It’s certainly no mystery why the GOP and its fanboys at Fox and elsewhere are always on the attack.  Aside from the fact that only 20% of Americans will still reluctantly admit to being Republicans, the other 80% are always susceptible to inconvenient facts slipping into the conversation, which would clearly make an embarrassing mess of everything if that sort of thing got out of hand.  But denying facts, as Senator (!) John Kyl did recently when he simply said he didn’t believe a Harvard study that found that 45,000 Americans die each year due to lack of health care, and making shit up, as the Cheney family is fond of doing, sometimes isn’t enough.  As Karen Finley (she of manufactured GOP outrage over her NEA grant back in the day…) once wrote, “When you’re having an argument, and it isn’t going your way, it’s time to bring out the threats.”

The GOP is very good at threats, and even better at carrying them out, not just because they’re assholes, which they are, but because they have to.  The old lawyers’ adage, that when the facts are against you, argue the law, and when the law is against you, argue the facts, has now been adopted by the GOP, with its own special twist.  When both are against you, go after the witness, guns a’ blazing.

I’ve written before about this curious, to the outsider, war on truth-tellers, but in the aftermath of the Obama/Fox News flap, which to my considerable delight shows no sign of abating, this bizarre tactic has gone into overdrive; every clown to emerge from the GOP Volkswagen has a big mallet in its hand, hell bent on pummeling the hated seltzer-sprayer du jour.  Glenn Beck was perhaps the most deliciously typical of the bunch; he went after Anita Dunn using deceptively edited video to “prove” not that what she said was false, since it wasn’t, but that she was a dirty Mao-worshipping commie trying to “control” the media.  Though patently ridiculous, for certain people, conveniently including all of his audience, annoying truths can be swatted away by saying that the person who had the temerity to utter them is a poopyhead.  So there.  Cut to commercial.  (If there still are any, that is…)

To the reality-based community, this seems kind of silly, but it’s been surprisingly effective in the past, so why not?  After all, when Scott Ritter said that Saddam Hussein had no connection to 9/11 and no WMD, he was pronounced a child molester, and when Joe Wilson said the same thing, he was declared to be a disgruntled lightweight on a junket his wife cooked up.  Oh, yeah, and she’s a CIA agent, too.  Bill Maher, Ashleigh Banfield, and Phil Donahue were all summarily fired and roundly shut down for their unseemly brushes with the truth, too.  And there you have it: multiple lives ruined, but at least that pesky truth didn’t get out, or at least gain currency, until it was safely too late.  Mission Accomplished.  Michael Moore can make movies that clearly show the corruption of the Bush Administration, the death-dealing venality of the health insurance industry, and the wanton theft inherent in Wall Street, and, well, he’s rich, and also fat, so who’s going to believe him?  The Dixie Chicks could say, on stage, that they were embarrassed by George Bush, just like most Americans, and not only are they denounced as the usual Hollywood lightweights, but traitors giving aid and comfort to the enemy on foreign soil.  Shut up and sing, indeed.

This would all be funny if it weren’t so damaging;  first, it serves to silence voices with critically important things to say that Americans need to know, second, it discourages others from speaking out, and last, the media falls for it, hook, line and sinker, every time.  Glaciers melt while everyone talks about Al Gore’s house and travel, innocents are slaughtered while pundits dwell on Janeane Garofalo’s career being on the  skids, and the country goes bankrupt while  the media dismisses Ron Paul as a crackpot.

Telling lies, in the curious media landscape of 21st century America, has become a canny career move.  You could end up with a NYT column (Bill Kristol, David Brooks), head of the World Bank (Paul Wolfowitz), or with a plum spot on Fox (Karl Rove).  Tell the truth, though, and all hell breaks loose, and you’d better hope your affairs are in order (Paul O’Neill).  Like just about everything else these days, telling the truth, especially in public, is a luxury few of us can afford.

UPDATE: Fox just had a neat little segment where their fair n’ balanced panel all agreed, well 4-1, that the secret to ending unemployment was, surprise, eliminating the minimum wage.  To what?   A dollar a day like the Malaysians?  Once again, Fox stands up for the little guy against the elites.  Not.

