Lies, Damned Lies, and Republicans

The Republicans opened their convention yesterday in Tampa. There, says Charles Pierce, they—

... set out on an experiment to see exactly how much unmitigated hogwash the American political system can contain on a single evening. The Republican Party has set out at its 2012 convention in search of the Event Horizon of utter bullshit. It has sought to see precisely how many lies, evasions, elisions, and undigestible chunks of utter gobbledegook the political media can swallow before it finally gags twice and falls over dead, leaving the rest of America suckers all the same.

Pierce has much more to say, including how—

It was an entire evening based on a demonstrable lie. It was an entire evening based on demonstrable lies told in service to the overriding demonstrable lie. And there was only one real story for actual journalists to tell at the end of it.

The Republicans simply don't care.

They don't care that they lie. They don't care that their lies are obvious. They don't care that their lies wouldn't fool an underpaid substitute Social Studies teacher in a public middle school, who would then probably go out one night and get yelled at by Chris Christie. ("They believe in teacher's unions. We believe in teachers," he said in his speech. Yeah, you just don't believe in paying them.) They don't care that their history is a lie and that, by spreading it, they devalue the actual history of the country, which is something that belongs to us.

On the other hand, as commenter Barry Friedman points out—

Thomas Carlyle once said, "No lie can live forever," and last night, the GOP said, "We just need it to live till November."

I read Hitler: A Study in Tyranny during Karl Rove's years [to date] in the White House. Although the concept of "The Big Lie" tends to be linked to Goebbels, Alan Bullock's quotes from Mein Kampf show that it was Hitler who first grasped just how to go about it.

This passage is merely GOP 101—and the last point shows how their forerunner set Turdblossom, et. al., on their course—

The first and most important principle for political action laid down by Hitler is: Go to the masses. 'The movement must avoid everything which may lessen or weaken its power of influencing the masses ... because of the simple fact that no great idea, no matter how sublime or exalted, can be realized in practice without the effective power which reside in the popular masses.'

Since the masses have only a poor aquaintance with abstract ideas, their reactions lie more in the domain of the feelings, where the roots of their positive as well as their negative attitudes are implanted.... The emotional grounds of their attitude furnish the reason for their extraordinary stability. It is always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge. And the driving force which has brought about the most tremendous revolutions on this earth has never been a body of scientific teaching which has gained power over the masses, but always a devotion which has inspired them, and often a kind of hysteria which has urged them into action. Whoever wishes to win over the masses must know the key that will open the door to their hearts. It is not objectivity, which is a feckless attitude, but a determined will, backed up by power where necessary.

Hitler is quite open in explaining how this is to be achieved. 'The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas.... Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of a crowd.'

When you lie, tell big lies. This is what the Jews do [Bullock summarizes], working on the principle, 'which is quite true in itself, that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily, and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters, but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. ... The grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down.' (Bullock, pp 69-70; 1964 ed., Harper and Row)

Journalistic Integrity

I came here for the "Planet Money"/Adam Davidson low-down (via this Tbogg must-read).

Take an audience of NPR fans that tunes in for liberal marching orders.

Feed them breezy explanations that in Wall Street crime "everyone"—therefore, no one—is to blame...

Now, who would have imagined that Davidson is on the payroll of "Ally Bank (the artist formerly known as GMAC) and they are kind of bad people..." (Tbogg)

I stayed for the Malcom Gladwell exposé, and subsequent exchange with the great writer himself.

I've glanced at Gladwell's stuff in the past, and found it unreadably shallow trend-marketing. Who knew: yet another Canadian who emigrated very successfully to the wingnut welfare side of the border, and has a long, lucrative history to those connections.

Well, he certainly would have those connections, if S.H.A.M.E. is correct in naming him "America's Most Successful Propagandist."

Or perhaps Gladwell just writes the one true science (unlike, for example, the efforts of what Charles Pierce calls "the greedy, Lamborghini-driving scientists behind the Great Climate Change Hoax.")

Thank god there still is journalistic integrity in this country.

After all, the public was recently made safe from fake Bob Dylan quotes.

Company Town

Chevron refinery fire, Richmond, CA
Photo: Tom Butt, SFGate

Richmond fire, viewed from Tiburon
Photo: John Storey, SF Chronicle

Local news in Northern California.

Among other details, 4,540 residents needed medical attention—

Investigators looking into the fire at the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond suspect that heat insulation around a leaking pipe contributed to the disaster by masking the extent of the danger until it was too late, The Chronicle has learned.

By underestimating the size of the leak, initially believed to be about 20 drips per minute, officials kept operating the refinery's large crude unit, where crude oil is separated under heat reaching 1,100 degrees.

... The company has been criticized for running the plant for two hours Monday afternoon after a worker first spotted the leak....

...

...in response to an estimated 4,540 residents who sought medical care after Monday's fire, Chevron will open a claims office Friday in Richmond to process applications for payments to cover medical expenses and property damage.

