Cognitive dissonance

I haven't really thought of cognitive dissonance in a long time. But reflecting on recent events I have concluded that cognitive dissonance is what I am suffering. That is, when there is a mismatch between what you are told and what you actually experience you have this strange mental situation. Perhaps the most simply example of this is Dick the Slimy's statement that the Iraqi resistance is "in its last throes." Try to reconcile that in your brain with what seems to be actually happening in Iraq.

Another example might well be the reaction of the MSM and Republicans to the Downing Street Memos. Now they are saying something like, "well, what's new about that? We all knew he was lying in the first place." Try to make sense of that. The implication is that because we were all aware he was lying in the first place we shouldn't be concerned about it. NOT CONCERNED ABOUT IT! Our President deliberately lied to bring about an illegal, unconstitutional, immoral, and unnecessary "war" in which many of our children and thousands of others perished and we are not concerned about it? What kind of warped illogic is in the minds of these people? They seem to believe that if they just ignore it, it will go away like all the rest of their scandals. After all, if we all knew he was lying before the release of the memos, why should we trouble ourselves about it now? Are you required to undergo a lobotomy when you register as a Republican?

Now it has also been revealed that not only did we lie to the British about our use of napalm, we have also done everything possible to downplay their concern over global warming. This after also learning that Cooney (I think that's his name) edited all the paperwork on global warming for the White House to make global warming seem as innocuous or unlikely as possible. Once he was found out he suddenly took a job with Exxon. Sigh.

Newt the Hypocrite has written a letter to the Senate urging them to censor Senator Durbin over remarks made by Durbin about the torture scandals. He complains, rightly so perhaps, that Guantanamo (and presumably our other torture centers) are not at all like the Nazi death camps, Stalin's gulags, Pol Pot's strocities, and so on. And of course they are not. But that is not what Durbin said. What he said was: if you were to read these reports from the FBI and others, and if you didn't know where they came from, you might well think they were written by the Nazis, etc. I think this is quite likely perfectly true. But trust the Republicans to twist everything to their advantage and by concentrating on one or more statements thereby reduce any attention to what was in fact the problem. Their criticism of Amnesty Internation is a perfect case in point. They seized on "gulag" as the only important statement and thus managed to shift attention away from the fact that the Amnesty report was most probably otherwise true. They used the same strategy with the unfortunate Dan Rather situation. The fact that what he said was true became lost in the confusion over where it came from. Given the Republicans cleverness is doing this kind of thing, and given the gullibility of their followers in believing it, it behooves Democrats to be more careful in what they say and how they say it. But this doesn't mean they shouldn't go ahead and attack, they should, but they should stand firm and defend themselves from Republican attempts to make black into white.