It seems that the only thing that is too indecent and/or inappropriate to be uttered in public discourse these days is, well, the truth.  You see, the media have bet all their chips on lies from sea to shining sea ever since Al Gore “invented the internet,” and truth today in the media, on those rare occasions when it manages to insinuate itself into the counterfactual narrative du jour, goes over like a fart in church.  Thus, when one of the handful of honest congresspeople, Rep. Alan Grayson (and my future husband, even though he’s egregiously homely…) says something glaringly  obvious, like, “The Republican (health care) plan is, don’t get sick.  And if you do, die quickly,” the Washington Republican/Media peanut gallery reflexively recoil; crying, screaming  and undoubtedly soiling themselves in abject horror.  The humanity!

There’s a reason for this, of course.  Since none of these peabrains can evidently assimilate the fact that even as a dozen or so elected Republicans have flatly told desperate constituents to see if some charity can take care of their cancer or open-heart surgery, and many others have loudly and proudly accused Democrats of champing at the bit to do a full Soylent Green on everyone in sight from little Trig to Granny, bewildered viewers and readers so unfortunate as to be watching the fainting spells and immediate calls for punishment sweeping the Washington Elite and the green rooms must be asking themselves, “Are these people retarded or something?”  Not exactly, but they clearly think their audience is.  You see, Grayson’s unpardonable sin was telling the truth; and to George Stephanopoulos and many others, that sort of thing simply must be stopped cold before it gets out of hand.  If people were allowed to run around willy-nilly telling the truth all the time, shows like George’s would be much more popular, of course with entirely different guests and a lot more credibility, but folks like George who’ve presided over them all these years would be utterly discredited and dismissed for the mendacious nincompoops they are, and worse, might end up someday flying commercial.  Lies, on the other hand, are quite fascinating and have the advantage of continuing to build the previously established narrative while making reputations which rightly lay in tatters seem, from within the bubble, to be immaculately unstained.  Lies are thus like the stock in an imploding Ponzi scheme that Our Betters are unable to unload, and must be fluffed up every day, while the truth is a dreaded upstart competitor borne of an inadvertently remaining loophole in the laws they thought they’d already carefully rewritten in their favor, and must be slammed, censured, and eliminated from the playing field.  Attention must not be paid, or else.

Seen through this lens, a lot of our recent history starts to make more sense.  Bill Maher’s unceremonious firing when he dared to say that the Sept. 11 hijackers weren’t cowards, Gen. Shinseki’s getting the boot for pointing out, correctly, that Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowititz didn’t know their asses from  holes in the ground, Howard Dean for his every utterance, and on and on, all tell the same story: telling the truth is a punishable offense; lying is the way to go.  If there were ever any doubt, compare the career trajectories of Bill Kristol and Ashleigh Banfield, or Scott Ritter and Tom Friedman….  I could think of dozens of others, but the only way to succeed in the Washington/Media nexus, as currently constituted, is to exalt the lie and disdain the truth.  Really, you can’t fault people for playing the cards as they lay, but calling such insulting kabuki “journalism,” or even commentary, is considerably more audacious than calling shit Shinola.  At least shit and Shinola bear some characteristics in common.  Lies and truth, not so much.

But in the truest sense, these people “can’t handle the truth,” so gobs of airtime are left to fill with its opposite, and, lo and behold, a few people still do seem to believe it all.  Enough to make a cable show popular, and perhaps even enough to fool the gasbags watching each other as lovingly as Narcissus at the pond, but decidedly not enough to make it, well, so, therefore alternative arrangements must be made.

The good news is that this rather embarrassing avoidance of the truth has, at long last, brought us to the point that politicians like Grayson and the few in the media who listen to them and air their views land in a desolate media landscape where the truth is like an oasis in the desert, and has suddenly gained currency for its sheer novelty.  And here and there, when a bit of truth is allowed to seep out in what Sam Seder used to call a “one-cheek sneak,” heads turn not in horror but in wonderment.  The church welcomes the fart, though the preachers are still aghast as usual, and Grayson is emphatically not blaming the dog.

Where will it lead?  The Hag is cautiously optimistic.

UPDATE:  Grayson walked into a roomful of swooning spinsters on the “Situation Room,” and cheerfully made asses of Wolf Blitzer, Gloria Bolger, and everyone else by holding his ground.  All the “journalists” were busy scoldingly telling him that what he did just isn’t done,  being Miss Manners rather than Brenda Starr, and the whole spectacle was pretty revolting.  The Republican, spouting ridiculously shopworn talking points, wasn’t nearly so adversarial as the liberal media, if you can believe it.  (and I know you can…)

Sheesh.