It seems almost an axiom that when we are confronted with extreme contrast we lose our objectivity. Faced with bombast and absolute conviction, versus well meaning, truthful low key prevarication, as individuals, we go for one, with near total exclusion of the other.
For example, George W. Bush was an unpopular, nincompoop President after he used American Armed forces to invade Iraq on the unproved Premise of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. But for the propaganda campaign waged by the White House, with Dick Cheney driving his ever subservient, underling G.W. Bush to do his bidding for god, for country and for Halliburton, we, the ever subservient American people, might have seen through their charade, whose real purpose, at the expense of young American and Iraqi lives, was to kill Saddam Hussein, a man who had threatened both the Cheney and the Bush families. But we didn't see through it. We joked about the incompetent, but emotionally accessible Bush, and we reviled the emotionally inaccessible Cheney, our own Dr. Mengele, who'd have killed his dog and eaten it for dinner had he nothing else.
Now, faced with horrors we never would have imagined, we long for the dulcet days of a Bush malapropism -- 'Is our children learning'. How innocent the well meaning but bungling gentle George from the Ranch seems in comparison to the mad demagogue that has transfixed our countries citizens, using P.T. Barnum's technique, one spectacular lie after another delivered with total commitment.
We are reaching a crossroad. Will the demagogue prevail and our country be driven into fearful nationalism, or will we wake up and realize we have been fed nothing but lies, by a mentally ill man with orange hair.
