©2007, UrbisMedia
[Editorial Note: Dear Reader, The author of this piece has provocatively titled it in a manner to appeal to base values and prurient interests. The Office of Morals and Values of Dragon City Journal does not approve of such journalistic chicanery and cautions the reader accordingly. The piece should not be read by children under the age of 18,who are easily bored, or anyone older than 65, without the assistance of magnification lenses. Thank you and our apologies for any offence that might result. Ba Feng Gu, Associate Editor]
Before leaving for their Summer recess the Democrat-semi-controlled Congress passed an energy bill that reversed some of the tax breaks and drilling rights for energy companies put in place by the Republicans, in favor of measures to reduce energy consumption and to favor exploration and development of alternative energy technologies. They also failed to have enough get enough votes to deny George Bush permission to wiretap Americans without FISA oversight since the fear of the very appearance of being soft on the so-called “war on terror” still plays too well in the home districts. However, they also managed to pass an Ethics bill that might have some teeth in it that are not biting into a filet mignon that has been paid for by a lobbyist. While our national legislators pause, we can reflect on what values their partisan politics reflect.
There is not much science in the discipline of Political Science. There is the stuff on voting behavior that applies statistical analysis, maybe a bit of borrowing from social psych in that “focus group” stuff, a larger debt to History (a lot of people I knew were History/PoliSci majors), some Philosophy (but not nearly enough) and then a balance of Rhetoric. But there is nothing in that so-called “science” that exposes in a systematic and scientific way, its quiddity, that what politics is it’s “what-ness.”
Politics is about many things, but, in its content, it is nothing if not about values. It is the axiology of public discourse. If that phrase is perhaps a bit abstract and off-putting, it is also about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky having a frolic in the Oval Office. There, that keeps us from drifting too far from the supermarket tabloids. But hold on a bit for the salacious stuff.
To return to being didactic, politics is about what is claimed to be good, or proper, or right, orjust, all value-laden terms. Values are not, despite how often people erroneously conflate them, facts. There are a lot of ways of elucidating the distinction but suffice for the moment to say that facts are about what is right or wrong (i.e. correct or incorrect), and values are about what is (considered to be) good or bad. Facts are like nouns (“that is a Muslim”); values are more adjectival (“that is a Terrorist”). Values cannot be validated by recourse to facts, and facts exist independent of opinion. If one has a problem grasping that I can send you a ticket to the new Creation Museum in Tennessee. There you can see humans cavorting with dinosaurs, a silly attempt to validate Genesis by simply presenting something that has no basis in fact (or to please people who loved The Flintstones) as though it were fact. Hey, what’s a few hundred million years this is way or that.
So Values and Facts go together like man and woman. I won’t venture which is which. Facts can exist independently of values, but values need facts to “cleave to” (hey, that’s pretty Biblical); they are meaningless unless they have something factual to modify. But I’m sensing that this metaphor can only get me in a lot of trouble, so I’m going to drop it and head to where I don’t mind causing trouble—Republicans.
Anyone who has been awake since the 1980s knows how the political value pendulum of American politics has swung far to the Right, and into Righteousness. Yes, much of this movement has be spurred by what the righteous have worried over as a decline in morality in America. These are people who do not include lying by their political representatives as an index of that decline in morality. No, it’s about what it usually is by religious hypocrites—sex. Morality equates with sex, and the rest, the lying and cheating and greed, well sometimes that’s what you have to do to get to punish people who are having sex, especially Democrats who are having sex. This tells you something about Republican values.
Republicans evince the baser values (they would say “fundamental”) because they believe that they know who and what we are (good or evil, hardworking CEOs or welfare queens, patriots or terrorist appeasers, etc) and so they know what has to be done. They are not one much for distinctions—NB: distinctions are very bad for winning at politics). Republicans like to say crud like they value “the American way of life,” so that everybody can fill in that blank the way they want to. They like equally vague appeals to fear, like “they hate our freedom.” “They” is the vaguely-defined terrorists/insurgents, of course, who probably hate the freedom we have arrogated to ourselves to meddle with and invade their countries, which we wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about if they didn’t have oil. They like to keep repeating implications they know to be un-true—that there were Iraqis flying the 911 planes; that Saddam was in alliance with Al Qaeda. Their prime value, it turns out, is that the end justifies the means.
Democrats are more about higher values (they might say “potential”) because they believe that we are in process, becoming, not cast in stone by our birth, gender and color, that politics is a means by which we can realize the ways we are all alike (like needing a living wage and health care and stuff like that), you know, liberal values. To Liberals, who see things as process–and hopefully, progress) means are not so distinct from ends, and so not any means—burning the village to save it, or rounding up all suspects and denying them due process, etc.—are justified by ends, especially ends of syntactic vagueness as a “war on terror.”
Probably all politicians lie and dissemble; it goes with the job to some extent. So it’s what a politician lies about that should become the means of necessary lies from the really bad ones. There is no doubt about it—and the facts support it for anybody who wants to argue about it—the Republican have become the biggest bunch of prevaricators in the history of American politics. They weren’t always this bad, but Nixon saying “I am not a crook” and lying about what tapes have subsequently disclosed is not nearly so bad to them as Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman.” Reagan, who knew damn well that he had made a deal with the (enemy) Iranians to give them weapons—in contravention to the Constitution—in the Iran-Contra deal, was lying, but not as seriously to Republicans as “I did not have sex with that woman.” And sure as no human ever had a T-Rex as a pet, what George Bush lied about to get us into a preemptive war with a country that never threatened us and has resulted in thousands of American and Iraqi deaths, doesn’t even belong in the same sentence with “I did not have sex with that woman.”
Ironically, the Republicans came into power in 2000 saying they would restore honesty and morality to politics. After the theft of the election they proceeded to: consort with Jack Abramoff; bowdlerize governmental reports on the environment and energy (with the VP consorting secretly with energy companies); pass bills in the middle of the night; start a war based on information they knew to be untrue; have lied about the injuries and deaths of soldiers (Lynch and Tillman); about Abu Ghraib; lied about how eight Federal prosecutors were fired (one of them for convicting a lying congressman who took bribes); then installing an Attorney General who lies for hours before a congressional committee; like to say that torture isn’t torture . . . It is possible to go on for pages but I’m about ready to puke. What have these lying bastards done to my country?!
But indulge me one bit further on this subject of lying. Bush is the most dangerous kind of political liar. He not only lies about the facts, but he lies (self-deludes) to himself. George Bush is a flop, and has been with everything he has tried. He is where he is by a series of handouts and favors he would not have received were in not for who his daddy was. And he knows that, deep down inside, underneath the self-delusion, he knows that. Some of the political monsters who have wreaked havoc have been that same sort of self-deluding person. They are most dangerous because the lie is not just a tactic, it becomes their raison d’etre. They leave a big mess and a lot of dead people in their wake.
OK, I promised that I would get to the subject indicated by the title of this piece. Yes, I happen to think that a little sex in the Oval Office (renamed the Oral Office by one of my friends) is a good thing, especially if it keeps certain hands off a certain red telephone. And I think. in paraphrase of Robin Williams, playing Adrian Kronhauer in Good Morning Vietnam , that “if ever a white man needed a b*** j** . . . ,” George Bush needs one. Alas, there do not seem to be any takers of this momentous responsibility—not Ms Hughes, not Ms Meiers, not Ms Rice, so far as we know. So it is time for Ann Coulter to “step up,” so to speak, and do her duty for the country.
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©2007, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 8.6.2007)