The Long Con

Digby is fuming today, and justifiably so. Dick Cheney is laying the groundwork for the administration’s endgame in the Middle East with appeals to the historical “long run,” that mythological concept used to justify all kinds of notorious quick-stepping. In short, the wisdom of history is supposed to vindicate everything. Would you buy a used car from these people? Anyway, like I say, Digby is not happy:

Allowing Nixon to get away with his crimes while his fellow Republicans angrily stewed over the injustice of his downfall is what led to the ongoing usurpation of the constitution under Republican rule. They believe the president is above the law and the constitution. Why wouldn’t they? They do these things and there’s no accountability so they do it again the first chance they get, always upping the ante. When they finally lose an election and take a breather from illegal wars and pillaging and shredding the constitution, the Democrats are so busy beating back political attacks and trying to clean up the mess that they decide accountability isn’t worth it. They “bind up the wounds” allowing the infection to fester until the next time it happens.

Cheney thinks that history vindicated Ford and therefore history will vindicate him too. Not in a million years. History will show that from Nixon to the Codpiece, the Republican Party has been progressively more criminal and more aggressively undemocratic and imperialistic. But the problem is, to quote our Dear Leader(ironically paraphrasing Keynes and not even knowing it) “history … we’ll all be dead.” And unfortunately, a lot of people are dead much sooner than they need to be because people like Dick Cheney know they can get away with murder.

Provocative times call for provocative language. Pick a scandal from the last seven years; what people actually did in that case you selected is far worse than some passionate bitterness on a blog. But the credibility imbalance is essentially infinite. Cheney is beyond the reach of reason because they’ve normalized irrational frames of reference and cloaked them in the trappings of officially sanctioned patriotism. Cheney admits openly that they don’t care about public opinion (never have); they essentially control the justice department, even post-Gonzalez, and can obfuscate as necessary; billions of dollars have shifted from the middle class to Cheney’s own economic class; and they will never be held to account for any of the suffering that comes from this legacy. History will judge, of course, but Dick’s even being disingenuous about that: he doesn’t care what history says any more than he cares what the present says.

These are partisan perspectives, obviously, and however factual they may be—they’re not as offensively fictional as, say, the administration’s statements paving the way for war—there is a price to be paid for saying them. My meaningless opinion can do me more harm, professionally, than just ignoring what’s going on. That’s the final irony. The system works beautifully to suppress a wide range of dissent and there’s a whole generation (or two) of media institutions helping to make Cheney’s elite perspectives into common sense.

Explore posts in the same categories: 2008 Election, Color Commentary, Foreshadowing, Journalistic Ethics, Kabuki, Misdirection, Phantom News, Political Discourse