Talking While Under the Influence: Lying

I am wont to think there should be some sort of etymologically-based breathalyzer test for politicians. It needs to be capable of detecting gross lies and exaggerations, mistruths and the demonic rhetoric of evil that results in the attempted destruction of intellect. It should be connected to rooftop sirens that screech in a loud and horrifying manner all across the land, whenever powered up. My guess is that it would not take long for sales of ear protectors and ear plugs to skyrocket, because any blessed silence would be gone, forever. Political ideological cacophony is deafening.

It needs to be said, at this point, that I accepted this sort of loud-mouthed behavior and criminal abuse of language and truth all during the campaign season, because it comes with the territory: you naturally expect to hear rude remarks, falsehoods, slander, evaluations and claims and counter-claims that range from the outlandish to the ludicrous. But you assume that, like having the measles or a sore throat, it will all go away, eventually. However, coming right after the last election, and escalating heavenward at an alarming rate ever since, then achieving near light speed velocities and volumetrics after the inauguration, the verbal garbage permeating the atmosphere and airwaves has become thick, like Los Angeles smog on a bad day in August.

There is an old saying about used car salesmen: how can you tell when they are lying? Their lips are moving. I know that I am not the first person to make this analogy, but politicians and used car guys have a lot in common, because neither have much “street cred” and the chronicle of history does not work positively in their favor. That little old lady from Pasadena NEVER drove that used car only back and forth to church on Sunday, and that legislative tax break being touted just before the upcoming election will not ever, ever save your job or make you and your brother-in-law rich. Controlled lip movements, to initiate the mesmerizing stupor of temporary belief in the impossible, has become an art form. I am quite certain that Julius Cesar employed this modus operandi, and we know where that got him. It just seems that our tolerance has surpassed that of Brutus, et. al. and we more readily accept mediocre duplicity.

A few days ago, I began try to keep track of and recording instances of the worst abuses of truth I could cull from the daily news reports. I finally gave up because I ran out of space, time and note paper. Suffice it to say that if you listen, even briefly, to the arrogant statements of John Boehner, the verbal flailings of Lindsey Graham or the obtuse pontifications of Newt Gingrich, or perhaps even switch over to the incomprehensible summarizations of “political progress” uttered by Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, you will get the drift of just how badly matters have deteriorated. I’m skipping Barbara “Give me more money” Boxer, for now.

But the events of the week of Feb. 9 have lowered the bar for the “highs” in contorted reasoning and the verbiage that has proclaimed it. In short, if you listen to the remarks of virtually any one member of the entire Republican delegation of congress people who make up the U.S. House of Representatives, NOT ONE of whom voted on two separate occasions for the $787B stimulus package, or…you can subject yourself to the non-stop and non-sensical floor speeches by nearly every one of the Republican Senators (save three) who followed the House vote, in lock-step.

But before I continue my critique of that litany of orally repugnant travesties, I feel compelled to bring to the forefront the speeches, claims and punditry of the right-wing press, the conservative talk show talkers and the paid-by-the-word conservative and ultra-conservative commentators on the network and cable television programs, many of whom have masqueraded as economists. Never mind, for a moment, that the bulk of the legislators deciding our monetary and financial futures right now are not economists either (most are bloody lawyers, who presumably went to college and law school, and also, presumably at least took Econ 101 somewhere along the line), the faux news anchors on networks like Fox, and the hired guns who emanate from think tanks and “research foundations” and appear with them on the six o’clock news, probably understand less about economics than Joe the Plumber (who we all know has done a great job analyzing the mid-east non-peace situation in Gaza). The dearth, girth and breadth of misunderstanding and misinformation which pours forth from these “experts” is literally overwhelming. It freaking makes my head hurt. The absolutely astounding reality of this is how many people actually believe this balderdash to be truthful and accurate. I’ll leave it to you to decide what to believe from the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, but don’t come crying to me when you discover that your intellectual underwear and underpinnings, as well as your wallet, have come up missing.

But back to the actual criminals…er, suspects. I will not even begin to assemble a complete list of examples of gross linguistic misconduct available (for reasons listed earlier), but there are just a few noteworthy examples I will cite, in order to make my point. First, there is Mr. Steele, the new figurehead and titular (and titillating) leader of the (new) Republican party. He has said that the jobs to be created under the stimulus plans are not jobs but merely “work”. The last time I had a damn job, it sure looked and felt like work to me. In a frantic and manic attempt to parse words to build an indefensible case, he has uttered the utterly absurd. Needless to say, he has been the butt of jokes on every liberal news program and caustic blog since he embarrassed himself on national television last weekend.

