Babel

1
   There is an alarming metaphysical transformation underway right before our eyes in the Washington.  It is unprecedented in our history and takes on a profound philosophical significance because it ultimately seeks to shift reality and undercut the very essence of accountability in the politics in this country.   It is the concept that there is no objective truth in government that cannot be subjugated to a larger purpose or well heeled special interest. 
   Truth then becomes an annoying mote in the eye of the beholder to be removed or overlooked at their convenience.  As Haley Barbour, under oath no less, once testified before Congress, “Perception is reality”.  Interesting perhaps as abstract theory, he made this statement about a fact in question before a committee of Congress on a point of law.  Astonishingly, not one person on the political panel, even in the opposition party, bothered to protest the contention.
     Imagine trying this in a true court of law where a witness is sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth with one hand on a bible and one finger raised in the air to test the winds of believability. Can you imagine the incredulity and thunderous outrage with which such an evasive claim would be met by a presiding judge?  
   Yet in Washington truth has become whatever someone says it is, wants it to be or can plausibly make a majority of the voters believe.  Truth can not be weighed on rigged scales or else relativity at all times in all things prevails.  Yet public statements today are not given for clarity’s sake but are mushmouthed, not meant to illuminate but to obfuscate and serve secrecy for its own sake rather than democracy for ours.  This invites deceit to new levels of respectability and relegates integrity to a rarely sighted beast, scurrying down congressional hallways briefly before disappearing again into a heavily forested maze of competing contentions.  Truth is fast becoming the Sasquatch of Washington.
   We must not be naïve, we have known liars in politics before.  Nixon and many around him lied like well worn linoleum to cover up illegal activities they didn’t wish to face in public.  Bill Clinton looked into a camera and flat out dissembled about his personal life.  But in politics today it seems we have blurred a line between untruth and truth.  The Bush administration has not only crossed this line but has obliterated it behind them.
   They have taken situational deceit and made it systemic.  Take a few well known examples from many that might be picked.  Obviously many lies were told to get the United States into a war with Iraq.  The inimitable Don Rumsfeld, for one, famously said before the war that “we know exactly where the weapons are located in Iraq.”  As there were no such weapons, of course, this was at best a wild surmise wrongly characterized and at worst a lie.  Yet in his last months as Secretary of Defense he merely claimed he had “never said that” despite the irrefutable evidence of the video tape proving he had.  
   After the war turned out badly, everyone who lied before the war either lied that they had ever lied or simply denied the obvious truth which later confronted them. This illustrates the prime example of the gymnastics of deceit, first they lie then they deny they ever lied and then they offer up an even balder faced lie as addendum to their initial lie to deny the irrefutable proof that they had lied in the first place.
   In regard to Iraq, Dick Cheney is still taking endless anti-victory laps around the oval track of circular logic, seeking to square lies he’s told by simply repeating facts that never existed.  So in the equivalent of a back flip with a double twist on the uneven parallel bars of logic, he repeats the obviously erroneous claim that Iraq possessed mobile chemical labs on flat bed trailers before the war.  
   This was a single source story based on a guy nicknamed “Curveball” and was supported, believe it or not, with a drawing based on no first hand information of anyone who had ever actually seen the thing the drawing was supposed to represent!  In the real world this “irrefutable intelligence” would carry essentially the same weight and merit of tabloid drawings of Martians sometimes seen in supermarket check out lines, and dismissed out of hand.
   However, it is one thing to not believe in Martians quite another thing to have to disprove them.  Since the source of the story was classified by the administration it was impossible to disprove until it was too late to matter. Still, even when the incendiary claim of these flat bed trailers was disproved it did not stop Dick Cheney from insisting for years after that they did exist even though no one ever found them and the only evidence they ever had of them consisted of a drawing of a rumor which they had commissioned themselves.
   Eventually the fantasy world they live in based on the original lies they tell, generate doubts that tend to galvanize into an amorphous ether of public distrust. Then the questions put to administration officials generalize and, based on best available evidence such as polls and elections, they enter into the more or less speculative or observational realm such as, “the country has turned against the war”, or “we are losing” or even “it seems that much of what you say turns out not to be true.”  Here Cheney prefers a definitively duplicitous dismissal, “Hogwash”, he responds with specificity.  He may as well have replied “Hogwarts” for all the firm grounding in reality his answer showed.
