Their Best Argument

Posted on August 10, 2004 in Campaign 2004 IRC/Chat

It’s politics Tuesday!

Tonight I ran into it on Undernet #political where I went to witness what the lurkers of the Right were saying in the wake of the mounting scandals of nonintegrity plaguing the rogue administration now squatting in the White House. Their talking points were brief and noncommittal. Their response to whether Bush should condemn the Swift Boat commercials seemed to fall on the list under the talking points heading “If someone raises this, don’t talk about it.”

I even found one of them admitting that Al Gore had won the 2000 election and that the country was in dismal shape! This ranks with admitting that there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq. But as with everything, there’s a spin: Bush is a victim of circumstances. Al Gore couldn’t have done any better.

I pronounce this the best argument the Bushites have for their candidate. It reeks of a very nonChristian dogma of determinism, that there is no free will, that our actions as persons do not matter. Suddenly, the main issue seems to be the size of John Kerry’s nose. If actions do not matter, one must ask, does the size of one’s nose matter any more? I think what is happening here is that the extreme Right has had its taste of power and even though the evidence mounts that the imposition of their theology has been an economic, cultural, and moral disaster, they do not want to let go.

The fallacy here is the insinuation that there is another planet, another time when Al Gore was president instead of George W. Bush. The experiment, they claim, was run and the results showed no difference between the two men’s performance. It is pure fantasy, a kind of willing Alzheimer’s where they will not catch on or remember their candidate’s lost promises and disastrous policies. With Reagan’s death, the political culture of appearances may be making a last stand here and now. Layer one is the superficiality of the face. Layer two, which is used even by John Kerry, is our fascination with the flag and the images of our past wars.

If their best argument is “Gore would have been no different,” then they’ve lost the election in their hearts. Even if it is stolen again, they have suffered a major intellectual defeat. And it’s about time.