THE EERIE POLITICS OF SURREALITY

By H. N. Burdett

Not too many moons ago I blew off political conspiracy theories as extensions of delusional tendencies fostered by all governments, even democracies. A bright young colleague from my newspaper days once gravely confided: "It's not paranoia if it's true."

When coincidences pile up, as they often enough do - for example, in the bizarre and well-publicized procession of sudden violent deaths of persons of interest, as they did following the assassination of John F. Kennedy - it has to give pause to those who would like to think of themselves as rational adults.

Forgive this perhaps overwrought introduction to a friend of a friend - a disarmingly charming and obviously intelligent woman known to me only as a telephone voice. To protect the guilty, she will be hereafter referred to as Penny Forthought. You'll have to accept as blind faith that Penny exists. She really does.

Penny was on the phone only minutes after a recent debate between the Seven Dwarfs (I keep forgetting to count the number of Republican presidential nominee hopefuls who line up on the stage during these intriguing forums). She insisted that this sad collection of unworthies for what is repeatedly called the highest office in the free world are all Democrats in disguise. Or else, she continued, how could they possibly be expected to be taken seriously as candidates for the presidency of the United States? Nope. Penny is confident that they are incognito Democrats pulling off an elaborate political dirty trick.

Here we must pause to remind faithful readers that, at this writing, it is nearly 14 months before the next quadrennial presidential election - a time when mischief, deliberate or not, and confusion, readily comprehensible, run rampant across the length and breadth of this great nation. And while the incumbent occupant of the White House sinks in the polls, vilified by the formidable GOP propaganda machine as lacking any semblance of leadership whatsoever, and dismaying hand-wringing liberal Democrats as the very pillar of appeasement, Republicans find themselves vacillating weekly if not hourly between the nonentities who have thus far offered themselves up as their most probable challenger in the 2012 presidential election.

A strong sign of the depth of Republican desperation is that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was the early favorite to be the party's last candidate standing. Viewed by hard-core conservatives as far too moderate for their taste, his viability seemed predicated on the premise that virtually anyone professing to be a Republican would be preferable to a second term for Barack Obama.

Then again, was not the laboratory for that GOP anathema, health insurance reform, the People's Republic of Massachusetts under the governorship of none other than Comrade Mitt?

Romney has begged to differ with that too-obvious-to-be-true assessment. In one debate with his fellow aspirants, he claimed to be just itching to cast Romneycare as nothing even close to Obamacare. The erstwhile governor suggested that the overriding difference is that the Bay State model would be best adopted state-by-state rather than imposed by the federal government. The plausibility of this contention is, in fact, secondary to the conventional wisdom that in politics the explanations seldom catch up with the allegations.

And even if Romney's conception of Romney-care were to be miraculously accepted by that portion of the electorate that gets the heebie-jeebies about "socialized medicine" and "the European model of socialism," the former New England governor would be squandering his advantages of telegenic countenance and articulate argumentation on fighting from a defensive posture. No less an authority than that master military theorist Karl von Clausewitz told us back in the early 19th century that the most ruinous losses are suffered by the retreating army.

No sooner would Romney make his case for Romneycare, than he would have to come up with acceptable explanations for his turnabout from a pro-choice governor of liberal Massachusetts to an anti-choice candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. With even more inconsistencies between his gubernatorial performance and issues he espouses on the presidential campaign trail, hapless Mitt would be destined to the fate of a counter-puncher throughout the campaign season. Political prizes are seldom awarded to those battling from a defensive stance. Of course, conventional wisdom does not always hold up, but backroom strategists would certainly roll eyes and shake heads at the prospect of running a horse weighed down by such a hefty handicap.

Not that political pinwheeling necessarily disqualifies Romney as GOP presidential material. George Herbert Walker Bush, the successful party nominee in 1988, and John McCain, the party's standard-bearer in 2008, were both believed to be too moderate to satisfy decidedly more conservative Republicans. To win their respective nominations, each eased away from his less than conservative legislative record.