John Boehner has said repeatedly that this legislation was said by the President to be about “jobs, jobs, jobs”, and it has become all about “spending, spending, spending”. Some of his colleagues have complained (in a similar vein) that the effort was not a stimulus bill but a “spending bill”. The President himself has actually offered the querying retort, “What do you think a stimulus bill IS, anyway?” Then, on Friday afternoon of this week, before the Senate was to cast their vote on the package, as a sort of entertainment topper to his earlier bleating, Boehner held up the 1100+ page document (finally 1700 pages) before the assembly, in order to make the following complaint: the document had just been delivered for inspection only a few hours before, and that “no one had read it”. He asked (somewhat rhetorically) why the congress had not been given the time over the weekend, “on the plane, the train or the bus home”, to read the bill before having to vote. To begin with, I wonder how many members of this esteemed group would have gone home, anyway: they all have nice digs in DC. Secondly, I am very skeptical that any one of them would take a bus. Lastly, if that were the chosen weekend task, they all must be able to read one helluva lot faster than I can. Consider these probabilities: I am very doubtful that anyone went home for a short weekend (not like Amtrak Joe Biden, and even he lives in Washington, now), riding a bus would put any of them much too close to the proletariat they seek to avoid, and I have this hunch that almost none of them ever really read much, anyway…unless it is polling results about their chances for re-election. And BTW, as the texters and twitter folks would enter, earlier in the day, one of Boehner’s fellow obstructionists told the assembly that the document was only 800 pages, or “about a billion dollars a page”. Either someone is lying, can’t count or exaggerating or someone is doing all three. I have given up trying to figure out which is what or why. But Mr. Steele has said that this work that Boehner and his fellows are doing is not a job, or that the job they are doing is not work, but we are paying them to do it anyway. Frankly I have to wonder “Why?”

(After Boehner’s rant about being inconvenienced, he bombastically dropped the entire printout on the floor of the chamber, only making him appear more oafish and contemptible than he had been beforehand. Good theatre; poor plausibility)

There have been a thousand thousand other examples of linguistic air pollution and vocabulary abuse, but the one that has me baffled the most is the oft (now) repeated wisdom of Sen. John McCain. He has called this legislation “generational theft”. Just ignoring for a moment that this phrase is a synthetic language construct and devoid of referential logic (I can construct fluffy bullshit as well as any Washington bureaucrat), it attempts to throw blame around anywhere it can be plunked, accurately or not. This man is attempting to make the point that, as everyone should know by now, we will be borrowing every last cent of this $800B to rescue our nation’s economic future, and that by passing this bill, we will be indenturing the children of the children of the children of those of us living now to pay it back: It is not generational theft, it is debt extension. He is using this argument in an attempt to waylay, demean, sabotage and obstruct the single most important (and the largest financial) piece of legislation in the history of the world. Curiously, he has completely overlooked the trillions of military dollars previously spent by his President, and the leader of his party, to play deadly war games in Iraq, Pakistan, and the other assorted “-stans’ where the United States has been “planting the seeds of democracy” and killing thousands, on a daily basis. This “debt extension” and “generational theft” he has managed to overlook. Not only is this rhetoric and logic myopic and misguided and misleading, he is lying and obfuscating reality. It scares the crap out of me that this man could have become the President.

Granted, the few most heinous and blatant examples I have given to make my case for the polemic breathalyzer have been Republican, but at the moment, they have reigned supreme with their onslaught of evil gibberish. They seem determined to clog the machinery (the pipes of credit?) in the short run, without any concern for the outcomes and needs of tomorrow. And I will happily give you that our newest financial savior-in-chief, Mr. Geithner, has so far been just as uninspiring as Hank Paulson ever managed on a good day (he is nearly as ghoulish). Larry Summers has yet to impress anyone and seems prone to a resuscitating an old version of doublespeak, while Joe Biden has demonstrated several instances of foot-in-mouth disease.

This Orwellian, obstinate, pointlessly confrontational and contorted communication practice must be brought to an end, if we are ever to rise above the level of primitive plutocracy. We are sacrificing dignity and humanity for semantics of plastic and artificial logic, all linked to money and the very greed which has brought us to this point of “bailout” in the first place. We seem unable to learn from our mistakes but rather doomed to compound them.

OTOH, BTW, (I am forced to laugh at myself: I am torturing the very language I am striving to save), we have President Obama, and his revelatory oratory. When he first began delivering speeches, I was impressed with his choice of words and his delivery, but I was also skeptical: my pleasure may have come only from the sudden and wondrous departure from a style of vapid, short grunts of near unintelligible and meaningless faux Texan blather. This was such a cathartic revision of public oratory that perhaps I was succumbing to its charm too easily. But now I think my skepticism was ill-founded. He does reason and speak with a very welcome freshness and alacrity. The gutturally nuanced and poorly framed language of fear and doom have gone, and these Presidential words are actually pleasing to the ear.

