Mars has WMDs!!!

“Who the hell are these 4 out of 10 Americans?” asks Reign of Reason. That’s the 40% who according to a Washington Post poll approve of the job George W. Bush is doing. Perhaps it’s more appropriate to ask what they’re thinking, or if they’re thinking. Personally I’m tempted to think that people hold opinions such as that for the same reasons they hold religious beliefs and that those reasons aren’t approachable by asking why, because it’s not about objective reality.

An even larger percentage of Americans now believe that Saddam Hussein actually had the weapons we were told he had back in 2003. 50% now believe he had them, and that figure has risen as the evidence that he did not have them has piled up to a level hard for anyone to deny. A Harris Poll released three weeks ago found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents — up from 36 percent last year — said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003.

It’s no surprise to me that people by and large tend to be stupid, gullible and intellectually lazy to the point that what is believed is what is fun to believe, but certainly Americans suffer no genetic predisposition toward idiocy that others do not. My explanation for a condition that is rapidly rendering the idea of Democracy useless if not actually dangerous is Fox News. Thanks to Fox you still hear people saying that it’s illegal to say Christmas and you have people believing that a few stray, degraded and unusable artillery shells found in the desert were the nuclear arms Condy told us we were about to be blown up with – possibly within hours.

True, we still have George W. Bush to tell us as he did the West Point graduating class last June that "When the United Nations Security Council gave him one final chance to disclose and disarm or face serious consequences, he refused to take that final opportunity." That’s a higher quality lie in that not only did he not refuse and he did allow more than 700 inspections, he had nothing to dispose of, but those eager young officers trained to surrender their intellect without question will doubtless believe and defend that belief for the rest of their lives and reality be damned.

That reality is that the 16-month, billion dollar investigation by an American Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. The UN was right, the French were right, Bush was wrong, but all that is swept away with a lie.

So where have all the weapons gone? The nukes, the rockets, the mobile weapons labs? According to a “speculative” Fox report in late July and backed up with no facts whatever, Hezbollah may have them.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a nation so addicted to being deceived and so reluctant to question authority is not only no Democracy, but is doomed and deserves to be doomed.