Heads I win, tails you lose

Public relations, or twisting the facts to best suit your case, is a marvelously developed art in this country because the lack of a state monopoly over communications forces the powerful to ever greater heights of acrobatic mendacity. In a dictatorship readers develop a skeptical sixth sense and immediately reinterpret and edit the official output while more or less swallowing it nonetheless.

In our system the same chorus is sung in a different register, a subtler and in the long run more effective one. Witness the official gyrations over the collapse of the surge strategy in Iraq: after a year’s insistence that the increase in troops had brought stability and assured an eventual triumph, suddenly the fact that fighting has broken out throughout the country is trumpeted as evidence that the troops should stay.

This approach, in which all facts, however contradictory, justify current policy, is remarkably consistent, and the echo chamber knows how to pick up on the latest Word from on high to turn on a dime without blinking. For example, Bush sycophants argue that torturing defenseless prisoners is essential because no terrorist acts have occurred in the last six years—proof that it works.

As soon as there is a serious attack, however, the argument will be that the practices have to continue because ruthless enemies may be planning more violence, i.e. because the previous approach (torturing defenseless prisoners) didn’t work.

Dismantling this pretzel-shaped logic requires the attention span of a multi-celled organism, so one can’t be too sanguine about the continued efficacy of the technique for dominating biped existence the world over.

However, there is one historical moment in which all the excuses and re-explanations eventually collapse, sometimes in an avalanche: upon losing a war. As the Bushites continue to raise the stakes and double down again and again to avoid facing their blunder and its consequences, they lay the groundwork for a shudder of national revulsion of unexpected depth and breadth.