Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Tony Snow: The New Cape in the Bush Bull Ring

I'm all a-chuckle over the general description of Fox News pundit Tony Snow's appointment as the new White House Press Secretary as being part of the "White House makeover." Heh. It will take a lot more than lipstick to make that pig look pretty.

We have the most transparently secretive government in the history of this country.

We know that the Iraq policy was formulated by the Project for the New American Century in the nineties, and that the 9/11 attacks were the "convenient excuse" the neoconservatives in and around the administration were looking for to execute that policy.

We know that Cheney and others cooked the intelligence on Hussein's WMD, and that the Rove machine used White House friendly reporters like Judith Miller to spread disinformation to the American public through the mainstream news media.

And that's just where it starts.

What's more, as the polls show, the Bush administration's line of bull has run thin. Even American citizens who understand little to nothing about rhetoric and propaganda tricks know that every time administration officials and supporters open their mouths, they're blowing smoke.

Changing the color of the smoke by substituting Snow for McClellan won't change the perceptions of anyone but already terminally brainwashed, and their perceptions don't need changing, at least not as far as the White House is concerned.

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The Bush administration's rhetoric has seldom reflected anything resembling reality. In that regard, they are typical of what Princeton Professor Emeritus Harry G. Frankfurt described in his celebrated essay "On Bullshit."
Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. ...The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Thus it is with the Rovewellians. Facts and evidence matter not a whit. If you can come up with the right talking points, and speak them forcefully enough, and echo them often enough, the truth is irrelevant. Until, of course, you've bullshit your way through one too many truths, and all but the most gullible have caught on to you. At that point, hiring a bigger and better bullshit artist to talk to the press for you isn't going to do any good.

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Speaking of bullshit artists…

I don't know how this happened, but I've gotten myself on a number of conservative publishers' e-mail lists. Maybe somebody was playing a practical joke on me, but whatever the case, I'm glad it happened, because all these right wing literature promos give an insight to the extent of the cognitive dissonance of the right wing mindset. One of these outfits--Human Events Online--just sent me a promo for Ann Coulter's upcoming book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism.

According to the Human Events promo, Ann "proves" that in The Church of Liberalism, abortion is a sacrament, Roe v. Wade is "holy writ" and Soviet spies like Alger Hiss are martyrs. Ann even "refutes" the sacred liberal myth of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

And all in one book!

For subscribing to the Human Events book club, you can get Godless--a $27.95 value--for free!

I find it an utterly fantastic fact of the American condition that a book by Ann Coulter costs $27.95 in an age when you can buy a leather bound copy of Shakespeare's complete works for $19.99.

A thousand monkeys pecking away at a thousand typewriters for a thousand years couldn't come up with a single one of Shakespeare's soliloquies. But they could probably produce something vastly superior to the complete works of Ann Coulter.

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I just heard former Clinton Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers say on MSNBC that Tony Snow will have to listen to "two voices in his head." One will no doubt tell him what incredible bullshit he's handing out to the White House Press Corps. The other one will be saying, "Take the money, then run to Ann Coulter's publisher, and take more money."

All the nonsense we're hearing about Tony's criticisms of Bush is, well, bullshit. At heart, he's a Coulter-class administration and neoconservative agenda supporter . On his Fox News show, he toed the company line about Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson, John Kerry and the Swift Boaters, liberal justices, George W. Bush's Vietnam era service, and much more.

Tony Snow is just a bigger, redder cape in the Bush administration bullring. We'll see how effective he is at continuing to fool the mindless beasts.

8 comments:

  1. Simpler reason for Snow to take the job: are YOU gonna turn down a job with the White House (baggage or no baggage)?

    Didn't know that about Ian Anderson. Gotta give Snow credit there.

    You mean, "Ann Coulter's upcoming book, Shameless: The Church of Charlatanism"...?

    She's an industry; she knows it. Michelle Malkin SO wants to be Ann.

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  2. Ludicrous on its face? I agree Tony isn't quite the shrill bitch Ann is, but he replaced her at the Arizona Star as the conservative op-ed columnist.

    http://www.azstarnet.com/dailystar/opinion/90500.php

    Ideologically, they're pretty close.

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  3. Anonymous2:45 PM

    "particularly going from her unauspicious beginnings."

    You have got to be kidding me. The following bio is hardly what I would call auspicious beginnings.

    "Rice was born in Birmingham, Alabama[in 1954], and is the only child of Angelena Rice and the Reverend John Wesley Rice (Jr.). Her father was a minister at Westminster Presbyterian Church, and her mother was a music teacher.".[1]

    In 1967, the family moved to Denver when her father accepted an administrative position at the University of Denver."

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condoleeza_Rice

    I wish I was born under such auspicious conditions. Being born in Alabama is not an "auspicious" beginning in itself. Being poor in Alabama, with a father that didn't work for a University, but instead as a maintenance guy at a machine plant is a different thing. But I guess that is why I find myself as a Navy wife and not some ivy league graduate.

    And as far as Tony Snow goes, he has come out and apologized for all past comments that criticized the President.

    On "Special Report with Brit Hume", host Hume held an exclusive interview with new White House Press Secretary and former Fox employee, Tony Snow, where Snow revealed he regretted previous criticism of George Bush.

    Btw, I love your work Commander.

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  4. Anonymous3:53 PM

    I am from Alabama. I know what it is like. I am not black, but I am not stupid either. But the fact is that she did not have the struggles that the majority of black families in Alabama had and are still having. I didn't grow up in Birmingham, I grew up in the southern impovershed part of Alabama. The town of 7000 that I grew up in is 50% African American and currently has an average family income of 15,000 a year.

    But the fact that she grew up in Alabama and was black does not automatically make her some kind of hero. If she had overcome adverse conditions of poverty like so many people I have met in Alabama, then I would say that was something. But she had more opportunities than most of us Alabamians. It is not always about skin color. Sometimes, it is all about wealth. The fact is that the African American people that I know in Alabama, the ones who grew up dirt poor, and still have nothing, and never had the opportunities that Rice has had, see her as turning her back on all the ones that have been left behind and forgotten in Alabama.

    She was buying shoes while people in New Orleans were dying! She is not a nice person, she could care less about her roots or the struggles of the great leaders like MLK that have given her the ability to achieve what she has in her life.

    I am tired of this. Why the hell don't we just let them start another war. It is Rice's job to go all over the world and try to convince other countries to get on board when we have a country in our sites. Maybe one of these countries will blow up a couple of our carriers. Maybe my husband will be put to rest at sea in one of them. And then I can reflect on what a nice person Condy is! I can say, I am so happy for her being from Alabama and overcoming adversity so that she could grow up to start wars that killed my husband! That would be grand!

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  5. Hear, hear, navywife.

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  6. Anonymous5:40 PM

    lurch,
    You are exactly right. I was not trying to put anyone down. That was definitely not my intention.

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  7. i can't believe i just wrote that....

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