   Only against this backdrop does the Lewis Libby perjury case just concluded become explicable.  The administration began with a lie inserted in a State of the Union address which they had to cover up.  So they lied about the first cover up with a second cover up while trying to smear the person who’d told the truth about their lie in the first place.  Caught at that, they had to lie again to the investigation in a third cover up to cover up the first and second cover up.  Makes you weary just reading about it.  
   Astonishingly, this same pattern has just been repeated across town from this court case by the Justice Department.  To justify the removal of a number of their own U.S. Attorneys they first lied about their rationale for the firings to the press, then tried to smear and discredit the U.S. attorneys in question, then lied some more while under oath to Congress.  Finally the Attorney General admitted that mistakes had been made, but seemed to show no moral revulsion or remorse for the lies themselves, only that they had been caught in them.  
   In other words, this administration lies in wait with new lies to tell about the old lies they have already lied about.  Otherwise they let the sleeping lies lie.  Yet lies are like termites that burrow away in interior passageways of government and hollow out its accountability and effectiveness.  Years later the structures they have invisibly infested unexpectedly collapse like rotten houses or like Iraq, the budget process, tax policy, energy dependency, the effectiveness of Walter Reed hospital or FEMA in New Orleans.
   This administration exhibits no respect for the truth whatsoever.  They lie as a matter of first resort as if veracity itself were their enemy of their administration.  The Washington monument has become the tower of Babel.  The town named after the man who “never told a lie” now produces nothing but lies.  The founder of the Republican Party, Honest Abe, has become dishonest George.  In this way little white lies accumulate into ever darker ones and venial lies soon turn into mortal ones.
   As the prosecuting attorney said in reference to the Libby case, “truth drives the judicial system – without it the legal system cannot work.”  The same must be said of democratic government.  Yet now supporters of the administration who consider government to be their own personal litter box are urging the President to continue to turn the legal procedures that found Libby guilty into a farce by pardoning him.  By this they hope to bleed dishonest political practices into formerly sacrosanct areas of law and justice, and continue the wholesale assault on the ethics, integrity and accountability of government which has already been so far advanced by this generation of leadership.

2   
   But where is the hidden map of their intentions to decipher the convoluted landscape of their justifications?  No matter how absurd and self-defeating their actions appear to us, there must be a theoretical coherence beneath which ties these otherwise unconnected surface manifestations together.  Until you understand that information is power, it will remain a mystery why, once members of government get their hands on the apparatus of government, which is really ours, they become mysteriously possessive about it, proprietary and parsimonious with the truth concerning it.  
   I heard a radio interview with a loyal member of the Bush administration, presumably the President’s personal science advisor or someone of a similar position, which might provide a clue to their thinking. 
When he was asked about the administration’s rather well known propensity to suppress scientific findings produced by government agencies when it didn’t agree with theirs or which didn’t serve their interests politically, this gentleman gave a non denial denial by simply redefining facts and changing the meaning of the question.
   To start with he said something like “the Bush administration is rigorous in its adherence to the best scientific evidence available.”  But when asked specifically about charges that they had impeded or suppressed science in regard to, say, global warming, or birth control, etc., he simply changed the commonly held definition for science and pretended that all the words used in connection to this issue really meant something entirely different to them than they did to the rest of us. 
   He said that scientific issues like birth control and global warming were not strictly scientific issues at all because they had become “controversial” and been “politicized” (by them, of course).  This meant that these scientific controversies morphed into a type of limbo between true and false and definitionally were no longer actually science but had become political science.  So he maintained that the Bush administration never altered or suppressed science per se, they just re-categorized a scientific finding they disapproved of and called it something else.  According to him, it was these political science issues, not actual science, which they then suppressed and withheld from the public.  This was how real science became junk and junk science became just as legitimate.  
   The way they see this then is not that they lie, they just compartmentalize truth and keep it separate from things they wish to misrepresent or cover-up to the public.  This takes us into the deeper, brain tissue issue of how ideologues think and manage to quarantine ethics and honesty into a special category of subservience to a supposedly higher (but invariably lower) cause.
