In Search of a Theory

Here's another link to a story about Romney being truthiness-challenged:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071230/ap_on_el_pr/romney_candor

I don't mean to pick on Romney; it's just so easy to do. He illustrates something much more important than he is: we tolerate and even allow ourselves to be governed by people who believe in nothing and have no souls. Why? I have no idea. Plato, in The Laws, has an interlocutor suggest that the punishment for people who pay insufficient attention to public affairs is to be governed by evil men. Maybe that's it. After all, there are plenty of worthwhile things to do rather than pay attention to the cesspool that is American politics and government. I'm still in search of a theory to explain this phenomenon.

In any event, consider the following. It is not possible to make a rational choice among a slate of candidates who don't believe in anything. If you participate in elections to select candidates who will seek to obtain certain policy outcomes, you cannot predict what a candidate who believes in nothing will do if elected. So, for example, it is not possible to know what a President Romney would do in any particular kind of circumstance. Thus one could vote for Romney for some other reason, i.e., his hair. But then, how would you choose between Romney and Democrat Edwards? Both have great hair.

So, you could support a candidate who has some meaningless but unique quality, such as Her Highness Hillary (because she is a woman) or Barack Obama (because he is a black man). It is clear that Hillary believes in nothing, but you could still choose between her and Romney over the hair versus woman issue. This year's campaign is so utterly vacuous that I cannot tell whether Obama believes in anything or not.

Ultimately, it may be that campaigns are so centered on television that they must be devoid of content. Obama, for example, may actually believe something, but there is no way to determine what that is because the "first tier" candidates' campaigns and reporting about them is solely about the zingers they throw at each other that have no information in them.

Another alternative (mine) is to support a candidate that actually believes in something (more or less what I believe) and has zero chance of winning. This is satisfying but unsatisfactory. We live in a critical time in human history. Mankind's destructive power is greater than ever before. We have seen the enemy and he is us. We are truly at a historical crossroads. I well remember the Cold War. It is behind us, but we face new threats from abroad and threats of new kinds altogether, such as environmental change. It is important for America's political leadership to be the product of as rational a choice as possible made by its people, and right now there is simply no way to rationally choose a political leadership. We stumble blindly into the new millenium.


Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

-t.s. eliot, The Wasteland

Romney versus Reality

I know the link won't last long, but I had to post this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/us/politics/21cnd-romney.html

It's a story detailing republican candidate Mitt Romney's, er, "exaggerations." Romney is the candidate for those who like satire. He's the cartoon character among the Republican bunch this time around. The only one I see on the Democratic side who equals him in utter phoniness is Her Highness Hillary.

Every four years I keep wondering -- is this the best we can do? There are hundreds of millions of people in this country. Surely we can come up with a better collection of candidates than this! The presidential selection process resembles nothing so much as professional wrestling. The whole thing is scripted and fake. The truly sad thing is that this is how we select the single most powerful human being on the planet.

Why Plame Matters

With the teaser from former White House spokesman Scott McLellan's book, which states that President Bush lied to us (gasp!) about the Plame affair, we learn yet again that we are governed by scum. Does it matter? After all, Plame was a bureaucrat rather than the cloak and dagger operative she has made herself out to be.

Yes, it matters. Her husband, James Wilson, was sent to Niger to investigate whether there was anything to claims that Sadaam Hussein's regime sought to acquire uranium there. He concluded there was nothing to the story. When Liar-in-Chief Dubya used the claim that Iraq had sought to obtain uranium from Africa to sell the war to Americans, Wilson wrote a number of op-ed pieces explaining that Dubya lied about the affair. In retaliation, the White House leaked his wife's employment with the CIA to "journalist" Robert Novak, who dutifully published her name and thereby destroyed her career. Dubya, "Dick" Cheney, Scooter "Convicted Felon" Libby, and Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove denied involvement or knowledge of the leak. Of course, all were lying.

The lie matters because it is this otherwise unimportant lie points directly to (a) the BIG FAT LIES that led the United States to war in Iraq, resulting in the needless deaths of thousands of Americans, and (b) the fact that we are governed by evil men.