[med-events] - The Wonderful World of Cheney ... (fwd)

[J.A. Terranson]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2008 23:04:03 -0600
From: Gil Ross <gil at gilross.com>
To: "Med-Events <med-events at ccm-l.org>
Subject: [med-events] - The Wonderful World of Cheney ...

 

 <http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/2/8/155824/2111/744/452848> The
Wonderful World of Cheney 


By Hunter / Daily Kos 


Cheney spoke yesterday at CPAC, the conference for people for whom reality
is just an illusion foisted upon them by a cold and liberal universe. (The
universe, you see, is full of dark matter called Librons, which in addition
to keeping the universe from flying apart like Ann Coulter in front of a
television camera, have the unfortunate side effect of inverting perceptions
of reality for all but the most trained Randian observers. Oh, and
Scientologists.) I'm supposed to say, at this point, something like "you
can't make this up", but of course you can make this stuff up. It's easy to
make it up. That's the whole point.

Some highlights
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/02/20080207-11.html> ...

As conservatives, we believe in a government that takes up a smaller share
of the national income, that treats tax dollars with respect and restraint.
And we believe in a government that keeps to its limits under the
Constitution, never expanding beyond the consent of the governed. 

 

And then, he farted candy and rainbows. And all the little woodland
creatures came out from under the floorboards to help sew him a magnificent
new dress for the ball.

 

The United States is a country that takes human rights seriously. We do not
torture -- it's against our laws and against our values. We're proud of our
country and what it stands for. [...]

America is a fair and a decent country. (Applause.) President Bush has made
it clear, both publicly and privately, that our duty to uphold the laws and
standards of this nation admit no exceptions in wartime. As he put it, "We
are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is, live by
them. 

 

And at that point, the Constitution Fairy sprinkled her magic Constitution
dust over the land, and all the tapes of the CIA torturing prisoners
magically erased themselves, and the waterboarded detainees became
un-waterboarded, and the vast program of illegal domestic espionage -- so
critical to our national security that President George Constitution Bush
has threatened to veto all FISA legislation, for all time, unless everyone
involved gets retroactive amnesty for their illegal acts -- suddenly became
Constitutional.

 

To prevail in the long run, we have to remove the conditions that inspire
such blind, prideful hatred that drove 19 men to get into airplanes and come
kill us. And so the President made the decision: We wouldn't just remove the
Taliban and Saddam Hussein and let other dictators rise in their place. 

 

Because one of the lesser known Articles of the Constitution is that no
mention of 9/11 by an administration official may take place without a
possibly hallucinatory-drug-induced conflation of it and Saddam Hussein. And
Shrek. Shrek was also there.


I like it. Reality as practiced by a man who can't tell the difference
between a grown man standing next to him and a tiny, barely-flight-capable
bird. It's not so much a CPAC speech as it is "NAMBLA for the mind." It's a
comic book speech, delivered by a comic book man to a comic book audience.
Cheney doesn't believe in merely denying reality, he believes in pinning it
down, attaching electrodes to it, then just clubbing it to death for fun.

The thing is, it'd be easy to ascribe behavior like this to mental illness,
presuming he really believes any of the things he says. But it's not clear
he does. In all likelihood, he knows fully well how ridiculous it all
sounds, but in an audience hand-picked for their willingness to accept any
premise, no matter how ridiculous, in order to feel good about their own
bigotries, nobody will ever call him out on it.

It's interesting, because once again one would think it would be a key
component of rational public discourse for people to, indeed, call him out
on his happy, camouflage-colored delusions. But it's somehow off-limits, in
the press, to point out when a public official is an unmitigated,
reality-sodomizing liar. Haircuts and pantsuits: fair game. Pointing out
that "a smaller share of the national income" means "a larger share", that
"restrained" spending means "more" spending, that "keeping to the limits of
the Constitution" means breaking those limits, that "no torture" means
"torture", and that "9/11" means anything else he wants it to mean at any
moment in time: pointing those things out are uncouth activities to be
delegated to people like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Keith Olbermann, and
a handful of crazy, uncivilized blogs.

And we're reduced to just making fun of it, because really -- what else are
you going to do? How do you refute something that's self-refuting?

Go figure.

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