Monday, August 22, 2005

Thanks, Howard

No, not that "Howard." I found this little gem while perusing the comments over at Eschaton:

One huge problem Bush has is that all of the abstract pro-Iraq war arguments--freedom, flypaper, war on terror--are unmeasurable, whereas anti-Iraq war arguments are grounded in concrete facts: lives lost, money spent, terrorists trained in Iraq. You would think our first MBA president would have known that any project needs quantifiable benchmarks. Like the old joke: "Whatcha doin'?" "Nothing." "How will you know when you're done?"
Howard McNear

That's why we here in this portion of the political spectrum are routinely referred to as reality-based. We address concrete reality. Lives. Dollars and cents. Jobs. Numbers. Simple truths. Things that can be counted, and ideas that can be counted upon to work well.

Then, of course, you have all the rest on the Bush end of the debate spectrum: the Intelligent Design is a Theory crowd, the Dominionism fascists, the Light at the End of the Tunnel sect, the Mission Accomplished set-designers, the Save Social Security by Giving it to a Bunch of Rich White Guys proponents, et al ad infinitum. You know, people who have "values." Immeasurable values, that is.

I suppose it is much easier to fool people with talk about abstract values than it would be to fool them with the simple truth.

Cindy Sheehan is not fooled. She can count to one. And that is too much.

2 comments:

Eli Blake said...

The problem that Republicans have is that when they have to limit the discussion to simple facts, they lose.

In fact, since their basic premise is to maintain a plutocracy that stays on top by trampling on everyone else (both here and in other countries), they couldn't just come out and say what they are for. So, they concoct a poisonous recipe of lies, obfuscation, personal attacks, smears, dividing people against each other, and stonewalling in order to prevent people from ever just sitting down and looking at the facts.

It's the only way they can win.

Eli Blake said...

And today, the whole 'democracy' argument collapsed into dust. The proposed new constitution sets up a fundamentalist Islamic state (like Iran) AND it also does not have the support of the Sunnis, making it likely that the insurgency will only intensify.