Decent church-going Republicans, who believe in the redemption of sinners, were not overly concerned about the discrepancies between the relatively moderate performances of Bush and McCain as legislators contrasted with the conservatism to which they gave lip service as presidential candidates. Had not some of the most powerful contemporary preachers confessed to having found their salvation after Perdition-bound lives devoted to draining whiskey bottles and scandalous wenching? Indeed a few televangelists have been shown in recent years to have more of a fixation on their respective collection plates than on the souls of their parishioners.

Hard-nosed Republican political observers were less certain that Bush 41 and McCain's changes of heart were indicative of actually seeing the errors of their old ways or merely transitions of convenience. In the end, of course, Bush 41 was ousted after only one term and McCain never got to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Valiant fighter that he was, McCain's presidential aspirations became an all but hopeless quest when he had the audacity as a U.S. senator to co-author campaign finance reform, a notion that still sends shivers down the Republican party's corporate spine. Unsurprisingly, during McCain's presidential campaign, he refused to support strengthening his own campaign finance reform bill lest he sew up his party's deepest pockets. Still, his presidential race seemed more like running in place on a treadmill against a spirited sprinter daring to dream that he could be the first African American president of the United States.

After one term, Bush 41's presidency went down the tubes for violating two tenets of contemporary Republicanism. He raised taxes after challenging America to read his lips as he solemnly pledged that he would never stoop to such a dastardly deed. And he was perceived to be no better than just another liberal jellyfish when he allowed Saddam Hussein to bounce off the ropes and live to fight another day by halting our troops at the gates of Baghdad with the plea that there was no exit strategy.

Then, of course, there was George W. Bush, who indeed defied all logic by getting elected to two terms. In retrospect, maybe Bush the Younger gets a Mulligan for his alleged theft of the 2000 presidential election against Al Gore. If historians choose to make that contest the exemplar of contemporary stolen presidential elections, for the sake of objectivity they cannot simply overlook those suspiciously tardy Cook County ballots in Illinois that gave John F. Kennedy his victory margin over Richard M. Nixon 40 years earlier.

Nonetheless, Bush 43 no sooner signed his White House lease than the nation was shocked and stunned by the heinous 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Bush the Younger famously responded by launching his vengeance tour - the good son finishing the job Poppy was too timid to carry through and never mind that his counter-attack was against a country never proven to have anything to do with the suicide air attacks that horrified the world.

The brilliantly crafted rationale for the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan was that the United States was declaring "war on terrorism" - a dazzling non sequitur that resonated seamlessly with angry Americans eager to barrage anyone or any country with lethal retribution for the unprecedented attacks on continental U.S. soil. Never mind that wars are hostilities between nations and cannot be waged against "isms," where there are no white flags to wave much less swords to surrender.

Thus with the 9/11 attacks, the Bush 43 administration had stumbled upon a possible formula for the continuity of GOP executive and legislative power, considering the unlikelihood that the electorate would be much up for changing presidents or shifting political party power in the middle of a war. The reasonable assumption was that perpetual war, as a war against an "ism" dictates, would translate into longevity of power for the incumbent Republican administration.

Riding the unbridled steed of patriotism - in which testosterone invariably trumps reason - the reckless Bush 43 had the solid backing of his wisest counsels, a preposterous pair of flag wavers, Vice President Dick "I had other priorities" Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who never made a mistake he couldn't pin on someone else.

Basking in all of this glory, Karl Rove, Bush 43's one-man braintrust whose audacity might cause the Florentine sage to turn emerald with envy, wagered that there was no way Americans would switch national administrations in the middle of a war. Rove felt that World War II rather than the infusion of New Deal socialism, in the guise of recovery programs from the Depression that followed the 1929 Wall Street crash, held the real key to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's three terms as president. The fantasy of perpetual war was a dream come true for Rove, whose stated life goal is a generation of GOP domination of both the White House and Capitol Hill.

