The Right-Wing Approach to Solving Problems

Sharing a living space over the last few years with a right-wing guy, I came face-to-face with a few annoying situations that could easily have been avoided by using a small amount of foresight. For instance, this fellow rarely took showers, for reasons unrelated to the subject at hand, but when he did take one, he would remove the small catcher that I had placed in the drain. Why? He had long hair, and when he took a shower, so much of his hair would fall out that it would clog the strainer and not allow the water to drain out. The longer the shower, the deeper the water would get if he left the catcher in the drain, so what did he do? Before he took a shower, he removed the strainer.

Why did this annoy me? Because, being the responsible one, I would inevitably have to get out the plunger and spend some work time with that bathtub drain at the point when the hair that flowed into it caused a clog further down. It occurred to me, on one such plunger occasion, that my housemate had provided me with the perfect metaphor for the right-wing approach to solving problems. He couldn't see very far past the end of his own nose, so he could not imagine what might cause the bathtub drain to get clogged.

During the Bush/Cheney era, we got used to hearing these right-wingers say "No one could have imagined..." or variations on that theme, when in most cases someone actually had imagined -- just not someone from their ideological circle. Pick a subject, from infrastructure maintenance to disease prevention, unemployment assistance to scientific research, investment in education to environmental protection, and the short-sighted right-wing approach will almost always lead to far greater long-term costs, even if it manages to achieve some small savings in the near term. Right-wingers do not see the long view, even when it's a matter of months rather than years, and they don't have enough brain cells firing at any one time to add up the logic of their actions to get to the inevitable sum of the results of those actions, so we put the future in peril whenever we hand them the keys to that future. 

Beware of the right-wing politician who says he can save you money by not spending for that ounce of prevention --  most of the short-term benefit will go to the wealthy 1%, but even if some of it does trickle down to you, the bill for the associated pound of cure is guaranteed to cost you a lot more in the long run.

The idea of the 7th generation apparently comes to us from the Iroquois nations, where those chosen to lead the tribes and to make the most consequential decisions did so on the basis of how their decisions might possibly affect 7 generations of their children. With right-wingers, you won't get 7 generations of forethought -- you'll be lucky to get 7 minutes.

Hobgoblins of the Right-wing Mind

Note: This is a repost and slight revision of a blog originally posted in September of 2012 on my website (DaveElder.com) back when the website had a blog page, before the March 2013 redesign.

Back when Dick Cheney explained his 1% solution, in which he said he would choose to interpret a 1% threat to the national security of the United States as equal to a 100% threat, he as much as admitted that he didn't have enough brain cells firing at any one time to be able to distinguish between a 1% threat and a 100% one. You would expect a leader focused on national security to weigh each potential threat based upon how it really tips the scales, determine which threats merit greater attention, and then set strategic priorities based upon that determination. Skewing your priorities to make a 1% threat equal to a 100% threat could lead to disastrous ends, such as invading a country that poses no actual threat to your own, based upon false evidence or faulty interpretations of intelligence, resulting in trillions of dollars of new debt on top of unnecessary widespread death and destruction.

After all, what kind of crazy paranoid fool carries around a hazmat suit in the trunk of his car, worried that terrorists could strike at any moment? The same kind of fool who could believe that Saddam Hussein played an active role in the 9/11 attacks, even though logic and a clear understanding of the facts would dictate otherwise. Like many others, I noticed the Orwellian way in which Bush and Cheney often linked Iraq and 9/11 in their speeches, when no such link actually existed, or even could have existed, but in their minds such a link did exist. Mr. C had to admit in a post-administration talk that he never found that missing link, even though while in office he did his best to have such a link tortured out of the mouths of various prisoners.

From a 2012 book entitled 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars by New York Times contributor Kurt Eichenwald, we learned that not only did Bush and Cheney ignore repeated warnings about an imminent Al-Qaeda attack within the United States, but some in their administration floated the idea that Osama Bin-Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack on the U.S. for the purpose of distracting the administration from the very real threat (in their minds) posed by Saddam. While such an idea made no logical sense, it appealed to the simplistic thinking of a group of people who can only understand the world in terms of "us versus them." Sadam and Osama, in reality, never worked together, and never would have done so, but Cheney, Bush and the rest of their neocon cabal could never understand that. When presented with a strategic offer from the leadership of Iran, Cheney responded by saying, "We don't talk to evil." What kind of leader uses such a phrase? One who can only comprehend the world by reducing its complexity to the simplest and most blunt terms, and such a leader will almost always mislead.

