Divided Families

by poputonian

Anyone who missed Olbermann’s powerful chronicle about President Bush’s most recent spate of lies should visit Crooks and Liars for a look-see.
Olbermann said:

And lastly tonight, a Special Comment, about — lying.
…
The President of the United States — unbowed, undeterred, and unconnected to reality — has continued his extraordinary trek through our country rooting out the enemies of freedom: The Democrats.
…
Yesterday at a fundraiser for an Arizona Congressman, Mr. Bush claimed, quote, “177 of the opposition party said ‘You know, we don’t think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists.”

The hell they did.

177 Democrats opposed the President’s seizure of another part of the Constitution.
…
Tuesday, at another fundraiser in California, he had said “Democrats take a law enforcement approach to terrorism. That means America will wait until we’re attacked again before we respond.”

Mr. Bush fabricated that, too.

And evidently he has begun to fancy himself as a mind-reader.

“If you listen closely to some of the leaders of the Democratic Party,” the President said at another fundraiser Monday in Nevada, “it sounds like they think the best way to protect the American people is — wait until we’re attacked again.”
…
It defies belief that this President and his administration could continue to find new unexplored political gutters into which they could wallow.

Yet they do.

One of the things that bothers me about neo-Republicanism and its entire foundation of lies, is the division it has created within families. I can hardly speak to my wingnut brother anymore, and we can’t speak at all about politics. We had numerous heated debates in the first couple of years following the invasion of Iraq, but he would counter every sourceable evidence I put forward with a lie he had been fed by Fox News, Rush Phlegmball, or The President — people who really have no honor whatsoever.

When I informed an uncle (in his sixties) about PNAC as evidence of pre-meditation of the war in Iraq, he asked me with complete and genuine concern if I had been getting information from the Internet, as if the Internet was a big tub of lies, with no sources to back up any assertion. His source of information about Iraq? He admitted it: newspaper editorials and the aforementioned Mr. Phlegmball.

It seems every political debate conducted in the family setting ends in emotional turmoil. If you’re serious about the politics of death and dying, your own flesh and blood are the ones you most want to convince of how wrong and dishonorable the current administration is. But convincing the last thirty percent of deeply entrenched wingnuts, even if they’re family, isn’t going to happen given that the current Republican leadership is the most dishonorable lot of American politicians ever. They have institutionalized and legitimated the art of lying to where it is now an officially accepted practice. I really think they see lying as an important part of the political gamesmanship, the country be damned.