Fish in Space

I know the arguments. I know the stalling. I know people have heard it before. I don't care: impeachment proceedings should begin immediately. Not later. Now. It doesn't matter if it's late in his term. It doesn't matter if Republicans and Blue Dogs will try to stall. It doesn't matter if there aren't enough votes to impeach. What matters is that Congress remembers its duty to perform oversight and actively investigate the criminal acts of this administration. That is all that matters. As a bonus, once the facts are revealed and displayed for the public in such a way that the media can't ignore it, voting against impeachment will become political suicide. No one but the most corrupt or self-deluded can possibly assert Bush's innocence even now, when only a fraction of the details are known. The President is not above the law, no matter what Cheney wants to say. Else we can no longer claim to be a nation of laws.

Cognitive dissonance has become one of my famous phrases of late, because it very aptly describes the kind of arguments I'm getting from conservatives in defending Bush and their own conservative viewpoint. Simply put, cognitive dissonance is willful ignorance. The wiki article puts it a bit more eloquently: "In simple terms, it can be the filtering of information that conflicts with what one already believes, in an effort to ignore that information and reinforce one's beliefs." Am I calling conservatives liars? Not exactly. Conservatives honestly believe they've got it all figured out, and the fact that reality refuses to conform to their belief just means they're being sabotaged by us damned liberals. They're closing their eyes, plugging their ears and yelling "lalalalalala! I can't hear you!" so they don't have to acknowledge any facts that refute their beliefs. A classic case of cognitive dissonance involves my mother. Shortl...

This blog entry was a fascinating look at cognitive dissonance as art form. If you can't quite bring yourself to finish reading all eleven entries (the author was shooting for ten, but his math skills weren't quite up to the task), skip on down to the comments to see my take on it. Provided, of course, the author allows the comments to stay.

There was a time when talking politics was talking about the issues. More taxes or less? More regulation or less? Are we on the right track or not? Most importantly, how do we fix what we perceive as wrong? But since the Reagan Administration, and particularly since the rise of Fox News, politics has become less about the issues and more about personalities. George Bush is a man people would like to have a beer with. Gore is cold and robotic. McCain is an honorable man of the people. Obama is elitist. Edwards is obsessed with his hair. Y'know what? I don't give a damn how much Edwards pays for his haircut or how well Obama bowls. I want to know what they propose to turn this nation back into a place I'm proud to call home. Because for the past seven years, I've been ashamed to call myself American. People are starting to wake up to the fact that the media has been treating politics like a reality television show. We want to know when our troops are coming ...