Lying Bastard Fatigue

Welcome to 2006. You could be forgiven, though, for momentarily believing that the extra leap-second which ushered in the New Year was a symptom of some strange Philadelphia Experiment designed to throw the world backwards in time to "1984", not forwards into a new year. And therein lies my problem. As I've mentioned before, I find that the outrage I should feel at the many and various lies of the Bush administration, the GOP in general and their lapdog poodle across the pond, Tony Blur, instead is a dull and generalised ache of discontent. I am so overloaded by scandal, lies and totalitarianism that my outrage has been burned out. I have Lying Bastard Fatigue.

Back in November I posted a list of links, 73 of them in all, imbedded in a profile of what it is to be a sociopath. The post was entitled "You Don't Have to be a Sociopath to be Republican, but it Helps," and the link was designed to show that the profile fits Bush, his administration and the current GOP leadership to a 'T'. America is being governed by a bunch of empathy-impaired borderline crazies - I am no longer surprised that they are Lying Bastards for that is the primary symptom of sociopathy. However, the post is also worth looking at because it gives some idea of the breadth and depth of their lying bastardness. It includes lies about intelligence, lies about the economy, lies about corruption, lies about featherbedding for their rich selves, lies about the dismantling of welfare and healthcare safety nets that mean America's poorest suffer a new Katrina every single day, lies about torture, lies about those who would point out the lies and lies about the lies themselves. Every kind of lie under the sun.

And now we can add lies about spying on Americans themselves - and lying about those lies too. The New York Times has a report today on how Bush came here to the Alamo City yesterday and used a military base and military personnel for another political speech in which he defended "both the legality and the necessity of the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, and he denied that he misled the public last year when he insisted that any government wiretap required a court order". Even some on the Right are starting to smell the coffee, although others are still in denial having invested too much intellectual and emotional capital in their sycophancy and others still are sociopaths themselves and hope to be part of the in crowd. The issue is not the wiretaps themselves as the sociopaths keep insisting, its the erosion of democracy caused by warrantless taps. But I'm unsurprised - sociopaths erode democracy in favour of totalitarianism whenever they can. They hate our freedoms, you see.

However, pandering to the sociopaths, for fear of being attacked by them as being "weak", is just going to give them what they want. That's why people like Marshall Whitman aka the Bull Moose and Democtrat leaders who are Hawks so as not to appear lilly-livered Doves are so wrong. Appeasing sociopaths, as we are so often told, leads nowhere except to being contolled by them.

It is also why one of the current issues which actually manages to give me an acute sense of outrage, rather than the dull ache of repeated domestic batterings, is the current rush to "do something" about Iran. Despite the debacle that is seeing a slide towards civil war in Iraq, despite the vast sums of money spent there but not on things made of concrete, despite the "staying the course" that seems never to get to that "last throe" - despite so much, it's all being reduxed like a bad remake of a bad old monster movie. We can expect better special effects this time around.

Have the media and the Democrats forgotten already? Have they forgotten the lies about WMD programmes? The charismatic figure at the head of a very dodgy rebel organisation who kept coming up with intelligence "revelations" that later were found to be fabricated from an agenda? Even the false allegations of ties to the boogeyman, Al-Qaida? It would seem so, because its all being done again and they are all following along like nodding dogs in a car's rear-window.

Alas, the sociopaths actually count on their victim's becoming dull to the pain from repeated assaults. It makes them easier to abuse and less likely to rise up and strike back. The sheer weight of different lies on so many different levels helps the next one to be lived with. The victim becomes numb.

Lying Bastard Fatigue - it's insidious, pernicious and dulls the senses. I resolve, this New Year, to fight back and to beat it.