer bailout and all those Washington
stimulus checks they happily cashed. (Talk about a gaggle of serpent-toothed
ingrates chewing the hand that fed them.)
No, this
was not run of the mill hypocrisy at work, but a profound disconnect from the
historical record, the factual narrative. Listening to speaker after speaker spin their
tales was like reading a complex historical novel from which Republicans had
redacted any reference to their role in that story. Down the memory hole they went, bemoaning the
terrible state of affairs while utterly ignoring their part in creating the
crisis and/or making the crisis infinitely worse. There is a reason this Party-of-No, Do
Nothing, Republican-led Congress is so loathed by the voters. On day one of Obama’s election, Republican
Senator McConnell clearly stated that his party’s one over riding goal wasn’t jobs or helping American workers retool
or working across the aisle to set things right, but to get rid of Obama –
throw the bum out of the bar, in the inelegant parlance of Speaker
Boehner. And it was the lock-step
Republicans, monkey-wrenching Tea Partiers and a gaggle of Democratic hacks
that brought pointless pain to millions of ordinary Americans caught in the
crossfire of their spite, their destructive policies, fantasy math, and the overriding
political strategy that keeping the country in dire straits would mean a
guaranteed Republican win in 2012.
All of
which went missing for three nights of astounding amnesia and false narratives.
That’s not normal hypocrisy, that’s pathology. And while you can campaign on
lies and rabbit hole history, you can’t govern that way.
Which is
why, when Paul Ryan, the fresh-faced Leave It To Beaver veep nominee stood
before the American people and repeated that
foundational lie, a lie he had to know was false, then fell down the memory
hole of “fake facts,” and Mitt Romney slid from a sweet, smiley-faced wish list
of unsupported platitudes and into irresponsible, bellicose war-talk, and we
were left with Anne Romney telling us we should “trust Mitt,” well, my only
response had to be, “Are you kidding me?”
Then my
head exploded.
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