Cheneyan Doublethink and Newspeak

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised Dick Cheney has the gall to come out and publicly defend torture of detainees by American authorities. As far back as I can remember, from McCarthy to Tricky Dick and Spiro, to Gingrich and Ken Starr, to Cheney, Alberto Gonzalez and Karl Rove...and that drooling idiot in the corner with the lace collar and the propeller hat..., these guys on the far right have been utterly shameless. So why should I expect an dirty old dog to suddenly learn new tricks?

Cheney refers to water boarding by the sanitizing euphemism, "enhanced interrogation techniques." He does this despite the fact that current, effective statutory law, judicial rulings and international treaties unambiguously define water boarding as torture. Let's leave aside the fact that Abu Zubaydah was "interrogatorily enhanced" over 80 times in one month.

According to Cheney, however, when Cheney calls water boarding an "enhanced interrogation technique," suddenly and magically it is no longer torture, not illegal, not a horrendous way to treat a captive human being.

Cheney's coinage is a classic example of "Newspeak" a central weapon in the totalitarian propaganda arsenal, illustrated so indelibly in George Orwell’s novel, 1984. With Newspeak, something is not what it is simply because the government authorities say so. To challenge the government’s statement is to commit a treasonous act, to invites government scrutiny and police intrusion into one's life ... like having all of one's phone calls and internet transmissions tapped, without a warrant.

Oh wait. They did that.

A self-proclaimed minion of "the Dark Side," Cheney has never wavered in his staunchly optional relationship to factual accuracy and, well, reality. If he could, he would suck the entire world into the black hole that is his psyche, so we all might play a part in the dark puppet show of Cheney's most paranoid fantasies. Combine Cheney's contempt for facts with Karl Rove's head for political strategy; add in their mutual appreciation of the manipulative power of fear, and you've got one diabolical formula: Strategic Mendacity -- a pattern of making stuff up to exploit people's fears.

Here is how strategic mendacity works: Put forth false factual assertions that justify one's position and put the burden on your opposition to marshal the facts necessary to set the record straight. Blanket the world with bullshit, and leave it to your opponent to dig the fuck out. Strategic mendacity has proven exceedingly effective, particularly in the period following 9-11, when overflowing wells of fear throughout the American public primed the field for absorption of megatons of bullshit.

It's a brilliant diversionary tactic. Instead of openly debating matters of policy and law on the merits, the Rovians mine the field of public discourse with factual misrepresentations, deliberately planted to mire the opposition in the effort required to expose and debunk the lies. It's a dirty tactic that works like a progressive tax on the opposition. Valuable time and effort that could be spent on positive efforts towards change and progress get wasted instead on Republican Roto-Rooter Research duty, sifting through the sewage.

Which leads me to one of my favorite pieces of Rovian Newspeak -- We are fighting this "War on Terrorism" in order to preserve and protect our freedom. Meanwhile, the government taps Americans' phones without probable cause, turns air travel into a universal stop-and-frisk, and obliterates core constitutional principles like the presumption of innocence and freedom of assembly.

We're preserving and protecting our freedoms by setting up a second judicial system, a shadow system of justice, outside the jurisdictional reaches of the United States Constitution, unbound by the need for a speedy trial, legal representation, the right to confront one's accuser, the right to due process or any hearing at all, prior to the deprivation of a human being's liberty or property. And this is all okay.

Newspeak. Doublethink.

Strategic mendacity, like "Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction," drove us into an unnecessary war in which thousands of young Americans gave their lives and still more their limbs, their mental health, their ability to support their families and to simply enjoy life. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives were wiped out, blithely dismissed as “collateral damage” in the greater battle for "freedom" or to wipe out WMD...or whatever.

Let us not forget, for years the Bush-Cheney administration fought the release of the numbers on Iraqi casualties. They sought to keep from us crucial information bearing on our personal responsibility as citizens of a democratic country, waging war upon the people of a foreign land. As far as the Bush-Cheney administration was concerned, the First Amendment to the Constitution simply would be on hold for as long as Bush-Cheney could make their state of emergency endure.

It is nothing short of an outrage that the connection between Iraq, Al Qaeda and the "War on Terror" -- the entire justification for going to war -- was one Big Lie after another, backed by intentionally-stilted intelligence reports, cooked up to provide after-the-fact support for foregone conclusions dictated by Bush, Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Saddam had weapons of mass destruction because Dick-Bush-Rummy said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and the patriotism of anyone who would question this claim is inherently suspect. Newspeak.

One particularly galling aspect of strategic mendacity is that the mainstream media, in a misguided effort to "fairly represent both sides of an issue," habitually give equal billing and air time to the psychotic claims of the Cheney-Rovites. Their arguments are deemed newsworthy not because they are factually sound but because of their entertainment value.

This was the unintended consequence of the side-by-side coverage of the May 21 speeches of Dick Cheney and President Obama. The entertainment value of the cage fight death match elevated Dick Cheney, a personage who should be shrinking into obscurity in disgrace, to the same level of public relevance as President Obama. This "even-steven" approach to coverage confers an undeserved legitimacy upon Cheney and the toxic bullshit he shamelessly disseminates to the American public.

Let us also not forget that when Joseph Wilson published credible evidence questioning the accuracy of the Dick-Bush WMD claims, the Administration – indeed Cheney – responded by deliberately blowing the cover of Valerie Plame, an active intelligence officer of the CIA! This is the same Vice President who had the gall to fault both President Obama and Nancy Pelosi on their support of the CIA. Simply mindbending, eye-crossing, head-exploding gall. Chutzpah.

Newspeak.

An old saying among trial lawyers holds: "A jury will forgive a witness anything, except for a lie." One lie, and anything else the witness might say will be dismissed as non-credible and worthless. If a witness will lie about one thing; he will lie about anything.

With that in mind, it is dumbfounding to me that either Rove or Cheney has the nerve to show themselves in public, let alone to speak on any subject, when the American public has countless examples of reasons to never credit another single word that Cheney or Rove may utter.