Background and context, courtesy of Democracy Now.

From interviews with Richmond Mayor (and Green Party member) Gayle McLaughlin, and environmental justice activist Andres Soto, on the hazardous over hundred-year old refinery and Chevron's history with the town—

AMY GOODMAN:
Chevron occupies over 13% of Richmond’s land, and according to the California Air Resources Board, emits more greenhouse gas pollution than any other facility in California. Many who grew up in the refinery’s shadow have memories of illnesses caused by spills. Community activists have also accused Chevron of using its local economic clout to minimize taxes and skirt environmental regulations. ...
...

GAYLE MCLAUGHLIN: ... This situation is totally unacceptable that every few years we have these disastrous situations with fires and impact on the health of our community....

ANDRES SOTO: ...Realistically, what we have seen is nothing but spin out of the refinery. On the one hand they apologized to the community is how they always lead their statements off. But, realistically, they came out and they were blaming the same community and the environmentalists for them not being able to modernize and upgrade their operations there at the Richmond refinery when in fact, we know that this unit, the crude unit that actually caught on fire and blew up, it was never part of that upgrade program. They could have ensured the safety of this thing in general. But it is that mendacity, the misrepresentation of the truth that Chevron is engaging in that makes it very difficult to deal with them. They refuse to negotiate in good faith with the committee over a wide range of issues, whether it is fair taxation or whether it's environmental safety and environmental justice....

National story: "Refinery fire; price of gas to increase on West Coast."

Putting THEM On Welfare

I caught this dog whistle on NPR this morning: Republican candidate speaks: the president is a darkie; therefore, welfare queens everywhere...

"Welfare" scarcely exists for even the neediest—as anyone living in the real world the last twenty years can observe. But reality is not to be spoken of publicly; here's Charles Pierce on that, from a few months back.

The Republican whistling is a two-fer, as one of Pierce's posts today suggests : the base is hearing the darkies are on welfare—and ACORN is registering register them to vote...

Marching Orders

Charles Pierce: on Romney's missing tax returns; the venom of "journalists" against Harry Reid for mentioning the subject; and how—as the media swallowed the bait of Vince Foster's "murder" and all that followed—"the bizarre attacks on Barack Obama were rehearsed by the entire political world between the years 1992 and 2000."

Sadly, the only surprise about this was that investigators immediately deemed the massacre domestic terrorism.

But the terrorist, it turns out, was well-known to the FBI, the SPLC, and others following the activities of white supremacists. That list includes criminologist Pete Simi, who interviewed Page while researching the hate music scene. Simi notes Page's connection with the military; that's one likely reason the "domestic terrorism" designation should soon be dropped.

Digby notes who is being allowed to decide the national etiquette toward mass murders.

Athenae, on What It's Time To Talk About—

No, it is not time to talk about gun control. It is time to talk about Chick-fil-A, and whether the president is secretly a communist, socialist, or Kenyan Muslim Marxist.

...

It is not time to talk about how we can be a less fearful society, a less aggressive society, a less fucking STUPID society, because that seems to require a reach and an ambition so critically lacking in those who task themselves with leading those conversations that we might as well pray for the EASTER BUNNY to save us. It makes about as much sense.

It's not time to talk about gun control. It's time to talk about what fried chicken you should eat to honor America's freedom. It is time to talk about that.

The Olympics continue offering public distraction—and there's NBC's cheesy filler, whenever not enough Americans are in the spotlight.

And, please, let's not have to hear about the socialistic National Health Service that so oppresses the British.

Charles Pierce caught the (non-American) human interest story bumped so NBC could "lard up their coverage"

with paeans to the moment in 1983 when Ronald Reagan arranged to liberate Grenada from the clutches of Cuban construction workers. This preposterous episode was treated by the NBC crew as though it were D-Day, and, yes, I'm aware that it is now a national holiday in Grenada, but I suspect, if they'd looked hard enough, they might have found some people there who are still dubious about our glorious triumph. Perhaps the relatives of the people in the mental hospital that we accidentally bombed. We'd all have been proud of it at the time, except that the administration clamped down on any independent coverage whatsoever, including that of, you know, NBC News.

(And that is not even to mention the possibility that St. Ronnie needed a successful distraction from the fact that, two days earlier, 241 of the Marines he'd sent to Lebanon on an ill-defined mission, and housed in a base with not much of a security perimeter, had been blown up in their barracks by terrorists sponsored by Iran, a state to which he was covertly selling missiles at the time.)

