So what?
Okay. So the indictments were delivered today. Press conference on Thursday. “Rumors” of up to 5 indictments. Fitzgerald spotted at Rove’s lawyers office this afternoon.
You know what? I refuse to be excited.
I simply cannot suspend disbelief anymore when it comes to the shit sticking to this administration. It’s been five years of non-stop fuckery: police records, army records, using tragedy for propaganda, ruining the careers of respected statesmen, hiring convicted felons to manage a centralized database profiling every single american citizen, hiring convicted felons to manufacture evidence for war while spying for Iran, paying off journalists to spread that evidence, making up journalists to attack its doubters, flat-out incompetence up and down the line, flat-out lying over and over until the lies become just the other side of the story, putting our soldiers, our nation, and our founding ideals in the shithouse for some neo-fundamentalist principles cooked up because a Chicago professor couldn’t handle seeing the sexual imagery on TV that he could never get in the bedroom. I don’t even need to link to those stories, because they’ve all been so widely reported, double and quintuple sourced, that they have finally trepanated our unbearably thick collective skull. But it hasn’t changed a single thing.
I’ve done my best to take a long-term view of things. It’s been bad before, but what’s eight years? Well, to me these eight years are more than just a rough patch, more than just squandering what will be remembered as an historic opportunity, possibly the last. This experience has shown me over and over that despite the best efforts of some of our most brilliant and well-intentioned individuals, the media-pandering, on-message political machines will always win, must always win, because those are the rules of the game. The rules of their game.
So right now I am not only an empiricist, but I am a skeptical empiricist. I will not even believe it when I see it. I will not believe it until Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are in handcuffs and entering pleas. And even then I just won’t be sure.
Because though they may not own the prosecutor, or the grand jury, or the judge, they’ve got the executioner by the balls. You’ve already heard the memes hovering, probing the surface, waiting to be unleashed: “Making it a crime to be conservative.” “Two-bit prosecutor looking for a name.” “Perjury isn’t a real crime.” They sound absolutely ridiculous right now, right? Make no mistake, the Lutz’s and Rove’s and the Ailes’s of the world, these are true masters of their craft. Let them whisper in our broadcast ear. Let them repetition prime us a bit. Watch the tide turn back yet again.
Familiarity to bias becomes a bias of its own. Only the black swan can save us now.
Related Posts:
- To you and you, and you and you and you (October, 2005)
- Protests on Rove’s Front Lawn (October, 2005)
- Spain orders arrest of US troops (October, 2005)
- consumer products (May, 2006)
- The Futures of Money (February, 2006)
October 26th, 2005 at 11:11 am
Wow, that made my day. . . shitty.
I don’t expect major changes, either. At least, not in the short run. I think those who sit around waiting for revolutions will be continually disappointed. It’s true that a handful of indictments, as welcome as they are, are just a drop in the bucket. You have to look at the last few centuries to see how far we’ve come, and to be inspired by the kind of change that may be possible in the next few.
Last night, you were groaning about how activist movements don’t ever really make a difference. I mentioned the Civil Rights movement as a glaring counterexample. Let me paraphrase one of those heroes, here: the arm of the universe may be long, but it bends towards justice.