You Lie Because I Say So Is Why

"He voted for that bill without even reading it!!" is a line that's been used by both parties when in the Congressional minority, and it is a canard. Congresspeople are busy, and the bills they vote on are fucking long. If you were in their position, I can assure you that you wouldn't read any more than was neccesary to get the jist.

Or maybe not. Congressman Joe Wilson, Republican from South Carolina, has become instantly famous by apparantly ubermenshing controversial tenants of health care reform into being by sheer will. Wilson publically called President Obama a liar during the joint-session speech last night when Obama said that illegal immigrants would not be receiving government health care under any proposal. The always quick-witted president managed to avoid an awkward situation by using his backwards Communazimuslim Lizardman language to sieze control of Wilson's mind and illicit an apology within an hour.

I'm not terribly concerned about proper decorum in the halls of government, in fact I lust for the day when Congress busts out into a Japanese-Diet style brawl. And like I said before, Congresspeople do not have the time to read entire bills cover-to-cover and should not be expected to do so. Still there is nothing stopping Joe Wilson from perusing the health care bills himself if he's afraid that there's anything in them that is insufficient in regards to keeping out the spi..../ upholding immigration law.

I've mentioned before that Orwell's fear that a authoritarian regime with "memory hole" power would have the ability to maintain its tyranny forever turned out to be blessedly backwards. What happens is that dictorial systems gradually fall under the delusion that they can invent truth, and in so doing they become unable to respond to threats they imagine themselves able to wish away. The Rupublican Party was never quite tyrannical during the Bush years, which makes the fact that very obvious fact that they fell very hard to this delusion all the more pathetic.

In 2005 it was deeply irritating to hear a hair's breadth majority party chastise us liberals for being "out of the mainstream". To hear a party now firmly in the minority lecture us in precisely the same way in 2009 is baffling and sad. Staid suburbanites and post-modern hipsters are now united in viewing the American right wing as the batshit uncle emberassing us before the world, yet the right-winger still considers the other ninety nne percent of Planet Earth to be the weirdos.

What we are seeing within the American Right today is not the sort of imperial God complex that brought down Moscow and the Third Reich, but rather the populist God complex chronicled in Bob Altemeyer's "The Authoritarians." Altemeyer observed that one of the biggest motivators of the 'right-wing authoritarian' mindset is a fierce desire to beleive that there is a universal standard for normality and that they are it. (In philisophical jargon, the right-wing authoritarian considers himself 'subject.')

When the right-winger combines this adolescent need to be normal with good old- fashioned chauvanism,(the worship of power and force, purely masculine of course, as the solution to all ills) he becomes endowed with the ability to bend reality as much as is neccesary to maintain his sense of being subject, center of and rightful master of the universe. The old buggaboo of 'liberal media bias' is the tool by which he bends reality. If the authoritarian's sense of being normal is upset by hearing the liberal media say that black is black, than black is white, the president is a secret Muslim terrorist, Naziism is a form of Socialism, and the State will force you to feed your grandparents to illegal immigrants.

So finally, if President Other dares to deny something that provides the right-wing authoritarian with moral license to hate him, such as making the objectively falsifiable claim that there is nothing benifitting illegal immigrqants in his health care proposals, than the shout of "you lie" delivered with certainty, passion, and perfect thoughtlessness, is enough to make this inconveinent fact disapear, and the world again rotates on the axis of the self where it belongs.