"Forgetfulness - a Gift of God"

"bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience."

-- Ambrose Bierce

Andrew Sullivan dips into the Orwell Goodie Bag.

Oh boy!

Thiessen, Santorum, And Orwell

...

"Enhanced techniques were not used to gain intelligence from detainees — they were used to compel their cooperation. While applying enhanced techniques, interrogators would ask detainees questions to which the interrogators already knew the answers, so they could judge when the detainees had made the decision to begin cooperating. Once they did so, the techniques stopped and the detainees moved into noncoercive debriefing."

- Marc Thiessen.

"'Do you know where you are, Winston?' he said. 'I don't know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.' 'Do you know how long you have been here?' 'I don't know. Days, weeks, months -- I think it is months.' 'And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?' 'To make them confess.' 'No, that is not the reason. Try again.' 'To punish them.' 'No!' exclaimed O'Brien.

His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. 'No! Not merely to extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.'"

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

"This idea that we didn’t ask that question while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was being waterboarded, [John McCain] doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works. I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative."

- Rick Santorum, on Hugh Hewitt's radio show.
...

Of course, when appropriate there is nothing wrong with a dip in the Orwell pool, although back in the Long Ago Olden Bad Times when Mr. Sullivan was making a buck excoriating us "Fifth Columnist", America-hating Liberals (just before he started making a buck aping us) I have a feeling that had any of us cheese-eating surrender-monkeys drawn any such direct and extended comparisons between any of Mr. Sullivan's then-running-buddies on the Right and the pure, noumenal evil of "1984", Mr. Sullivan would have machicolated "Moore Awards" down upon us from the Conservative parapets like boiling oil.

So I do not disagree with Mr. Sullivan's extremely obvious take on torture. I mean, who in their right mind could or would? But I will note for the umpteenth time the Primary Revelation from which Mr. Sullivan continues to flee every day of his professional life: the ugly fact that, behind his specific and damning invocation of Orwellian torture stands the gigantic machinery of constant, routinized memory-slaughter that made the world of "1984" possible:

From George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. (emphasis added and see if this reminds you of any Conservatives you know.)

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink. ”

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."

Yes, torture is horrifying, and those who defend it are moral plague-bearers -- no one needs Mr. Sullivan to tell them that. But for all of its repugnance, torture apologism is simply one particularly grotesque symptom of the widespread, insidious and never-to-be-acknowledged-on-teevee ideological infrastructure of lies upon which the entire Conservative Movement depends, and upon which Mr. Sullivan will never touch.

When you understand that the entire edifice of Conservatism is a massive, multi-generational, consensual hallucination -- an exercise in Strategic Forgettery...

...however much one may agree with some of the Conservative Expat crowd over specific issues such as same sex marriage and marijuana legalization, as long as they cling to their own, obsessive Strategic Forgettery, they will always be fools and clowns and chumps. Because as long as they depend on their own Big Conservative Lie to tuck them in at night and tell them that they're good little Reaganites, they cede any pretense of occupying any moral high ground from which to render judgment on the Palinites and the Beckians.

The homunculi who are left inside the Big Tent Batshit Thunderdome are either stupid, evil or nuts...or some cocktail of all three. And if the trend lines of the last 30 years have proven anything, it's that Conservatives are such willing collaborators in their own brainwashing that neither the Expats or the Palnites and their Elite Enablers are capable of retaining any political inconvenient fact longer than 13 seconds (or, in the case of the Palinites, reacting to anything other than what Rupert and Rush tell them to be angry about this time.)

There is absolutely nothing left sifting around inside their mushy, angry skulls except that sparkly aluminum sand that good people at Ohio Arts use to make the Etch-a-Sketch.

Shake-shake-shake...and Ronald Reagan never sold weapons to terrorists, funded an illegal war, raised taxes four times, or left behind the largest deficit in American history up until that time.

Shake-shake-shake...and Bush the Elder never hired Lee Atwater.

Shake-shake-shake...and what Southern Strategy?

Shake-shake-shake...and George W. Bush is the Greatest President Ever, you filthy, Liberal traitors!

Shake-shake-shake...and where did you ever get the idea that anyone in the Conservative Movement supported that "Progressive" George W. Bush?

Shake-shake-shake...George Bush who?

Shake-shake-shake...Sarah Palin never supported the bailout!

Shake-shake-shake...Deficits don't matter.

Shake-shake-shake...Deficits are worse than six Hitlers!

Shake-shake-shake...the Kenyan Usurper's deficits are destroying America.

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Republican"? I'm a Conservative!

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Conservative"? I'm an Independent!

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Independent"? I'm a Independent/Conservo/Libertarian!
...

...on a cultural/industrial scale -- you begin to see that (to quote the Joker) someone like Newt "Anyone who quotes me verbatim is lying" Gingrich

is not crazy, but merely ahead of a clearly definable curve. Sullivan's Conservative depends completely on everyone agreeing to forget everything that happened before, say, 2006; Palinites and Teabaggers depends on blotting out everything before January 20, 2009; and Gingrich's lies depend on a sliding, three-day window.

Gingrich will probably fail, but he will not fail due to a lack of understanding of the Real Conservative Movement as it really exists. The beating heart of the Modern Right has always been a vicious, xenophobic one – often racist, often fascist and always giddy-drunk on rage and ignorance and fear, and bearing no relationship whatsoever to Mr. Sullivan’s Fantasy Conservative Movement that never was.

So at exactly the same time Mr. Sullivan was busy making a career for himself as the Useful Gay Idiot for a Movement that hated everything he stood for, the Movement’s real leaders – freaks like Falwell and Limbaugh and Ailes and Gingrich -- were busy, busy, busy in the lab, refining and growing the Party’s happily-brainwashed Orwellian Base and building the electoral and cultural monster that now controls the Movement entirely.

No one who saw where the Right was headed a generation ago could possibly be surprised that, after 40 years and hundreds billions of dollars of effort, the Right now exists in a parallel, Orwellian universe, complete with its own newspapers, magazines, teevee networks, book publishers, think tanks and Jebus.

All built on Doublethink.

Or, if you prefer Strategic Forgettery --

...the training of an entire generation of Conservatives to mindlessly attack!attack!attack! the "Left" while holding themselves willfully and belligerently ignorant of what their Movement is really doing and who is really running it -- is, in the end, Ronald Reagan's most potent and vile political legacy: Strategic Forgettery.

One of the most successful practitioners of which is Mr. Andrew Sullivan.