Clinging To The Big Lie

The Mudville Gazette has a brilliant little piece on the desperation in the fevered cries from the left that Bush was somehow still "AWOL". At this point in order to believe that line of argument one would A:) have to be incredibly stupid or B:) be so incredibly partisan that the truth no longer matters. I believe in many cases I’ll give Bush’s critics the benefit of the doubt and say it’s more B than A, although with some it’s becoming increasingly hard to tell.

It’s also a function of cognitive dissonance – in fact, this is a textbook case of that phenomenon. Note the way in which evidence which contradicts the idée fixé that Bush had to have been AWOL is either ignored or set aside in favor of evidence which confirms the Bush-haters worldview. Bill Hobbs makes further note of this in regards to Bush releasing his complete service records. The records clearly don’t confirm what the Bush-haters believe, so naturally, the records must be wrong.

This is both pathetic and deeply troubling. Democratic society rests on the bedrock of enlightened discourse, not the kind of mindless partisanship that has come from both sides of the political spectrum in the last few decades. Pejman Yousefzadeh is correct, this sort of argument has descended to the Area 51 School of Goofy Conspiracy Thinking.

Unfortunately the Democratic Party is becoming less of a political movement and more of a cult. The idea that Bush was a coke-using deserter is as fixed in the minds of many Democrats as the idea that the sun rises in the east. No amount of evidence will contradict that belief for them, because it isn’t something based in logic, argumentation, or fact, it is a conviction held with religious fervor that is immune from any argumentation that might show otherwise. It doesn’t matter that there’s no evidence that Bush did not fufill his term of service in the Guard. It doesn’t matter that other Guardsmen and women have said the same. It doesn’t matter that his records show that he exceeded his required goals for the year and was given an honorable discharge. It doesn’t matter that eyewitnesses place him in Alabama and documentation shows that he was there. The only thing that matters is that to the liberal partisan George W. Bush is a bad person, a deserter, AWOL, and the symbol of all that is wrong and evil. To them George W. Bush is Emmanuel Goldstein.

Such thinking is not only ridiculous, it is irresponsible. Just don’t be holding your breath for people like Terry McAullife and Rep. Sherrod Brown to be making any apologies for their false accusations any time soon.