Politics, Sales, Rhetoric ... America
Captain Kremmen said:
So when he said:
"As President, I will close Guantanamo, reject the Military Commissions Act and adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists. "-
he wasn't being entirely factual, was he?
Well, it's hard to figure what your point is, there.
Most Americans understand a thing or two about campaign rhetoric, and if we want to have that discussion now, perhaps it's time. However, it would not be of any benefit if we were to undertake that discussion from so ignorant a perspective.
That is to say, back when we were electing
white men to the White House, people understood the difference between campaign rhetoric and reality.
Nobody ever crucified Bob Dole for saying he would use his presidential authority to effectively destroy the First Amendment; everybody knew the old white guy was making a point about pop lyrics that we had been hearing over and over again. If Bob Dole was going to stop Sistah Souljah, he was going to need Congress to do it.
It's entirely possible Candidate Obama overestimated congressional Democrats, who eventually joined their Republican colleagues in faithlessness.
But it's true, when he said all that, he wasn't being entirely factual.
To the other, it
was, at the time, a reasonable presumption that Americans understood the difference.
However, the years since have corrected that notion. To listen to all the chicken littles out there telling me the sky is falling, one might think no president has ever failed to deliver on a campaign promise because his congressional allies weren't ready to back him.
Look ...
really. Fine. People want to change the standards for the black man in the White House, that's their own business. But the idea that the rest of us have to pretend to be so goddamn naïve in order to accommodate the newfound disabilities our conservative neighbors are experiencing is excremental.
I've learned to never believe that the political discourse can't get any less intellectual, any more stupid, useless, or delusional than it already is. And I learned that because of conservatives. It's worrisome in a way, because it suggests I'm coming to believe that humanity is perfectly capable of dancing over the edge like lemmings, but, in truth,
lex parsimonae suggests someone has come to a conclusion that dumbing down the public discourse to the point of dysfunction benefits their interests.
It's been over four years since one of my conservative neighbors explained that racism has nothing to do with opposition to Obama, and even implied that it was the president's fault that from the time before he was even president his radical leftism was so tyrannical that good, decent, respectable people had nothing left to lob at him but racism. I mention this because one would think this sort of perspective some manner of outlier, except its devices keep coming up over and over and over again, and I think of that
post so moronic I couldn't tell you whether I hope it's real or a lie because I can't figure out whether the world is better off if my neighbor is so overtly evil or so overtly stupid every time I hear of some new
racist political outburst:
They're not really
racist. It's that evil Barack Obama's fault for forcing those good, decent people to act like racists.
Now, that particular line is something of an achievement; much like the ice cream bar soliloquy, the thirteen rakes, throwing Lois down the stairs, and other occasional outrages that remind me of that old phrase from childhood, "You can't do that on television!" our neighbor has set a standard. If Sciforums disappeared tomorrow, and I never encountered him again, and I lived to be a thousand years old, I would always remember that particular point on the curve, when somebody actually tried to seriously make that particular argument to me.
The short version is that four years later I see our neighbor was not an outlier but a harbinger of things to come. That idiocy
was the writing on the wall, the portent, the forewarning of what was coming. He's hardly the prototype or archetype, but he his hardly an outlier; these factions are having their day in the sun.
Which might lead us out of this overlong post: My political conscience has been active essentially since the 1980 presidential election. In the twenty-eight years that followed, the electorate demonstrated a certain set of relatively consistent behaviors. 'Tis true some of those destabilized in the nineties, but something new started happening as the Obama presidency became possible and then real. Perhaps it is also symptomatic of defending the Bush years, and without those some of this wouldn't have happened, but it's almost like a perfect storm of accidentally coincident factors regarding what people will tolerate of their government. The Bush years broke a bunch of stuff, coming on top of the Clinton years, in which conservatives broke a bunch of stuff.
That's fine, if it's time to have the conversation about various aspects of our political society, the nods and winks, the nudges and quiet glances.
It is, however, coincident with Obama's presidency that we are somehow supposed to believe this is all
new behavior.
Thus prefaced, to revisit your point—
So when he said:
"As President, I will close Guantanamo, reject the Military Commissions Act and adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists. "-
he wasn't being entirely factual, was he?
—the first answer is, "You're fucking kidding me, right?"
And in the second second, "Well, sure, but what, exactly, is your point?'
And then the third thing to mind: "What, really?
Really? This isn't a joke?"
The best answer I can give you, though, is to simply say:
Sure, he was promising too much, but there was a time, as early as the beginning of this century, that people could tell the difference. We have, for generations, condoned and endorsed that kind of campaign rhetoric. If it is time to have the discussion about whether or not we will continue to accept such campaign rhetoric from candidates at all levels throughout our society, then it is time to have that discussion. It would not serve us well, however, to subvert the discussion from the outset by adopting observably inaccurate presuppositions.
Oh, I'm sorry, did I say simply? Did I break a promise, or now that the question is asked—because people can no longer understand what they've been doing for years—it becomes a bit more complicated than the question initially suggests?
