Decius wrote:

There is not one damn thing that is new about Iraq.

Occam's razor suggests that the people of this country just aren't down with the Republicans in the wake of Katrina, and the conservative pundit class is trying to save itself while diverting attention from that issue. I hope that's the answer.

I have two book recommendations for you.

Recently I mentioned Political Fictions ($12 in paperback at Amazon). Over the weekend, I spotted We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, an Everyman's Library edition of the collected nonfiction of Joan Didion, including Political Fictions. The collection is only $20 in hardcover. From the Publishers Weekly review of PF:

As the title implies, her focus is how the press, think tanks, political strategists and opinion makers conspire to create stories that reflect their biases and serve their own self-interest. Didion's willingness to skewer nearly everyone is one of the pleasures of the book.

This book will offend many Democrats, particularly of the Democratic Leadership Council persuasion, and many more Republicans, but it is members of the press who fare most poorly. To Didion, they are purveyors of fables of their own making, or worse, fables conceived by political strategists with designs on votes, not news.

My other recommendation for today is David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. In particular I would like to quote from the entry on Godard which I reviewed today:

Godard's collected works are an Encyclopedia Cinematografica, the insistence that all things exist only to the extent that they can be expressed in cinema. Godard more than any other director taunts reality. It is not that life imitates art, but that it is all art, all fictional as much as documentary, and it is cinema once any lens -- in camera or eye -- notices it.

There is not one damn thing that is new about Iraq. Nothing about 2003 has changed recently. If you are now unhappy about what we did in 2003 you should have been unhappy about it 2 years ago. In fact, if you'd bothered to be unhappy about it two years ago you could have actually fired the people responsible for it instead of punishing a bunch of other people who had much less to do with it, but happen to have the misfortune of playing for the same team.

Many people just wanted blood in the wake of September 11th, and Afghanistan wasn't gratifying enough for them. Others embraced the argument that a democracy in the center of the Middle East is the key to changing the entire region, yet didn't even know the difference between a Sunni or Shia, couldn't point at a map and say a single informed sentence about any of the other countries in the region, or acknowledge that successful democracy is grown from within rather than forced at the barrel of a gun. It also helped that an artificial sense of urgency was created and intelligence puffery was in play, exploiting the trust people put in the government. As for 2004, we had already bought this war at that point. To reverse "the course" would have required setting aside the righteousness that seems to define the modern right these days.

Occam's razor suggests that the people of this country just aren't down with the Republicans in the wake of Katrina, and the conservative pundit class is trying to save itself while diverting attention from that issue. I hope thats the answer.

People's attention spans are very short. Aside from people directly effected, I bet Katrina isn't even registered on the average voter's top three issues list. For most people, it was a TV drama that lasted a few weeks, that they remained emotionally bonded to when away from their TV sets thanks to the presence of gas station price signs. They have been belted with bullshit issues like gay marriage far longer, so those get higher positions on their list. It's easier to adopt a "values platform" as "values" always tap into something current...

I really hate to look down at the bulk of the electorate, but there are times when it's hard not to. We call them elections. The vast majority of people don't take the time to put serious critical thought into issues, regardless of how much the issues effect them. They just run with the idea presented to them that's the easiest to understand and feels right. Hence, the resulting public debate is bullshit and almost entirely irreverent. It's Occam's Razor on a sugar buzz. Everything is about "values" rather than pragmatic solutions.. Pragmatic solutions are usually too complex to explain in ten words or a thirty second TV advertisement.

Winning a modern election in the United States uses the same skillset necessary to market soda, sneakers, brokerages, and automobiles. I view this as the central problem facing democracy in the uber mediated world we live in today. People don't read anymore. You can't sell an idea as easy or as quickly as affecting an emotion and connecting something with it. I give you, righteousness.