Can we really have a presidential election in which one side does nothing but lie? (Apparently so.)

[Click to enlarge, of course.]

"Everywhere it is power that is at stake, between states, between parties, within parties. Everyone constantly talks about morality, and everyone lies."

-- German literary historian Victor Klemperer (1881-1960),
in a diary entry of August 10, 1957

by Ken

Am I the only one in a state of stupefaction over the course the presidential election has taken? Oh, we saw it coming, but now that it's here, is it any less shocking?

We have a campaign in which essentially every word out of every mouth on one side is a lie.

Oh, we've seen the the extremified Right heading this way, rejecting all obligation to, even minimal respect for, the concept of truth, instead applying the word to what Stephen Colbert has conveniently dubbed "truthiness," which can be either (a) what one thinks ought to be true or (b) what one wishes were true. These are actually very different things, but functionally they have in common that they represent an abandonment of the basic standard of truth.

It's an astonishing thing to watch, and unlike so many progressive commentators, who can tell you exactly how a battle against it should be fought, I'm for the most part struck dumb. I don't see anything the least "postpartisan" about our time, but I see all too clearly that it's "posttrue." And once the public has lost all interest in actual truth, and yet in screeching, almost murderous, hysteria proclaims its lies to be truer than truth, what is there left to discuss?

The Sarah Palin phenomenon is part of the package. In saner times, she would be dismissed by all but the hard-core delusionals as an irrelevant ignoramus, and the McCranky campaign would get the old Gong Show hook and never be heard from again, having admitted that in terms of having anything to say of any relevance to the governance of the country it is 0 for the campaign. Instead, this person of absolutely no qualifications for any public office, let alone the vice presidency of the U.S., is breaking the rule that in presidential elections people don't vote for the VP candidate. It appears that large numbers of voters are prepared to vote for McCranky the empty suit because of the appallingly ignorant Palin and her random snatches of ultra-wacko extremist ideology.

Most appallingly, the emergence of the know-nothing candidate appears to have remoralized, not just the hard-core Republican base, which has long made clear its devotion to, even worship of, ignorance, but the Republican "middle" (meaning the "merely far right" as opposed to "far, far, far, and then some right") that has taken over the GOP. In the process this means that our actual sitting president, the Tiniest George Bush, has disappeared from their consciousness. People who finally came to understand at least some of how catastrophic Tiny George's regime has been no longer have to account for either the man, or his actions -- or their votes for him.

And so another segement of the commentariat bites the dust: the sages who told us so knowingly that the political alignment set in motion by Richard Nixon, which has effectively defined our politics for the last 40 years, has ended, to be replaced by . . . well, who knows what?

This was a tack taken by several reviewers of Nixonland, Rick Perlstein's monumental study of that political transformation, as reflected in the turnaround from Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory in the 1964 presidential election to Richard Nixon's landslide victory in 1972. Well enough in its way as far as it goes, those commentators sniffed, but that's so, so yesterday.

No, I think we're still living in Nixonland, only now it's Nixonland with fun-house mirrors. Thanks to the ideological warriors of the Far, Far Right, the country has been half-insanitized. Of course it's been done mostly by people who aren't at all nuts, people who expect to reap substantial profit in terms of either power or money. But once the insanity is unleashed, how do you fight it?

One of the things I've been reading while on temporary hiatus from Nixonland is the equally mammoth final volume, covering the postwar years, of the diaries of the remarkable German (and for the final decade-plus of his life specifically East German) literary historian Victor Klemperer* (1881-1960, seen here in 1945). Klemperer's story is much too complex to synopsize here, except to say that he survived the Nazi years, ever so barely (saved, in fact, by the fire-bombing of Dresden, which enabled him and his non-Jewish wife Eva to escape from deportation scheduled for the next day), only to wind up in Soviet-controlled East Germany, which he initially believed held the moral high ground over what he considered essentially a Nazi successor state in West Germany. His opinion of the German Federal Republic (West Germany) never improved, but as an unreconstructed political liberal he came to understand the basic fascism of the German Democratic Republic.

In a diary entry of August 10, 1957, Klemperer wrote:

I am so disgusted, I see the mendacity on both sides and everywhere. Everywhere it is power that is at stake, between states, between parties, within parties. Everyone constantly talks about morality, and everyone lies. At the moment things are more brutal, Asiatic here than in the Adenauer state [referring to the man known as "der Alte," "the Old Man," Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967), West German chancellor from 1949 to 1963]. But over there is the most blatant return to Nazism -- here to Bolshevism. De profundissimus.

I apologize for giving such an inadequate representation of the experience and thinking of this remarkable man. The final entries of his diary, with their awareness of impending death, which he both dreaded and hoped for (we're left to imagine the three and a half months between the last entry he was able to make, in October 1959, and his death in February 1960), was a more difficult and painful parting than I've had with most of the people I've lost in my actual life. But one thing I hope will nevertheless come through in this diary entry is the well-founded depth of Victor K's despair.