Remember back in March of 2003 when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a live press conference and broadcast network audience that he knew the location of Iraq's non-existent WMDs? Looking closely at those non-existent WMDs now, they bear a striking resemblance to the super-secret Soviet ABMs which The Committee for the Present Danger, run by Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney, worked very hard to protect us from back in the late 1970s and up through much of the 1980s. When the fall of the Soviet Union proved conclusively that no such Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile program had ever existed, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney almost immediately found new enemies to fear.

Over the past few years, right-wingers have vowed to keep us safe from the imposition of Sharia Law, the enforcement of martial law by U.N. troops, and the threat posed by hidden members of the Muslim Brotherhood inside of various security-related departments of the executive branch. The echoes of McCarthyism in the Muslim Brotherhood accusations are astounding indeed, but to be fair to Mr. McCarthy, while there were no Communists in the executive branch of his time, contrary to his loud and forceful assertions, the likelihood of there being one was still much greater than the possibility of a member of the Muslim Brotherhood lurking within the present day executive branch. As far removed from reality as right-wingers like McCarthy were in the 1950s, the modern-day heirs to their paranoia have moved a step or two further away from reality.

I had thought that, given their incredible mishandling of security matters related to 9/11 as well as other significant events such as the anthrax attacks (which were never solved) and violations of D.C. air space by small private aircraft, the Bush/Cheney bunch would forever put an end to the myth of Republican superiority in matters of national security, but yet that myth still persists in some quarters. Why? Because right-wingers believe that only other right-wingers can keep them safe from the hobgoblins that haunt their simplistic worlds. Those of us who live in the reality-based community, with its thousands of shades of gray as well as millions of colors, cannot afford to have these clowns handling our national security, because not only will they not see where the next major threat might come from, if it's substantially different from the last one, but they will also drag us into more wars against people and countries that pose no actual threat to us, but who are different enough from us that these right-wingers will see in them some possibility of a 1% threat to the United States, and that possibility will then become 100% to them because they cannot actually tell the difference between the two numbers. The only way to achieve genuine, effective and lasting national security is to keep these right-wing fools, and the hobgoblins that haunt their simplistic minds, as far away from our national security apparatus as possible.

Separating the Conservatives from the Authoritarians

Conservative John Dean did American culture a truly beneficial service, in his book Conservatives Without Conscience, by identifying the true nature of the Dick Cheney types -- they are authoritarians. In the book he speaks about how authoritarians have taken over the conservative movement, and while people like Cheney call themselves conservative, their actions follow a very authoritarian pattern, not a conservative one. 

Growing up in a conservative household in the 1960s, I would not have believed that 4 decades later, someone calling himself a conservative would start an unnecessary war, champion torture techniques and institute a major domestic spying program. We saw and expected this kind of behavior from the Soviet Union, and other Communist states, but surely no American leader, of any party or political leaning, would do that, would they? I couldn't imagine anything more un-American, and more un-conservative.

Mr. Cheney did not try to disguise his obvious contempt for democracy, and the will of the people, when he uttered his famous single-word reply to a reporter's mention about majority opposition to the Iraq War in 2007 (So?), but Dick will not call himself an authoritarian, even though he would have wished to rule by dictate, because he knows that American culture does not respect or value authoritarians. He and others like him want to give the orders, and have those orders followed without question, regardless of what the majority, or even significant minorities, might think of those orders, but these authoritarian types can't openly admit that. 

So how to draw the line between the genuine conservatives and the autocrats who call themselves conservatives? Actually, they draw that line themselves, and unknowingly reveal themselves, when they defend, make excuses for, or try to promote what they usually call enhanced interrogation techniques, which can be clearly understood as torture. Quite simply, anyone who believes that you can beat the truth out of someone is not conservative -- they are authoritarian. 

I remember laughing along with my classmates in grade school when we heard the absurd confessions of the Salem witch trials, where women who had been tortured admitted to turning themselves into cats and birds. In the 1970s, the Spanish Inquisition was a favorite Monty Python joke as well. Among the baby boom generation, it was understood across political lines that torture was an anachronism from the Dark Ages that only survived in the modern world under autocratic regimes like China. I could not then have predicted that an American government autocrat calling himself a conservative would resurrect a technique from the Spanish Inquisition and insist that it has a useful modern application. I don't know if Mr. Cheney believes that the Spanish Inquisition did a good job of ferreting out heretics, or if he's convinced that some women in Salem really did turn themselves into cats, but given his fantasies about yellow cake and Iraqi WMDS, perhaps he does believe these other crazy things. 

