Stupendo material from BoRev: "Fun With Cognitive Dissonance"

Posted by BoRev on September 14, 2008 6:55 PM
Fun With Cognitive Dissonance

You know what's fun? Trying to explain to some street kid in a foreign land exactly why half of all Americans think that Iraq blew up the World Trade Center. He'll say something like, "Look, I dropped out of school in the second grade and huff nitrous oxide daily, so how is it that I know more about this than your crazy snowbilly vice presidential candidate?" And then you just shrug because what can you say?

Anyhow this weekend the generally accepted storyline in Washington is that Bolivia and Venezuela booted their US ambassadors, not for backing violent secessionists, but rather as a cynical ploy to distract the dumb rubes from all the problems or something. Adam Isacson offers a nice summary of the weird conspiracy theory "conventional wisdom" :

"Don't believe for a moment that either expulsion had anything to do with an imminent danger of aggression from a waning U.S. administration already in way over its head in the Middle East and with Russia. What we have here are two leaders badly in need of an external threat to rally their domestic bases at a volatile political moment."

Right, of course. It had nothing to do with US aggression. That makes tons of sense, considering:

• The US ambassador to Bolivia denied he was even meeting with separatist leaders at all until camera crews caught him sneaking around with them in the middle of the night.
  
• Nobody knew that US Special Forces were even operating in Bolivia until one of them got arrested waving a gun around a Santa Cruz whorehouse, then the embassy claimed diplomatic immunity and sprung him from jail before the questioning began.
  
• The Venezuelan government has released recorded phone conversations from "current and former military leaders" discussing a plot.
  
• Evo Morales just beat a recall referendum with a rocking 68% of the vote, so this would be an effort to distract the country from...his own popularity?
  
• Everything happening in Santa Cruz today is a poor man's carbon copy of everything that happened in Caracas six years ago, when Chavez was the one being taken out in US-backed coup.
  
• This is all happening on the 35th anniversary of another US-backed Latin American coup you may have heard of.

So to recap, Chavez and Morales conspired with their own opposition media to make it look like US officials were engaging in hilarious, embarrassing activities involving insurrection and prostitution in order to have an excuse to bolster their already ridiculously high approval ratings, because really, that theory makes the most sense. Now let's see how many times it gets repeated in the next few days--you may even need to use your toes for all the counting.

Update 1: Oh, and if that Isacson quote sounds familiar, it's because you already read it in yesterday's New York Times. Simon Romero lifted it from Isacson's blog and made it look like it came from an interview. Lazy, lazy Simon Romero.

http://borev.net/

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It's good to laugh!

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