Ask any politician and the answer will be the same: Whether his purpose is to serve the people or line his own pockets, the thing that counts is the number of votes on election day. Sure, there’s the occasional John McCain out there, saying he’d rather lose the election than lie, but deep down he knows a little obfuscation may be necessary if he’s to get the job that will let him do what he thinks needs doing.
That’s why we’re in Iraq. After 9-1-1, we were — the majority of us, anyway — ready to kill a bunch of Muslim Extremists. And they were all Muslim Extremists.
Saudi Arabia may have been friendly, but those 19 murdering suicide skyjackers were mostly Saudis. And Saddam Hussein was a flat out bad guy who’d gas his own people to quell insurrection. Kill ‘em all.
And we set off to do that. A lot of us thought maybe moving on Iraq was a bad idea, but we were not the politicians who had to give President Bush the go-ahead, and we were not the majority of voters who were pressuring the politicians to give President Bush the go-ahead.
The vast majority of us were buying newspapers and watching television that went along with the attack-Iraq argument; the news media stays in business by reflecting, by its choice and treatment of stories, what its consumers want, and we wanted blood.
Obama was right. When we’ve been lied to enough times by our government, we reduce our litmus from broad concepts to narrow concrete choices: for or against gun control, pro-life or pro-choice, Christian or Islamic.
It’s not that we didn’t have those beliefs all along, but in a sound-bite world, those issues become symbolic of our world view. Is the Constitution meaningful, especially in a nation whose government is whittling away at personal rights? Is life, especially that of babies and other helpless among us, sacred? Are we to defend ourselves, even preemptively, against foreign attackers.
When times are really tough, and our lives are not under our control, we look for someone to blame, or at least someone who promises to save us. Ask Hitler about blaming the Jews for the economic hard times in Germany. Ask any preacher about how the population in the pews and money in the collection basket relates to the local economy.
Ask Ronald Reagan. We laughed at Bonzo the chimp, but we quickly turned out a southern military leader whose rescue helicopters crashed in the desert in favor of a cowboy in a white hat and Winchester who promised to give those Eye-ranians their due.
And when his administration did things that were not exactly legal, we turned away and joked about he must have been asleep and didn’t know what was going on.
Barack Obama, and others like him, have to learn to walk the very fine line between “condescending” and “patronizing.” They don’t have to down shots in redneck bars, and they don’t have to bowl a 200-plus game, but they do have to find that middle point between “I know stuff” and “you don’t.”
Most people respect education — as long as they don’t feel forced to admit they don’t have it.
In the end, it’s not whether you’re right or wrong; it’s how many votes you tally on election night.