We can count ourselves lucky that we haven't reached that stage. But we have one political party that has now made this its actual agenda, and people like Karl Rove and Tom DeLay did everything in their power to turn the country into a one-party state. And important segments of the other party -- the crypto-Republican DLC-ers, the "insider" careerist Emanuelites -- have resisted only insofar as the Rove-DeLay agenda didn't allow for a share for them. and another that resists it only when convenient.

As of now we still have a clear electoral choice. But with half the country apparently joyfully embracing insanity, well, I think Victor K would have understood what I'm feeling.

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*If you're not familiar with Victor Klemperer and wonder, as I did when I first heard the name, whether he was any relation to the great conductor Otto Klemperer, the answer is yes, they were first cousins (meaning, obviously, that their fathers were brothers), though their relationship was fairly slight. Readers of Peter Heyworth's biography of the conductor know, however, that Victor's oldest brother, Georg, a distinguished medical professor who specialized in neuroscience and wound up settling in Boston, played an important role in Otto K's life.

Victor was clearly intimidated by his famous cousin's celebrity, but there's a poignant episode in the postwar diaries when Otto K is guest-conducting in Dresden and makes a considerable effort to establish contact with his cousin. (It didn't succeed. Victor was in Berlin at the time.)

*

DO WE REALLY NEED ANOTHER EXAMPLE
OF THE MADNESS? WELL, OKAY --

Awhile ago a colleague passed on this melancholy note to a list I'm on:

When I signed in this AM at Yahoo, one of the lead stories was:

"Obama blames Wall Street woes on GOP Policies."

Five minutes later the Obama story was replaced by:

"McCain says his highest priority will be to reform Wall Street."

This is just one example of what we, and the Obama Campaign, are up against.

I suppose our new mistress of American finance Governor Who??? will tell us again -- assuming she's asked -- that the problem at Lehman Bros. and Merrill Lynch was all those taxpayers dollars we've been shoveling in.

Sigh.

*

UPDATE: WHEN IT COMES TO McCRANKY CAMPAIGN LIES,
YOU JUST CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP

So it turns out that in nearly identical talking points -- or should we call them "blithering point" -- the Ticket from Hell is out there blithering about how they're going to "reform" Wall Street, ending such abusive practices as those shockingly abusive golden parachutes given to failed corporate executives to make them go away. (And even as commentators commentate that if the Lehman Bros. "problem" hadn't been resolved by this AM, the entire financial sector was set to go down the tubes, Young Johnny assures us that the fundamentals of the economy are sound. As if he would know a fundamental of the economy if it kicked him in the groin.)

There isn't a syllable or pause for breath anywhere in this that isn't a bald-faced, unmitigated lie. We've got a pair of lying ignoramuses spewing garbage that everyone with a working brain knows is a flat-out lie. Nobody is more squarely in favor of the rankest corporate abuses than these two, whose entire careers, in fact their entire lives, are paid for entirely by corporate abuses. It would be no exaggeration to say that Young Johnny McCranky and Governor Who??? literally are corporate abuses. It is the only reason that either of them exists as anything but a burden to their own families.

You can laugh or cry, but of course we all know that one of Young Johnny's chiefest economic advisers, seriously rumored to be VP timber before Governor Who??? was invented, ousted HP CEO Carly Fiorina, is one of the worst golden-parachute abusers, having walked away from her catastrophic tenure with some $42M. (And now our Carly is whining that Tina Fey's dazzling SNL impersonation of Governor Who??? was "sexist" (and Amy Poehler's portrayal of Hillary Clinton in the same sketch was what, Carly?). I suppose Carly is touch about preserving her status as one of the dumbest people on the planet, in which case she needn't worry. Not only one of the dumbest, but one of the most totally corrupt beneficiaries of the corporate malfeasance the GOP ticket-toppers lyingly claim they will reform.

But aren't they biting the corporate hands that feed them?

Now you might wonder: Aren't McCranky and Who??? asking for trouble among the very people they're most dependent on right now, the corporate lions who are finally shoveling cash into their campaign?

And you might have a point, if anybody with even minimal brain activity thought they meant a word of what they're saying. But of course every CEO with one of those golden parachutes written into his/her contract knows for a guaranteed certainty that they're kidding -- just making up stupid little stories to tell to incredibly stupid voters so gullible that they'll apparently believe anything. And of course the media will pass on all the lies without even cracking a smile, because . . . well, because that's what they believe they're paid to do.

Anytime either McCranky or Who??? opens his/her lying mouth, it should be taken for granted that he/she has simply edited out the announcement that what follows is the Lies of the Day. Really, they should begin each spiel, "Oh wait, I've got one!" and then, in Maxwell Smart mode, say, "Would you believe that . . . ?"

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