Reply #18: Why are Bush and the Right Wing Enterprise believed? [View All]

We were scared by nine eleven, and there was and one thing even scarier than that....that our nation is in the hands of a man who feels justified in saying anything he wants, skewing any science, falsifying any fact, hiding any contrary fact, squelching dissent with chauvinism, and more, in order to get his way and magnify his own power.

It's too horrible to contemplate. Our great nation, our ideals, in the hands of such people. Some refuse to look. Some look but refuse to see. Some see but turn away from politics because it's too painful.

At every turn, Bush and his co conspirators put it in exactly those terms: YOu calling the president a LIAR? You saying he wanted a war no matter WHAT? You saying that he connected Saddam to nine eleven and then LIED about that? You saying the president STOLE an election? Just what are you SAYING?

And people instinctively, emotionally recoil, because to say "yes" is to look straight into the abyss of a country that is worse than lost. So the answer comes out "errrr no", and that point, the issues become muddled and confused: suddenly nobody is responsible, everyone is equally wrong.

Sure, there's the incompetence argument when things turn out to be Not the Way He Described Them, and Bush is getting hammered on that. But "incompetence" only comes out *save* Bush when the only other alternative is that he or his people are evil. Nobody gets impeached for incompetence, and things have to go really, REALLY bad before incompetence means a lost of trust. So the plan has worked for five years, eight counting the campaign and fundraising. An evil, lying sack of shit from the very formulation of the "judicial restraint" and "compassionate conservatism", a strategy meant to disguise true stands while winking at the base, simply came to full flower. All Bush policies are built on, use, and win approval by lies. What, you really don't think he knows how Roberts and Alito are going to vote?

The Bush team is taking advantage of the same principle of surprise that pirates use: nobody wants to believe how evil they are until it's too late. Credit to Kurt Vonnegut.