You gotta love this President. I mean, he knows that words don't really mean anything. They are just squiggles and sounds. So if you don't care what you say, you can be both the villain and pose for photos as the white knight in shining flight-suit who's protecting everybody from evil. It's kind of a reverse Zorro or Robin Hood.
You know the old story. Rich and powerful villain in charge of governingment thinks he can do anything to the poor ordinary peons and get away with it. And he can, so long as he controls the army/police and can label his victims in such a way as to make them seem less-than-you-and-me. Criminals. Enemy Combatants. Unpatriotic Obstructionist Alarmist Racist Liberal Democrats.
In the stories, the label-ees are outcasts until someone of pure heart champions them. Then we are reminded of our duty to our fellow humans, our love of justice blossoms and we turn on the evildoers. Only today, it's the Compassionate Conserver himself who's robbing and pillaging and blaming the peons, not the Sheriff of Nottingham. The rhetoric is so dizzyingly doubled that ordinary people get lost in the shell game and pick the empty lie every time.
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The lies inside this story is too complicated and too petty to be interesting to your average citizen. Too much thinking for too little result. So is the lies in the case of the prisoners at Guantanamo. And the rollbacks of clean air and water regulations. And the zero funding for enforcement of many federal protections of your common citizen. They have nice names like Homeland Security, the Healthy Forests law, the Corporate Responsibility bill, but the devil is in the details.
Words is not nothing. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can destroy your freedom and leave you naked on the heath when you are too old to fight any more. All it takes is for good people to trust the cover instead of reading the book and do nothing.
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