   The single most audacious misrepresentation of this administration of course has been of the Constitution itself.  The Constitution was never intended as a suicide pact with the executive branch.  Yet they have said that since the Constitution grants the President certain war powers, and since by their determination we are permanently at war, therefore the President may take the limited power the Constitution has granted him and expand it unrecognizably far beyond the limits of his own initial authorization.  By this time, his supporters say, the Constitution has granted him so much authority that the Constitution has scant authority over him at all.  Or, in other words, the authority of the Constitution is somehow used to authorize the erosion of it own existence.
   We have seen things like this before in certain authoritarian regimes where all information is controlled and all authority is consolidated to a central point, we have just never seen such systematic political sophistry and mendacity in our democracy before.  This takes the governance of the nation to the level of a game show or reality TV or radio talk show (a la Tony Snow) which says that all’s fair in politics and wartime and the end justifies any means where partisanship is defined as war and any American who disagrees with you, including the very people you’ve been hired to serve, is the enemy.  

3
   Some might say these undemocratic traits are just delusional or mad or stubborn or misguided, but unfortunately, devotion to such vapid untruth seems to be based on a clear headed tactical decision to deceive the people of the United States.  Many politicians in Washington today use information in government not to unite and serve the people but as just another partisan political tool of state and the government itself as a bludgeon to advantage themselves unfairly against the rest of society.  
   I don’t believe that their dishonesty is necessarily endemic to their character or that it bleeds over into other areas of moral relativity - to permit them such things as rape or bank robbery, for instance - but is rather the product of a moral relativism that they conveniently apply only in regard to democratic government.  
   Their actions and the errors these actions invariably lead to then, are the logical and predictable outgrowth of a series of tactical decisions that have each been subjectivized and taken to their illogical and self-defeating extremes. 
   Therefore, if you begin with a political premise that you are always right then no one who disagrees with you can ever be anything but wrong.  If you never ever admit mistakes, then all truth becomes expendable and news is a just a pliable game without rules you must play and even cheat at to win. Then facts become not stubborn things at all but magically become subjective to your wishes.  In this case you may always deny inconvenient truths and never acknowledge facts at variance with your own propaganda. Finally you have to believe that if you merely repeat untenable propositions over often enough they may become factual through sheer insistence and repetition.  
   If you are unwavering in following these unprincipled principles, I suppose what we have today is what your communication with the public invariably comes to look and act like.  
   Unfortunately, this makes the government a total vacuity replete with a complete absence of morals and ethics at its ever changeable core.  Facts are negotiable, truth has only a tangential relationship to actual events, and self-interestedness is the only long term goal their ethics acknowledge.  Amorality is institutionalized, ethics only sought to its lowest common denominator and objectivity, honesty and the service orientation of government are just collateral damage to the process.  These are the ethical and accounting procedures to the public of Enron. Perception is reality and reality is perception only as it is seen and expressed through the prism of your own eyes and your public duties are devoted only to furthering your own private political interests.
   This breeds an internal intellectual atrophy.  Rather than acquiring new blood and new ideas which could breathe new life into and overhaul the decaying system their bad procedures have created, cronies and second rate believers are hired from within the ranks with a stated determination to sustain their shared delusions as their chief requirement of employment.  The government has long since become a self-sustaining and an ongoing coverup of its own illusions and past mistakes.
   Before long, any such organization so organized begins a slow institutional implosion.  It is one thing to occasionally deny the reality of your errors but to always do so, after six years, with as many errors as this administration has made, means they have grown and compounded to unmanageable dimensions.  The Bush administration, then, for some time now has had to invest more in maintaining the old illusions and dealing with past mistakes than moving forward with new policies.  Its propaganda and partisanship have become self-sustaining ends in themselves and excellence and honesty for its own sake move farther away from a goal to be achieved. 
   In addition, the longer you reside in such a hall of mirrors world of your own devising, the more prone you are to see the world through your own warped and distorted lens of reality and the more flawed your decision making becomes.  More and more frequently ideology trumps ideals and the pursuit of excellence.  Some even start to disbelieve their own eyes in favor of their own lies.  This deceptional and delusional process of decision making is why so many of them, as in Iraq, seem so surprised now that the mirror of their own activities, including their own lies to initiate the war in the first place, have begun to turn so accusatorily against them.
As with all ethical short cuts in life, to make their jobs easier in the short run they have betrayed good procedure which makes their jobs impossible to do over the long haul.  By now this administration is as hollow as a shell and its credibility is rightly in ruins.

