The "Truth"

The Bushies are constant--one has to grant them that--absent even a minor "truth" to muster in support of their policies, they lie and absent any readily available falsehoods or urban legends to invoke, they manufacture their own. In that regard they are what I've taken to calling "21st century people," defined as those for whom no amount of fame or fortune or power or adulation is enough. They are insatiable ids wanting what they want for no reason other than they want it. If they don't want something, they ignore it or destroy it, only to proclaim that same thing, when it jumps up and bites them, the biggest baddest newest evil or threat or trophy or you name it.

Bushy himself likes to operate through surrogates and so last week, unable to counter Congressman John P. Murtha's scathing critique of his war of aggression in Iraq, Bushy unloosed a slime campaign against him, like the one employed against John Kerry prior to the 2004 election. Howard Kurtz and Shailaigh Murray report the story in the January 14 Washington Post, citing a piece in Cybercast News Service from January 13, challenging the validity of Murtha's purple hearts. It's ironic that the Bushies, who like to repeat that old shibboleth that American troops returning from Vietnam were spat upon by anitwar protestors, are themselves major slimers of Vietnam veterans, engaging in direct, heavy handed character assassination of military heroes. Soldiers are dishonored, as John Kerry forgot to remember when he was being slimed, when they are sent to kill and die for a lie--in the case of Iraq multiple lies.

While the Dog is chewing on lies, he'll weigh in with the observation that the lies and hypocrisy emanating from the upper reaches of government both contribute to and feed upon the coarsening of public discourse and common decency--respect for other people--or even individual responsibility--for anything other than getting what Id wants--that mars America today. Witness the case of James Frey, whose mega-bestselling memoir, A Million Little Lies, contains enough falsehoods, according to The Smoking Gun, that it should probably be called fiction. Yet Frey and his defenders, including Oprah Winfrey, steadfastly maintain that the story of addiction and crime--and redemption--he tells is emotionally true, and that's all that matters. They really seem to be saying that it fits their notions of the degradation of drug and alcohol abuse, crime and prison and, thus, it must be true. They, like Bushy, prefer a nonreality based world, where truth is what you make it.