Althæaphage.
I got an email here. Uh, “Rush,” uh, “now that two of our own have been tortured and murdered by the terrorists in Iraq, will the Left say that they deserved it? I’m so sick of our cut-and-run liberals. Keep up your great work.” Bob C. from Roanoke, Virginia. “PS, I love the way you do the program on the Ditto Cam.” [Laughter.] I read… no, I added that! He didn’t, he didn’t put that in there. [Laughter.] You know, it—it’s—I—uh… I gotta tell ya, I—I—I perused the liberal, kook blogs today, and they are happy that these two soldiers got tortured. They’re saying, “Good riddance. Hope Rumsfeld and whoever sleep well tonight.” I kid you not, folks.
Do I even need to tell you that not a single liberal kook said anything of the kind?
It’s not that they lie. It’s not even that they lie so brazenly, so completely, so shamelessly. It’s that people believe them. It’s not that if only we were speaking out against their lies with more volume and vigor and vim. The indisputable fact of us, being where we are and doing as we do, is enough to give them the lie direct. But the people who believe them don’t pay any attention, and if they do happen across us, they don’t listen. They don’t have to.
Go, Google Abu Zubaydah. Read up on how important he was: a top Bin Laden deputy, al-Qaeda’s top military strategist, their chief recruiter, the mastermind behind 9/11. He’s thirty-five. Two years younger than me. We caught him in 2002. He’d been keeping a diary for ten years, written by three separate personalities. His primary responsibility within the foundation was to make plane reservations for the families of other operatives.
“I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied.
So we tortured him. We tortured him, and he told us all sorts of things about 9/11, and over a hundred people we’ve since indicted on the strength of his coerced word, and “plots of every variety—against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, ‘thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each… target’.”
And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
At least the president didn’t lose face.
As above, so below: the self-similarity of the wingnut function; string theory for echthroi. Too much has been swallowed ever to turn around and come back up; it’s basic human nature to prefer being wrong to ever admitting one might not have been right. (The sort of human nature one is supposed to outgrow, yes, but.)
“Ignorance is a condition. Stupidity is a strategy.” Cliché? Hell, it’s a shibboleth: Welcome to the Reality-based Community. —Ignorance we can deal with, with the talking and the listening and the reasoning and the debating and the citing. Stupidity requires a different approach. Pathological liars so epically insecure they’ve made up their own network called “Excellence in Broadcasting” and call themselves “America’s Anchorman”? That shit writes itself, but our real fight’s altogether elsewhere.
Practice makes perfect. Big lies work best.