[Newspoetry] Fightin' Mad Bob LaFollette's Fantasy Land...

[emerick at chorus.net]

DateLine: The dusty Campaign Trail, somewhere in the Battleground States

A war of words is being waged in America today, between the guys who think lying is best done boldly, in a grand and bombastic style of distortion, hyperbole and misdirection -- and the guys who think lying is better done by small, nuanced statements, open to revision, reinterpretation, further elaborations.  And the policies putatively would follow the style of these word warriors, or so we are led to think.

Well, actually, no one wants us out here thinking, not during an election that is all and only about eviscerating equivocations.  Bush-Cheney would have us believe that an inexperienced president would be the cause of 9-11 -- if you believe the Veep's statements from yesterday.  That is, Cheney seems to claim that 9-11 happened because we had an inexperienced president whose notorious vacuousness encouraged the enemy to think that it could succesfully attack America.  So, supposedly having "learned" by experience not to be vacuous, America has paid the entry fee and already had its 9-11.

Unless, that is, as the Veep ominously warns us, America makes the mistake of electing Kerry president.  In that case, the Veep says, we will have another 9-11.

The Kerry camp was quick to reply to these new insinuations of the most insidiously insinuating and insulting presidency in American history, too insulated from reality to be well informed.  "Vagueness is not vacuousness, let us never forget that vital distinction.  Vacuousness means nothing's there, while vagueness means you can't tell whether anything is there.  Wrong-way George gets everything wrong, wrong, wrong -- and we all know that three wrongs never make a right."

So, the "take-no-hostages" gang takes no hostage of the the gang they call the flip-flop folk.  Meanwhile, the latter group prates on, as if the campaign were to be dignified by the seeming appearance of rational discussion -- as if governing were an intellectual art of limited consensus, relying on knowledge and understanding, rejecting overreaching and overspeaking.

"Why," says the t-n-h gang, "Nader resembles Kerry.  He, too, wants to talk seriously about America's problems.  But, the time for talk is already past -- we're the do-something, do-anything real-life action heroes.  That's why Arnold endorsed us -- policy doesn't matter, as long as you get good press -- and you only get that when you look lively, and don't let yourself be bothered with the details.  Heck, the details will happen all by themselves -- micromanaging is not our style.  We just do the colorful big picture things...  Heck, Laura even thought George was agonizing over going to war -- when actually he was just agonizing over the possibility that he might get caught in his lies.  But, like Cheney said, 'Lies are deficits of truth, and deficits don't matter any more.'"

Kerry thinks lying does matter and that it matters a lot.  "Big lies are what big men tell you.  Little lies may be worse, but they are cheaper to make -- and you have to keep track of all these many little things.  It takes a genius like me to keep track of them.  That's why you should vote me -- I'm smart enought to remmeber how clever I mean my words to be."

Nader says, "It all starts in business school -- where they teach business majors that lying isn't bad unless the people catch you at it.  Business schools teach future CEOs how to be evasive, how to avoid being pinned down, how to paint rosy pictures for investors, and, most importantly, how to fleece the sheep.  Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld are almost perfect examples of the plausible-deniability of the lying CEO-class. And, the Democrats like Kerry and Edwards are taken in daily -- and serve the corporate masters of America, as well."

[Editor's note: without fleece, CEOs wouldn't be able to hire the attorneys necessary to ward off the inevitable law suits -- law suits that Bush has promised to make impossible in the name of "tort reform" as a money saving device. No-liability creates a new application of the King-can-do-no-wrong philosophy of the caveat-pre-emptors: the CEO's price is always right.  More importantly, without fleece, business schools would have no sheep to shear.]