State of the Union - More Rebuttal From the Real World

That's our man Jack S. again. These days, everything is about him, and inasmuch as it is government to whom we turn as we once did to god, it's religious. And someone – H.L. Mencken, I think – once observed, “Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.” "

Some time ago, a TV personality (is he a newsman? – I was still up in the woods, I guess) named Stephen Colbert supposedly coined a word, “truthiness.”

“Truthiness,” he said, is '”What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.' It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality.

"It used to be,” he continued, “everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the President because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?”

I guess there's not much doubt about that, is there?

It happens that I came across that quote from Colbert while researching Korsakoff's Syndrome, a mental condition you might say is that of a pathological liar. The latter, of course, while the expression in the vernacular for someone who thinks something is the truth as soon as he says it, is not – as far as I know – actually a clinical term. Still, I think of it every time I hear and watch George W. Bush speak publicly. One of the first people to be trained – actually, I started training myself while a student wrestler in high school, the better to size up my tournament opposition – and hired as am analyst of body language, our esteemed president is a study in confabulative prevarication. He is, in short, a pathological liar.

George W. Bush is so completely and thoroughly a liar that at times he is genuinely confused at the inability of those around him to recognize the truth he has just created. He believes it - why don't they recognize it? WHY CAN'T THEY MAKE IT WORK?

By the way, Korsakoff’s Syndrome is believed sometimes to be due a vitamin deficiency – do you suppose we could solve all our presidential problems by slipping the man a shot of Vitamin B?

But I digress. As someone (other than Mr. Colbert) once observed in the instance of William Jefferson Clinton, Mr. Bush’s predecessor – we just go from bad to worse, don’t we? – he is the perfect representative for a nation like this one, probably the numerically largest collection of liars in human history. Stephen Colbert was right, including his remark that it’s tearing us apart.

Unfortunately, I think there’s even more to it than just his “truthiness.” Watch television and you will not only hear it argued vehemently – FoxNews Sean Hannity, for instance – that fact is no longer a matter of the epistemological sciences, but one of political result. It's what he's trying to do. Truth is whatever people can be made to think it is. It’s whatever they’re happy with.

We vote to decide what is real.

And the government knows it, the reason the CIA Operation called Mockingbird was birthed in 1949 and continues today. There is absolutely no rational doubt - Occam’s Razor, anyone? - about it. Some while ago, I related having made a survey of the logical fallacies pumped through the “boob tube” to the public by television pundits and “analysts.” It’s a blizzard, certainly to a degree that must be suspected of purpose, and the purpose is deceit. Construction of a false reality.

During any given evening – even a time as short as an hour – you will see and hear:

Argument from False Authority — From generals whose military careers were spent in a branch of service having little or nothing to do with, for instance, the war in Iraq, to a “Doctors” whose degrees have utterly nothing to do with the topic.

One, again for instance, who gives all manner of psychological and sociological advice actually has a Ph.D. in physiology. You’ll also hear repeatedly from authors of books, people whose book research was entirely in other books, and who tout their book is touted with statements like “So and so read my book and loved it.” When you check, you learn that the author has forgotten to mention that “So and So” is a professor of Korea History, commenting on a book about Arab nationalism or the like.

FoxNews’ Bill O’Reilly, by the way, was a high school teacher, then a radio talk show host, and the like. His experience and expertise having to do with military strategy – especially guerrilla warfare like that we face in Iraq – you could get in your eye and it wouldn’t make you blink. You could probably say – like the guy whose “research” is other books on the same subject – that he has about as much authority when it come to “culture war” and being a “Culture Warrior” - the name of his latest book.

That book, by the way, he’ll send to our troops in Iraq – one for each one you buy.

No further comment.

Then, there’s Argument from False Dilemma — i.e., assuming that there are only two possible opinions on the subject. If you don’t recognize this one, you haven’t listened to much of what our president says, and damned little TV otherwise. It says, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us;" or, “If you’re not a conservative, you’re a liberal.” And, of course, “If you don’t support the war, you’re a traitor.”

That last brings us to Argument by Demonizing — identifying others as a mortal threat. If you don’t support the war, and/or you want to bring the troops home, you’re damaging their moral, and that’s treachery. Usually, the “analyst” – Sean Hannity just about every night of late, throws in this Argument by Scapegoating — everybody who’s not supporting the war is prolonging it. President Bush’s plan would be going better if it weren’t for your lack of support.

“Liberals,” (or conservatives - in this 'truthiness' thing, it's all about point of view) are to blame for the mess we’re in, and everybody who doesn’t agree with me is a liberal (or conservative). “Liberals” (or conservatives) are stereotyped to a fare-thee-well (if you don’t recognize the stereotype, you haven’t been listening) as people who only criticize the president, and “haven’t got a plan” (how many times have you heard that one?) for Iraq. Et cetera.

That last, incidentally is also known as false dilemma, portraying as it does any opposition group as having a value system that is the polar opposite of the “analyst’s” – rather than simply having different priorities.

