One of the authors is John Yoo, who famously wrote memos authorizing torture for the Bush administration. So, on one hand, Mr. Yoo thinks a president should not have authority to investigate if there’s even the appearance of a quid pro quo in federal contracting. On the other, in 2005, Mr. Yoo said the president should have the authority to crush a child’s testicles in front of the child’s father as a means of torturing the father to gain information.

I have a rule about never engaging in personal invective in this space. John Yoo has always been the toughest test of that rule. He does, however, illustrate the guiding principle of the Republican Party: We want what we want and we don’t care how we get it.

Consider the “deficit reduction” plan House Republicans recently passed. It would abolish Medicare over a ten-year period, give wealthiest Americans more tax cuts and increase the deficit. It doesn’t make sense, but sense is beside the point. It’s not designed to make sense; it’s designed to give the Republicans what they want – more power for the rich and corporate.

Look at the two parties’ positions on almost any issue. Democrats spend their time trying to find the right answer, a win-win or at least something fair, the greatest good for the greatest number. (Inasmuch as their own corporate masters let them. I mean, I haven’t started eating lotus blossoms.)

Trivial matters of logic or intellectual consistency do not bind Republicans. That’s why they scream about the deficit, but were silent in 2005 when Dick Cheney said, “Deficits don’t matter.” That’s why their “deficit reduction” is built on tax breaks for people who don’t need them cutting health care for old people. (Had I mentioned that already? It bears repeating.)

This is why Republicans run around calling themselves “fiscally responsible” while perpetrating scams on the public, why they say they’re “restoring honor to the Oval Office” while setting up secret prisons and torture chambers (not to mention sex-club fundraisers). They say whatever’s needed to get a short-term win. They believe if they string together enough short-term wins, it’s a long-term win. They may be right.

Karl Rove laid it out for journalist Ron Suskind in 2004: “The aide [Rove] said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

This is why Fox News and the rest of the Murdoch media empire exist, to prop up and repeat these fantasies at great volume. They know well-informed, discerning citizen Thomas Jefferson imagined and Ralph Nader dreams of doesn’t exist anymore, if such a creature ever did.

They know people vote for the guy they’d rather have a beer with (George W. Bush) than the guy who’s more likely to have the right answer (Al Gore). Based on the collective seats of our pants, we decide beforehand whom we agree with and then never stop to listen to the facts.

It’s fun to watch Jon Stewart put up clips of politicians and Fox hosts contradicting themselves, sometimes with a span of mere seconds. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking, “Boy! If the New York Times and the Washington Post and the networks would just hold politicians as accountable as Jon Stewart does! Then we’d be getting someplace!”

Maybe we would. Even in the unlikely universe where an epidemic of truth telling seizes the American media, it would only be a start, a first step. Things are bad. They will not get better unless and until enough people decide to make them better. For the time being, can we at least stop pretending?

© Mark Floegel, 2011

The most absurd character in the book is Milo Minderbinder, who – at least initially – runs the mess hall. A true entrepreneur, Milo steals supplies from the army and sells them on the black market. He justifies this by telling the servicemen he’s cheating that they will all benefit from his larceny. He issues “shares” in M&M Enterprises. The Ms stand for Milo and Minderbinder, but he put an ampersand between them to “demonstrate” that the company will benefit all. “What’s good for M&M Enterprises is good for the country,” he tells the airmen who complain that he’s ripping them off and endangering their lives by selling the safety equipment from their planes. (Does any of this sound familiar?)

By the end of the book, Milo has misappropriated an entire squadron of planes and is bombing his own airbase, having signed a contract with the Germans to do so. It’s absurd, right? Mr. Heller, like many novelists, uses exaggeration to allow readers to see our own society in a new light.

If only. I looked at the news Tuesday afternoon to see ABC reporting that the Justice Department now admits American military personnel tortured prisoners at Guantanamo Bay on behalf of the Chinese government. Milo immediately came to mind. “We’re doing this on a contract with the Germans!” I heard him say.

Joseph Heller’s irony is now our reality. The people we tortured at Guantanamo for the Chinese are Uighurs. Uighurs are an ethnic minority from western China who practice Islam. U.S. military personnel kept the Uighur prisoners awake, unfed and subjected to low temperatures for hours prior to the arrival of Chinese interrogators. The idea was to “soften them up” and make them more likely to tell the Chinese what they wanted to know (or at least what they wanted to hear).

It’s come to this. In the hectic days after Sept. 11th, John Yoo and other Bush administration functionaries cranked out memos justifying torture on the grounds that America was under threat of imminent, devastating terrorist attack. Two and half years later, we were treated to scores of photos from Abu Ghraib of soldiers torturing prisoners as they “softened them up” for military and CIA interrogators. A few enlisted were held accountable, even though authorization for such tactics went all the way to the Oval Office, via then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Now we learn America is the outsource for Chinese torture and no even seems to blink.

The other voice in my head, sounding quite at home next to Milo Minderbinder’s, belongs to George W. Bush. “They hate us for our freedom,” he said repeatedly in the months after September 11th. What kind of freedom, Mr. Bush? Religious freedom? The Uighurs of western China just want to be left alone, like the Tibetans, another ethnic minority whose homeland has been occupied by the Chinese, who disapprove of their Buddhist religion.

I thought the “global war on terror” was supposed to bring the values of western democracy to the world. Seven years on, our own civil liberties have withered away, Iraq and Afghanistan are ruined nations, the terrorists are stronger than ever and our government acts more like them every day.

China holds over a trillion dollars in U.S. currency, thanks to our enormous trade deficit, so when they come asking for a wee bit of torture, it’s awfully hard to say no. America, which in very recent memory was a beacon of liberty for the world, is now torturing people who seek religious freedom at the behest of the Communist government of China. We turn our heads away as Tibetans protest the half-century of Chinese occupation and repression because, hey, we want our Olympics. The tee vee rights and the marketing tie-ins are worth billions.

Welcome to the 21st century and to hell with the notion that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What’s good for G&W&B Enterprises is good for the country.

© Mark Floegel, 2008