Grounded in Unreality
Sent July 15, 2004

 
Alan Keyes is living proof of the fact that a supposedly intelligent man with an advanced degree from an Ivy League school can still have a grating personality and be pretty stupid when it comes to dealing with people. There’s nothing politically smart, for example, about gratuitously insulting the daughter of your own party’s vice-presidential candidate. George W. Bush, on the other hand, is proof that someone who botched his education at an Ivy League school that he never could have enrolled in on his own merits can still be pretty clever about conning the public by being a seemingly nice, decisive guy about it.

That’s the big difference between Keyes and Bush the Lesser, and what makes the latter more politically effective than the former. What they have in common, though, is scarier: they’re bold, decisive, and speak from strong conviction — about all the wrong things, for all the wrong reasons, and they’re both devastatingly divorced from reality. These guys are so out of it, they wouldn’t recognize a reality check if it punched them in the nose — all the more reason they need one (the reality check, or the punch in the nose? Take your pick).

Here’s the question all voters should force themselves to answer before they enter a voting booth: what good is decisiveness and conviction if you’re decisive about (and convinced of) all the wrong things? What good is it if a man acts boldly but stupidly, because virtually everything he believes and acts upon has been repeatedly shown to be untrue? That’s exactly what Bush the Lesser has been doing for four years — while the polls continue to reward him for it.

If a fool does this on the street and hurts no one but himself, that’s one thing. When he does it as the chief executive of the world’s major superpower and international economic engine — and trashes our relationships with nearly every major ally, spends so much money while giving useless tax breaks to the rich that it will take us 40 to 50 years to dig out from under the national debt (if we ever do), mortgages the future of our children, panders to the powerful corporate elite while the middle class and the poor pay for it, deliberately misleads people about any connection between the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq or between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden (you remember him, the guy who was really behind 9/11?), lies to get us into an unnecessary war that members of his own party say he was contemplating months before September 11 occurred, and ruins or ends thousands of lives in the process — that’s quite another.

There are some impeachable offenses here, much more serious ones than the one that got Bill Clinton into trouble. Wouldn’t leading the nation into war under false pretenses count more than, say, fibbing about oral sex in the Oval Office so that your wife won’t find out and kill you? Remember: when Clinton lied, nobody died — but W. has blood on his hands, more of it with every passing day, and those Iraqi civilians who happen to be innocent still have to live in the middle of the war that Bush created, as do our troops and those of the few allies we still have left. And we’re not even counting the average Americans who have been punished by — or died because of — one or another policy or cutback that Bush-Cheney instituted so that their friends and financial supporters could line their pockets. Nor are we talking about the ballooning national debt, being bought up largely these days by Asian banks and the occasional Arab potentate, which Shrub in his dementia created by not being able to do math (what, you mean he can’t cut taxes and spend ten times what he’s taking in without the debt becoming a national security issue?? Yep, pretty much).

For all of this, the war in Iraq has served as cover and as a huge distraction, to keep us, the public, off topic. But it’s gone on for this long because we let it.

What is most disturbing to me is the unreasonable degree to which average Americans — voters in particular — are unwilling to hold W. accountable for either his stupidity or his sins. Because they perceive him as likeable, as decisive, as having convictions, to this they attribute some kind of moral value. Never mind that that they seem to be doing this in an ethical void or that much of what he says he believes is a demonstrable lie — or that he’s been forced to take back what he’s said or backtrack on what he’s done multiple times (on Iraq, for example) precisely because he’s been proven wrong each time. Anybody remember W. going back and forth on the intelligence czar issue (sure smells like flip-flopping, doesn’t it)?

Remarkably, being proven wrong doesn’t stop Shrub from believing untrue things and repeating the lies to us. How many 9/11 commissions does it take for him to admit he was wrong about a connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein? And how many speaking tours do members of the 9/11 commission have to undertake before people stop giving him a pass for lying about connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda? Even the Republicans on the commission concede that Bush is wrong about this — so why do people still think his convictions are so great? An objective observer would conclude that either Bush or the voters (or possibly both) are delusional.

The fact that a deluded man really believes his delusions doesn’t mean he’s right, or that we should reward his convictions — quite the contrary, it usually means we send him off to get disabused of his notions and treatment for his condition. The main difference between a deluded neurotic in the street and a hallucinating president is that the latter can do far more damage. So why reward delusion with a second term instead of a prescription and a referral to a good shrink?

Possibly because admitting that W. is delusional might mean that we’d have to admit our own political illusions — like that we can have our own personal tax cuts and not increase the budget deficit or add to the national debt, or that we don’t bear any responsibility for the idiots we put into office. Yeah, sure, and I’m going to be Pope next week (which would require, among other things, a sex change first; not bloody likely). Therapists call this phenomenon folie a deux — a delusion shared by two; neither party calls the other on his fantasies because he’d have to admit his own and thereby destroy his own neurotic self-image. In W.’s case, we’re talking folie en masse.

Alan Keyes has all the political acumen of a pretzel, which means we’re in no danger of having him as an elected official. All he’ll ever get is a platform from which to harangue us about issues that are important to him but won’t help us balance the budget, feed or school our kids, fix the economy or get better jobs, create peace and stability in the world, or repair relations with our allies. Keyes, therefore, is for the moment harmless. George W. Bush is another story.

Yes, one can be stupid and blind about the real world but still remain electable — and the key, apparently, is just to keep repeating embarrassingly obvious, repeatedly disproven lies often enough and with enough conviction that people will at least reward your nerve and consistency, if not your lack of intelligence and dishonesty. But what does that say about us?

Based on their delusions alone, neither Keyes nor Bush deserves to hold public office of any kind. Not even dog catcher. To operate from the realm of fantasy, as W. daily demonstrates, costs the nation an enormous debt in money and human lives. It’s his fault and his debt, one he’ll never be able to erase — but if you allow him to continue in this manner, it’s your fault, too. Don’t make the rest of us pay for your delusions: we’ll already be paying for his for years.