A suspension of disbelief

For once I've got some time to kill at work. I promise a full report on the new job and Temple when I get the internet hooked up at home.

Briefly here, before I have to go cover a symphony fundraiser (free appetizers — woo!), I'll say that I can't believe this Swift Boat farce still maintains some level of credibility. See any of the coverage from Drum or Marshall to see just how full of shit these guys are.

Sadly, that doesn't matter. These attacks are only important because they give Bush supporters a way out. Forget everything that's fucked up in the world today. Hell, forget everything that's going well, too. What really matters is what some guys with huge axes to grind remember happening 30 years ago on a river bank in Vietnam. Oh, and did you hear that Kerry might have slightly mis-remembered a story he hasn't mentioned in over 10 years?

The thing is, it's obvious to everyone involved that this is nothing but base sophistry. The facts of the issue aren't important — controlling the debate is. Since Bush's policies are not doing well right now, the right somehow hijacks the headlines, and the issues that might actually affect someone's life after November 2 vanish from the public discourse.

This whole deal is so obviously a non-issue that conservatives go out of their way to justify with feined bluster why it actually is. I heard Rush do it after reading a WaPo article (shockingly, he ommited the quote from the guy Kerry saved which contradicted the SwiftVets), and here's another example. In every case, we're told, "This is important because it reflects Kerry's character" or some such bullshit.

Again, the focus of this tactic is to move the discussion further from the rational, the solid, the evidentiary into the land of subjectivity. How do you measure character? With your gut, of course. Fuck the facts.

That, or they say that this is all really Kerry's fault because he made it such a huge part of his campaign — after conservatives spent the better part of the summer calling Kerry a pussy and a terrorist-hugger, so he framed his campaign around society's oldest symbol of strength, war experience.

You know, I never really cared much about the hoo-ha over Bush's guard service, but I simply cannot grasp how his supporters can take Kerry to task in light of that record.

I know I too often refer to my family as some kind of barometer of conservative thought, but that's exactly what they did. They weren't actually mad about Kerry's supposed lies. They were laughing about them, repeating the SwiftVets' claims with mock frowns and raised eyebrows, like you do when you're gossiping about something you don't really believe. It made me want to pull my hair out.

Michael Ventura puts it well in the Chronicle this week:

When pressed slightly, my conversant [who had approvingly repeated the SwiftVets' claims -- ed.] had obliquely admitted Kerry's courage and spoke with the decent humility most of us feel when contemplating such a war record, we who haven't looked down gun barrels. This man just liked being lied to, as long as the lie reinforced what he wished to believe. That's human enough, and who hasn't succumbed to such self-deception at one time or another? That is precisely the human frailty that Bush plays to.

The right-wing media, apparently, is no different.

When the people who are supposedly serious about politics obviously aren't, shouldn't it be clear why so many people say, "Fuck it all," and stay home on election day?

UPDATE: This is not surprising:

President Bush, who has refused for weeks to condemn a veterans' group's television commercials attacking John Kerry's military service in Vietnam, today said the group and others running independent advertisements should stop running them.

So Bush lets these ads run for a while without comment, gets their message into the news cycle, weakly condemns them, then calls for Kerry to denounce such outlandish ads as those that recite how huge the deficit is. Riiiight. Nice try, Dubya.