But, alas, Rove, a proud American history buff, unforgivably forgot or chose to ignore Abe Lincoln's dictum that some of the people can be fooled all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Thus, while at least part of Rove's high stakes wager held up, Bush 43 having been re-elected, blood continued to spill on the two selected battlefields of the purposefully misnamed war on terrorism, even as a novice Democratic party politician trounced a combat-tested, genuine Republican war hero in the 2008 election.

Compounding the long-standing smoke-and-mirrors myth that the GOP is both the party of fiscal responsibility and far tougher than weak-kneed Democrats in dealing with enemies foreign and domestic, Bush the Younger left the White House destined to be remembered as easily the worst president ever to hold that office. Not only was the confessed perpetrator of 9/11 still at large, presumably hopping through the treacherous terrain of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border with the apparent agility of a mountain goat hooked up to a dialysis dispenser, the U.S. economy was left in shambles with global markets following closely behind.

That Bin Laden was finally shot, killed and dumped at sea on Obama's watch is an inconvenient truth Republicans would prefer to expunge from recent memory, if not the history books. To accomplish this seemingly improbable feat, they pile more and more garbage at the President's doorstep, all the while shouting through talk radio megaphones that the incumbent in the White House has, in less than four years, not wiped up the malodorous mess and all of its indelible stains that over eight years was created, packaged and distributed by Bush 43/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice et al.

Not Penny Forthought, nor anyone else can make much sense of this nightmare narrative. But Penny watches the contingent of prospective Republican presidential nominees straining and struggling to have the electorate believe utter nonsense: the lunacy that two wars can be fought for 10 years financed by maybe the Tooth Fairy, but not, by golly, by taxing upstanding, patriotic wealthy Americans; that, though the nation is suffering from near double-digit unemployment after 10 years of Bush the Younger's corporate welfare, that two-percent of the nation's wealthiest individuals deserve tax breaks because they somehow qualify as "job creators," knowing full well that more often than not they are job-killers and job-outsourcers.

So Penny watches the Republican debates and the only possible sense she can make of them is that they are behaving as caricatures of politicians that would be far too off-the-wall for any respectable editorial cartoonist to draw. In fact, the appeal of onetime front-runner Mitt Romney, on all sides of virtually every issue, was so flimsy that whispers that none of the candidates was cutting it rose to prayers that were not muttered but screamed.

All of which prompted yet another sheriff to saddle up and lift the hopes of the born-agains and flat-earthers, the lunatic fringe believed by more than a few Democrats to be the very heart and soul of the GOP.

Prior to Rick Perry's one-man stampede, imbecilically devout Republicans had only Rep. Michele Bachmann, who claims a Higher Authority as her personal political guru, as the only star who was worthy of hitching their wagons that remain filled with skepticism about science, evolution and anything else they are unable to find in the holy scriptures.

That Governor Perry more truly represents the wishes of the Supreme Province than Ms. Bachmann is a decision more likely to emanate from his home state's considerable oil and defense industry interests than by righteous bible thumpers, who can be trusted to fall into the beat of the all-too-familiar corporate cadence.

Anyone foolhardy enough to attempt to use this narrative as an outline for a a novel or even a slapstick movie comedy would not only be rejected by agents far and wide but declared candidates for rubber rooms in the nearest funny farm. So, as I was starting to say up front, I no longer shrug off the conspiracy theorists as pitiful creatures gone bonkers in a weird and crazy world they never made.

These days I tend to sympathize with those who find imagination, illusion and fantasy a preferable alternative to confronting today's realities in a forthright and serious manner. Then, too, it is absolutely true that during the last 10 years or so of my professional life in Washington, I toiled from an office that had previously been occupied by none other than JFK conspiracy weaver extraordinaire Mark Lane. When my telephone pal, Penny Forthought, learns of this, we'll have much more to discuss.