Next is the Straw man Fallacy — mischaracterizing the opposing position, then making a case against the mischaracterization. A few weeks before the last election, for instance, Fox and the rest made a proving that anyone who voted for Democratic Party candidates were additionally supporting Osama bin Laden.

Then we have what I’ve come to refer to as the “Hannity Question.” It’s otherwise known as the Loaded Question Fallacy — posing a question that implies or ascribes a position that the opponent does not hold. "How long have you refused to support the troops?"

And how long have you heard that one, in one form or another, on television?

Among the most frequent of them all, most annoying, too – for me, anyway – is the Irrelevant Conclusion. In this one, the “newsman” or “journalist” makes an argument or arguments totally unrelated to the topic of discussion. When he has proved one thing, he announces that he’s just proved another. “I never said that!” he says, even proving it with a tape of a segment other than the one in question to prove it. That he did say it in another is something for the audience to discover, apparently. How dishonest can you be?

Recognize anybody, by the way?

The last (there are many more, but I’m tired of the subject – getting myself pissed off here) is one guy’s chief stock in trade, so much so that you’ll recognize his “No Spin” at once. It’s known as Argument by Emotional Appeal and (or) Personal Attack — attempting to bring a discussion to an emotional level "Everyone” (the New York Times, for instance) :is against me!" "That’s – or , when the guest makes a particularly telling point, “You’re - stupid!" "Turn off his mike!” Sometimes, it comes down to one form or other of the old classic retort, "Shut up!" High class stuff. And just as honest.

Oh, yeah – one more. This one I love, laugh all the way through the show at the antics of one little Afro-American (black? – frankly, I’m getting tired of trying to guess which term is the acceptable one lately) woman on the Paula Zahn Show. This gal simply won’t let anyone but herself talk. Smiling, anticipating and relishing now wonderful she will seem, she waits to pounce. The instant she sees that her opponent is about to speak, she shouts him down with one or the other of what must be a bookful of slogan-arguments she has memorized. The fact that her choice happens to be a mindlessly diametrical non sequitur deters her not one wit. That one you could call Argument by Blizzard of Bullshit, I think.

This stuff also includes almost invariably things like the old Apples and Oranges mix. Nowhere is it more in evidence than where the topic is federal spending, where in order to make one number appear more or less than another, the “host” or “analyst” jumps back and forth between cardinal numbers and percentages, avoiding the absolute value that will permit a real comparison. In a nation as innumerate as this one, it’s a very effective tactic for preying with political purpose.

The statistics method of lying includes the Half-Truth Argument. That one – a favorite of none other than Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister and the inventor of the Big Lie method - is the trivially true statement, one true only in a strict and relatively meaningless sense. One of my kids – the guy with the high IQ – tried to “con” his mom one night when he reported that he hadn’t left a single “veggie” on his plate during supper at a friend's house.

You guessed it – when I asked, he admitted (Aaron was always as honest as can be) that there hadn’t actually been any vegetables on his plate. All of nothing is still nothing (but then, if you heard the president's speech, you know that).

On television, the Half Truth argument one will sound something like, “we’ve increased spending on intelligence gathering ten billion dollars since taking office, while the previous administration accuses us of cutting funding for the CIA.” See if you can spot the fallacy (you should – you hear this one just about every day).

Every night now, we hear the Appeal to Fear. It's the hallmark of the Bush Administration. Iran is about to achieve a nuclear weapon. Think about that. What would they do with it? Attack Israel? Israel with as many as two hundred nukes? What? – they’d invade the U.S.?

Yeah, I know – they’d “destabilize the region.” Explain to me what that means (you can explain it to yourself before you try it on me). It comes out to “keep us from getting and keeping control” – doesn’t it? All that oil?

Tell me, while you’re at it, what the war we’re waging in Iraq is doing to “stabilize.” When has the “region” ever been less “stable?” Tell me why you think the twenty-two million people we’re keeping in the worst kind of misery imaginable here on earth (how would you handle being in danger of obliteration by explosives, kidnapping and murder by beheading - even small stuff like only three hours of electricity a day?) will remember us kindly – even if they do manage to come up with some kind of democracy. And while we’re on the subject of that last, explain to me how you operate a democracy in an Islamic country, where a religion as draconian and inexorable as Islam mandates that clerics decide anything and everything they want to decide. Do it all by yourself, with just the logic and the numbers of the thing. Oh, by all means, look up the history of Islam, for instance, but otherwise, just use your own head.

Have fun, but remind yourself that you’re all by yourself, there in your head. No popular opinions, no consensus to tell you what to think, or rely on. Try this - pretend the product the president was selling the other night – war and the military industrial complex’s weapons - was a car or any of the myriad of other things that make watching television so infuriatingly impossible nowadays. Stay away from Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” and reality by political consensus and you’ll discover that the State of the Union Address was nothing more than Big Brother’s Big Lie – Operation Mockingbird.

You’ll see that it’s really just a sales job, and what they’re selling is their version of fact, and reality. What they’re selling is a break with reality.

Craziness.

Insanity.

Think!

(When reality gets you by the throat, you're all by yourself - ALWAYS!)