Overload

In the age of American mass media, we've become so conditioned to shotgun-style journalism and "spin management" that we've developed a group case of Attention Deficit Disorder. Our brains are so assaulted
in the information age that, between the mental demands of our personal existence and the 24 X 7 "news feeds", the hucksters and politicians have learned to exploit our collective short term memory loss. Maybe we should start spiking water supplies with Ritalin.

Our national predisposition toward a short attention span allows someone like George Bush to get away with statements like this on the campaign trail:

"We removed a declared enemy of America who had the
capability of producing weapons of mass destruction," he said during
the Wisconsin stop. "He had that capability. And he could have passed
that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them."

Capability? Excuse me? Bush has fallen back on using the same type of words, in the same haphazard manner, as he did in the 2002 runup to the Iraq invasion. No proof of "capability" has been shown to the American people. Again, we get the tired equivalent of "trust me, trust me" on this issue. To the best of my knowledge, not one journalist covering the Bush campaign has seriously asked the question - where is the proof of capability? The scribes and talking heads covering the Bush campaign just keep letting him get away with it, and parrot the pResident's most recent speech in their reports.

Let's see some documents - not David Kay's report, but actual Hussein-era memos describing the "capability to produce". Show us a few photos of labs even remotely capable of producing mass quantities of WMD, and show us some evidence of the ability to deliver said WMD in a battlefield environment.  Otherwise, the Bush regime is just crying wolf again. Intelligent people asked for the proof the first time. We didn't get it. Look at what it got us. And now, the media conglomerates are letting them off the hook again.

We haven't learned a blessed thing, have we?

But, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter because we've already forgotten the original lies. There's so many lies and spin about lies, coming from both political parties, that it's impossible to sort out the lies and spin anymore. So we throw up our hands, go to sleep at night, and wake up in the morning with a clean slate.

Go ahead, rewrite recent revisionist history - most of us aren't paying any attention anyway.  

Update, 7/15/04, 9:30PM: Juan Cole pens an excellent article for antiwar.com that covers a lot of the same ground on Bush's speech from yesterday.  Go.  Read.