October 11, 2006
Selecting what reality to face
Lately the most disturbing trend I’m seeing among our political leaders is not their general lack of honest, nor their inability to directly answer a question. It’s not their ego, their hubris, arrogance, their stubborn stances on failed policies, their abject lack of accountability nor their disregard for the principles upon which this democracy was founded. Nope, lately it’s been the repeated instances of failure to acknowledge reality.
This trend is sweeping the political ranks and showing up in all manner of news issues. Sometimes it’s about avoiding reality to save face or deflect blame. In other instances it’s to avoid having to come face to face with something bad. It’s not even a new trend as some of the recent instances of selective reality that are just coming to light are actually a bit old.
That’s the case with the selective realities in the Mark Foley House Page text-sex fiasco that’s currently devouring the Republican Party. We all now know a number of Congressmen and staffers had some inkling that Foley was doing something inappropriate with pages years back, yet somehow no one did any investigation. A number of people’s excuses have not gone beyond “I never actually read the e-mails, I was just told about them.”
The idea of Foley’s advances toward the pages were just too horrible to imagine, so the people involved possibly chose to pretend they didn’t exist. By telling the guy to knock it off and never reading the e-mails or looking to see if they lead to discovery of the much worse communications they obviously portend, the Congressmen and staffers were spared facing a disgusting truth and now had a handy political cover.
Then there’s the proud case of Our Fine President’s reaction to the news that North Korea and its ever-so-nutty dictator Kim Jong Il. He didn’t directly deny the blast or belittle it like those pansy French are now doing. But he also is not really admitting that it flies in the face of his stated goal to keep the world’s most dangerous leaders from threatening others with the world’s most dangerous weapons.
At a press conference he said direct negotiations wont work, as they failed when Clinton tried them. He might not be wrong there, but he went on to assert that the six party talks he’s been backing are the better way to go. Now North Korea certainly ignored deals with the US under Clinton and now they’ve obviously ignored any deal they might have had with the other five talking parties. Instead of clinging the selective reality hope that his strategy will still find a way to work, it’d be nice to see the man admit that Kim is a desperate madman and reasoning with him alone or en masse doesn’t seem to work.
And finally we have the official reaction to the Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health’s report that places the civilian death toll from our Iraqi excursion at 655,000, or 2.5 percent of the population. The study used a methodology that extrapolates the final number from a relatively small sample and the people who conducted it admit that they could be off by more than 250,000. However, it was vetted for accuracy multiple times before being published and numerous experts are attesting to its value.
Of course the reaction from Our Fine President who only last year estimated that toll to be 30,000 is that he doesn’t consider the report to be credible. Now I’m not sure what credentials he has to pass judgement on the validity of statistical work, but with his belief in data mining, you’d think he’d have a trust in the work of statisticians and data experts. That said he’d rather ignore reality in Iraq than face the truth that his war has not gone according to his predictions and the number of innocents killed under his order is monumental. I’m not sure if the number in the study is real or not, but I know one thing, neither our government, nor Iraq’s, nor any other independent body is offering up research leading to a different total or a reason to disbelieve the Hopkins number.
I’d have no problem with Our Fine President or his friends offering their criticism of the death toll if they presented evidence to back their claims or reason to doubt the study, but they don’t want to do that. Trying to get an accurate civilian body count would be acknowledging a horrific reality they’d rather not face. Unfortunately as people start to select more and more of the reality they experience, they become less and less able to take part in the reality in which the rest of us reside.