Views From a Do-Gooder

"If we could land the Rotary Club on the moon, we are certainly capable of making solar energy cheaply. Any president who followed this sort of scenario might be killed; but that's not as important as actually having done something that the Owners did not want done but once done even they would be happy." - Gore Vidal, 1976

"1981: the ever-political Vidal out in support of a Writers Guild strike, in front of the Twentieth Century Fox headquarters"– The Guardian, Gore Vidal: a life in pictures
Photograph: Mega Productions/Rex Features

I keep going back to the 1980 Views From a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal, compiled from interviews of the 1960s-70s, selected and arranged by Robert Stanton, and edited by Stanton and Vidal. Vidal's observations on America—his main subject of fiction, essays, and public appearances—range through history, politics, the ruling class, journalism, education.
Troughout so public a career, Vidal corrected interviewers' perceptions of him and his work, as in a 1975 interview with Oui [pp 257-8]. When Vidal said he had wanted to be President—

OUI: But you need sincerity, which you hate.

VIDAL: I hate hypocrisy, not sincerity.

OUI: You like the power?

VIDAL: Obviously. To change things.

OUI: But you're not a do-gooder. Or are you?

VIDAL: If you don't see that I am, you've missed the point of my career and it's too late for me to advertise. I write essays, lecture, go on television in order to change the society.

OUI: Do you really believe in the possibility of change?

VIDAL: Change occurs all the time. Nothing ever remains the same, with the possible exception, as someone said, of the avant-garde theatre.

Last Citizen of The Old Republic

Though in declining health and wheelchair-bound for some years, he outlived Buckley.

The Best Man is a Broadway hit again; theaters will dim their marquee lights tonight.

I find myself returning to his essays so often that I assumed I might be reading Gore Vidal when the news of his death came, as it did on July 31.

As it happens, I'd been re-reading Robert Stanton's book (with Vidal), a compilation of excerpts from nearly twenty years of interviews. Published in 1980, Vidal's thoughts on history and a range of topics are timely as ever.

Serious comments around the Web are on the lines of "I miss him already," and I feel the same way about the loss of Vidal's voice. Some thoughts from Digby and Roy Edroso.

With Vidal being remembered for his TV appearances, it's painful to remember that there once was some time allowed for articulate thought. If the medium has always been one of huckstering, Vidal understood how to turn that to his own purposes. From a 1977 interview, cited in Views From a Window (p 142)—

...it's interesting talking on television. I pick a general direction I want to go in. Now you can't get on the tube unless you're hustling something, so I have to pretend to be selling a book a book or play. I get that over as quickly as possible. I've even stopped Johnny Carson in the middle of a conversation about the book to get on to the attorney general's crimes. In a funny way, television is the only way you can get to people... on television your voice is actually heard without an intermediary.

The chance of "getting to people... without an intermediary" on network TV seems incredible now, though when asked by the interviewer if "network powers" ever tried to keep him off shows, Vidal replied—

They don't like me, and Dick Cavett told me that the blacklist still goes on... that periodically, [at ABC] he would be given a list of people not to have on, and sometimes I would be on that list. Then, for no reason at all, I'd be off it. Nobody ever figured out the rationale for it. But there is indeed a blacklist, and it does continue.

Despite political and sexual antipathy to him, Vidal was considered entertaining enough to be on TV regularly in the '60s and '70s: an era that now seems about as distant as the various centuries in which his historic novels are set.

The better part of this in August 1 NYT was the first couple of comments, including—

Anarchteacher, Tulsa, OK:

"Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Oratore, II, c. 80 B. C.

Gore Vidal was our American Cicero. He valiantly stood as our golden shield of republican virtue against the brassy sword of empire yielded by plutocratic militarists and their vulgar plebeians. He was the national conscience, unrelenting in reminding the citizenry of its lost historical memory in this "United States of Amnesia." Something great has gone out of the world with his passing.

"Since I recall pre-imperial Washington, I am a bit of an old republican in the Ciceronian mode, given to decrying the corruption of the simpler, saner city of my youth." — The New York Review of Books, April 29, 1982); included in At Home: Essays 1982-1988 (p 5); this may also be in Vidal's later collection of essays, United States.

Vidal's 2008 remarks on Buckley's death expressed his contempt for the deceased. Typical of his late writing, the column rambled, yet ended with the blend of erudition and truth-telling we could expect from Vidal—

The unique mess that our republic is in can be, in part, attributed to a corrupt press whose roots are in mendacious news (sic) magazines like Time and Newsweek, aided by tabloids that manufacture fictional stories about actual people. This mingling of opinion and fiction has undone a media never devoted to truth. Hence, the ease with which the Republican smear-machine goes into action when they realize that yet again the party’s permanent unpopularity with the American people will cause them defeat unless they smear individually those who question the junk that the media has put into so many heads. Anyone who says "We gotta fight 'em over there or we're gonna have to fight 'em over here." This absurdity has been pronounced by every Republican seeking high office. The habit of lying is now a national style that started with "news" magazines that was further developed by pathological liars that proved to be "good" Entertainment on TV. But a diet of poison that has done none of us any good.

I speak ex cathedra now, ad urbe et orbe, with a warning that no society so marinated in falsity can long survive in a real world.