The men who, by their labor, crafted the basic structure of the U.S. government in the era that followed The Age of Reason, understood the folly of cruel and unusual punishment, and so they wrote a prohibition against it into the foundation of American law. They understood, by virtue of reason and logic, that torture serves mainly to command obedience and yield false confessions. Anyone who speaks in favor of harsh interrogations does so not from a desire to conserve basic American principles, but from an autocratic impulse to control people in whatever way possible. No matter what the guy calls himself, if he says torture works, he's an autocrat, not a conservative.

Why They Call it "The Liberal Media"

We have Richard Nixon to thank for the phrase The Liberal Media, and in that long-ago era I logically deduced that, with the media being part of the establishment, it would probably ideally position itself slightly to the right of center. Indeed, in a time when television reporters could and would actually ask a commander-in-chief some tough questions at a press conference, and the commander-in-chief generally felt a public obligation to personally appear at many such press briefings, the American Fourth Estate appeared to me to lean a bit to the right, but not particularly so.

I naively thought that the so-called Liberal Media's fawning adoration of Ronald Reagan would forever put an end to the phrase. As the hard-hitting questions of a typical 1980 Carter press conference suddenly gave way to a kid-glove approach to Reagan, who often didn't even bother to show up for briefings, the idea of a liberal media seemed ludicrous. Following the Reagan years, I watched the Corporate Media tilt more to the right, even as the self-labeled conservative mouthpieces accused that media more and more of tilting to the left, so that by 2003 you could hardly find a single voice speaking out against the right-wing clique that engineered GWB's invasion of Iraq. Watching this unfold, I thought, as TYT's Cenk Uygur has suggested, that the right-wingers were working the refs, so to speak -- they were constantly accusing the Corporate Media of left-wing bias simply to get that media to swing more to the right.

Then a few years ago, I moved into a place where I shared common spaces with a renter who I did not know very well at the time. During one of our first political conversations, he told me that he considered himself a centrist, and that he liked to hear both sides of an issue. He understood that Fox News presented the conservative side, and he told me that he would watch CNN, CBS, NBC or ABC to get the liberal side. This sounded to me like striking a balance between the strongly right wing and the crazy extreme of the right wing, and I had to ask him why he thought the corporate media outlets he named, other than Fox, were liberal. "What is liberal about CNN, or CBS?" He had no answer for the question, and he could only say that all the major news stations other than Fox seemed liberal to him, whatever that meant.

Getting to know him better over the next couple of years, which will happen when you share common living spaces, I began to get a stronger impression of how much this fellow leaned to the right, despite the fact that he had voted for Obama in 2008. Still, I didn't realize just how much he depended on Fox for his facts until the moment, in the summer of 2012, when he revealed his birther leanings, saying that "a lot of people were talking about it." Well, in fact, there was only one place on the dial where "a lot of people were talking about it," so at that point I knew he had to be spending a lot of time on Fox. I quickly pointed out the logical absurdity of the birther arguments, and took some small comfort in the fact that he could still respond to logic in basic conversation, despite his obvious attraction to the Fox world view. Not long after the birther exchange, I saw quite clearly why he said the media, other than Fox, seemed liberal to him.

George W. Bush once said to Joe Biden, "I don't do nuance, Joe."  Well, neither does Fox News, and this is the key to why the watchers take such comfort in the world view that it expresses. Take the millions of colors from a snapshot, and convert it not just to grayscale, but to purely black and white, and you have arrived at Fox. While the Fox folks may occasionally admit to the existence of exceptions, largely, in the Fox world view, a Muslim = a terrorist, a latino = an illegal alien, a doctor who performs abortions = a baby killer, a typical black teenager = a thug, and on and on. When the folks who like Fox News call the rest of the media liberal, it seems liberal to them because it presents a view of the world which, regardless of how much it might lean towards the conservative side, is still nuanced, and nuance, in and of itself, seems liberal to the Fox audience. To put it bluntly, Fox News puts it bluntly, and that's what the Fox audience wants. If you substitute the word blunt for Fox and nuance for liberal, when you hear Foxers use the phrase the liberal media, then you'll know why they call it the liberal media.