4
   Now the public will generally accept a few little white lies, a little spin, even an obvious and self-serving cover-up now and then from their political employees if they are competent in other ways.  After all, nobody’s perfect, we don’t expect flawlessness.  But these guys aren’t even trying.  C’mon, work with us a little bit here fellas.  No one’s naïve about a little political gloss or gossamer, or putting the best face on an inadvertent mistake or a tactical maneuver for legislative advantage, but this has gotten ridiculous. We all love to nurture a few illusions about the nature of our country, too, we each have a few prejudices here and there we like to inculcate, even to press unfair advantage or two of our own along the way when we can; we are a forgiving people when possible, but you’ve got to give us a little more to work with than this.
   Instead the White House and Congress has become Hogwarts on the Potomac where nothing is as it seems or is as it ever was before.  On the theory that what the people don’t know, or aren’t told, can’t hurt them (the administration, that is, not the people) in Bush, Cheney and Rove’s eyes the American people themselves rate as little more than “muggles” to their smug and superior understanding.  Ordinary citizens are just highly inconvenient props along the way to the grandeur of their own particular peculiar political aspirations - usually ignored, always distrusted and barely tolerated.
   Needless to say, this self serving, attitudinal hubris is foreign to democracy and represents a disastrous split from the basic necessary discipline and integrity of providing the accurate information a democracy requires from its leaders to make its decisions properly.  Imagine any other situation where an employee could treat their employer this way, as if truth was theirs to parcel and ours to find out, lies theirs to tell and facts fragile, fungible, indeterminable things left for us to deduce or uncover on our own?  
   In democracy the people, despite with what childish arrogance the President continues to spout the opposite, are the true deciders in the country.  He is just a servant, an employee and obviously, not a very effective one at that.  It is his job to give the American people the facts and truth as best he knows them to be, not as he wants them to be or not as they best suit his purposes.  This is what the premise of democracy is, collective decision making.  At this he has failed completely.
   As careless and dismissive of the truth as he has been he is just as sparing with self-analysis. In response to any question which requires mature reflection and analysis he shrugs insouciantly, adopts his best “what me worry” Alfred E. Neuman blank stare and says, “history will sort this out in fifty years”.  Not to overlook the obvious, that most of us will be dead in fifty years and could care less what happens then but, on the contrary, history happens now.  This is it for us, if history isn’t done right the first time it can never be repeated.  Unlike politics, history is real, this is not a game, perception is not reality and truth can’t be avoided with lies and facts can’t be covered up by being rewritten.
   After the last election, there have been a few new signs of change and openness in this administration, some softening of the rhetoric of contention, but not many.  When push comes quickly to shove, as it always will, this administration and its supporters still seem more interested in evasions, oversimplifications and tactical lying than in engaging in the hard work of plucking the grain of truth from the chaff of lies and bringing successful, hard fought and well thought out policies to fruition through the hard husbandry of democratic procedure.
   This is the householder’s dilemma.  What do you do when you catch the butler stealing time and again and there is no other butler around to replace him for another two years?   You watch him very closely, hem him in, demand accountability for everything, trust nothing he says or does and count the silverware when he goes.  Until then this administration hasn’t earned our trust and doesn’t deserve to have it given to them.
   Meanwhile, this administration does not exist in isolation.  Many of these dissembling tendencies and spin doctoring techniques did not originate with them and had been growing in usage prior to their arrival.  In Washington the moral malaise which produced them seems quite widespread.  The termites are in the foundation of government and the dry rot has spread to the rafters.  More and more departments of government today seem prone to the disease of systemic failure, a sure sign of years of neglect, lack of excellence and endemic unaccountability.  
   Unfortunately, the excesses and failures of the Bush administration are symptomatic of the disease not the disease itself.   We are beyond the point of being able to merely shift the pieces around on the chess board of a rigged game and expect the underlying moral failures that beset our elected officials to suddenly disappear.
Congress is mired in money, our elections are sterile exercises, and cynicism and denial are epidemic.  We need serious reform and stringent new standards of ethics to instill a new vitality of sacrifice, service, accountability and excellence in all branches of government.  Yet such reform seems somehow far above the known capacity of current members of our government to deliver.