Oddly enough, this may in fact be the “stimulus” for the opposition’s verbal toxicity. Having been confronted with both inspirational and positive nature and content of the President’s delivery, they may have been traumatized. They all may have realized, perhaps even somewhat unconsciously, that they have been cornered, and have consequently resorted to the basic instinctual choice between fight or flight. Since, in this electronic world, no one can flee very far and never successfully hide from anyone (or escape the being found out, ala Governor Spitzer); they have chosen to put up a fight. However…

My son has a tee-shirt which says:” I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man”. Methinks that that the (mostly Republican) primordial, ooze-like blustering is a revelation that they have only managed to bring “a knife to a gun fight”. They are outclassed, out-gunned, out-spoken and out-reasoned and can only manage to come after our benevolent T-Tex with a crude club. He is sipping Chardonnay and they are swilling cheap beer. As for the Dems, they may also just be overwhelmed by the power, persuasive ability and the sheer tsunami-like adrenaline rush that this President affords the general public (who are not already transfixed by talk radio), and are fumbling for words that they desperately hope will keep them on anyone’s radar screen. They must be a disappointment to the President.

In either case, both the conservative miscreants and the left-sided liberal underlings would do well not to run from, hide from or attempt to belittle the presence of some genuine and uplifting language ( even Chris Matthews has noticed that). In spite of everything else which has sounded recent sour notes within the fledgling administration, there is still an element of hope. If any of these entertainers are going to engage in talking under the influence, whether that influence be fear, ignorance or sheer incompetence, they should learn to take better cues from President Obama and stop embarrassing both themselves and their constituents, by continuing to verbally stagger around, drunk-like, across the public landscape of language, in a kind of linguistic stupor. Their inadequately thought-through lack of thinking has left their intellectual pants hanging down low, exposing the crack in their logic, like the backside of Joe the Plumber.

President Obama could well prove to be our very own renaissance man, providing impetus and stimulus to become better than we have been. If our public mouthpieces can take the proper cues, and upgrade and uplift their thinking and their vocabularies, almost anything is possible. But at the moment, the bulk of them seem to be cowering and nervous, worried far more about their self-preservation than the health of our society. It should go without saying that this continued insistence on lying will obliterate any eventual useful bipartisanship and nullify any chance for meaningful compromise. Continued talking while under the influence is certain to put us into the wall. Any right-minded NASCAR driver can tell you that.

Stuff That Can (Or Is Going To) Go Wrong

Congress should be indicted for murder: Before you jump to the (perfectly reasonable) conclusion that I am about to clobber the Republicans for acting like spoiled children and incompetent jerks about the rescue plan this week (they did), there is plenty of blame to go around for everyone. The Congress, as a whole, has worked hard to murder the entire country. While Republicans in the House and the Senate, who now represent the last of the red areas of the country, have proven themselves to be intractable, stubborn, short-sighted and obstinate, just to prove a point (or try to), the Democrats have simultaneously proven that they have been born without backbones (Reid and Pelosi are jellyfish) and have allowed the discussions to wipe out much needed provisions in the bill to save schools, education, infrastructure and health care. Collectively, these over-paid idiots (Claire McCaskill included) have wasted valuable time, laughed in the public’s face, claimed immunity from sanity and behaved like uninformed buffoons. And all of that is on a good day. (The infrastructure of this country is woefully inadequate and collapsing. It must be repaired and soon, so why not do it now, and kill two flocks of birds with one stone?) . If the US was a business (it is, really), and we were not making money (we’re not: it’s called the GDP), we would make layoffs (including upper management) and stop paying people until the economic conditions improved. I move that we lay off and stop paying the Congress until they manufacture something we can sell/market at a profit, i.e., JOBS. If members of Congress can only act like clowns, let them go get jobs in the circus.

Misuse of Personal Pronouns: As much as I loved the President’s first press conference for its eloquence, detail and good grammar, he got his ego shoe stuck in his mouth. He kept referring to cabinet members as “my” secretary of the treasury, etc. No they are not: the cabinet members are OURS. W’s megalomania is over: stop that shit. This is supposed to be “Yes WE can”, not “Yes I can”. And speaking of the press conference, why on earth did he snub the grand dame of the press corps, Helen Thomas, by not answering (even obliquely) her question about nuclear weapons in the Middle East? Potential grandeur was spoiled by arrogance. Huffiness ruined the moment even if he did call on The Huffington Post.

How do you spell mistake? Geithner. He is guilty of tax malfeasance, is just another over-rated Wall St./Harvard MBA banker, cannot speak in public ( Paulson did as well but looked more ghoulish) and made a presentation to the people on Tuesday that left even Krugman and Reich saying, “Say what?”, while the Dow tanked so badly that Wall St. almost shut down for the week. No details, no clarity and no…oh, no… transparency. God, I am beginning to hate that word. Transparency in government isn’t, and only means that you will get to see what the government wants you to see, when they want you to see it… and when you do see “it”, it will be too late to do anything about it. Geithner is a surefire way (so far) to take the “can” out of yes we can. Go ahead, hope otherwise if you like.

Stop mixing up terms: Governments and politicians have always played fast and loose with words and phrases, but the current torrent is becoming intolerable. Beginning with the faux financial crisis of last fall, when Paulson and company introduced TARP, now we have TALF (?), and most sadly, pork, earmarks (thank you, John McCain), stimulus and spending, and all have become interchangeable. The President has asked, with regard to the spending bill “What do you think a stimulus bill is, anyway?”, and just this morning I heard Orin Hatch (R-UT) call the entire “stimulus” package an “earmark”. This sloppy use of terminologies (employed, I think, just to confuse the public) is misleading and irresponsible. Oh, I forgot the favorite term, “Christmas tree”. Bah humbug.

Gaza, The West Bank and Israel: We certainly forgot all about that mess in a hurry. The MSM has gone stone deaf again while many Gazans are still stone dead and suffering. And amid the aftermath of that turmoil, Israel is actually trying to play at normalcy and have an election. I’m sorry, but Tzipi Livni sounds like an anorexic Italian sports car. And Obama has said zip about any of it. Maybe we should just give them a few more F-16‘s and hope the problem goes away? Calling Dick Cheney.

Bipartisanship in Congress is a Ruse: Get over it, move on, and worry about something we can work with. The only goals of the legislature are to get richer (Daschle, etc.) and re-elected. And they will pursue those goals if it kills the country (see the first paragraph), and it surely will. Dogs will not mate with cats, and elephants will not fornicate with donkeys. The only successful hybrid animal I know of is called a jack-ass and we have plenty of those in government already without encouraging more illicit and obscene behavior. Stop wasting our time with this useless palaver and do something that will move the country forward. Pining about bipartisanship will do nothing to prevent you from falling off of a cliff of philosophical, political euphoria.

One Place We All Go Wrong: Linguistically, and in terms of truth and substance, we have been served up shit stew for so long, that we are immediately and completely bowled over by the rhetoric and style we have been given by the new President. Everything is relative: in the press conference, President Obama alluded to the fact that the American people would be prone to listen to reason and practicality. He actually said that we would welcome “rational argument”. Bullshit: we are impatient, have unreasonable expectations and want immediate gratification. It may be reassuring to hear him say all of that, and it may make us feel momentarily warm and fuzzy, but it just sets up unrealistic estimations of our status quo and puts hope on an unattainable pedestal. Remember Condi Rice (where the hell did she go?) and aspirational horizons? Please don’t do that to us, again.

Breaking Bad Habits, Attracting Private Capital and Making Nice with Iran: Good grief! Why even waste time and oxygen talking about changing bad habits is Washington? That is like trying to turn an aircraft carrier around in a swimming pool. Smoking is a bad habit (and addictive), which is why the makers of nicotine patches make so much money. And like quitting smoking and drinking alcohol, bad legislative habits are bound to have a serious recidivism rate. So while it sounds good, don’t expect much “change” (I doubt John McCain will sell many houses or K St. will go away any time soon).

And in keeping with the brandishing about of silly terms, enticing private capital to buy “toxic assets” is complete and utter nonsense. This country was not built on credit default swaps and will not be saved by anyone buying them. Anyone who offers this as even a partial solution to our financial problems (Geithner) should have his/her mouth washed out with soap. No successful entrepreneur made his fortune by buying up worthless crap. If all the cars in your used car lot won’t start, you’re screwed.

The President said that some of Iran’s actions have been “unhelpful”. Well, after all the dirty deeds and conniving and political skullduggery the US has been up to in that region for decades, what do you expect? We have a lot of explaining to do.

I surely wish the new President and his (precariously co-mingled) cadre of cabinet members and advisors the best, and of course that means I mean the best for our country, as well. But, as my friend Ron and I have oft discussed, the “wheels seem to be coming off the wagon” (this morning he embellished that with “the cotter pins are coming out of the axles”) and the prognosis is not good. As I sit and write this (and watch MSNBC), a member of Congress, representing the Blue Dog democrats, has just said that if any details of the current stimulus bill are altered in the compromise discussions this week, the “blue dogs” will withdraw their support and vote against final passage of the bill. Having heard that, I will close with these observations:

Such radical, narrow and inflexible thinking is largely why we are in the mess we are in (combined, of course, with greed, avaricious behavior and irresponsible regulation: I really do think that John Boehner and Lindsey Graham have had brain damage) brings me right back to my first paragraph. But if we do indict these reprobates for their despicable behaviors and such spectacularly poor stewardship the country, how in the world will we EVER find a jury of their peers for the trial?