Navigating Bullshitworld

How Do We Keep the Fires of the DNC Burning When So Many Seek to Douse Them With Torrents of Crap?

Do you remember the movie “Waterworld?” In it Kevin Costner and Jeanne Tripplehorn and pretty much everyone left on the planet earth were left floating around on an ocean planet because of the melting of the polar ice caps.

As the peaks of last week’s Democratic National Convention recede into memory I feel they are also at risk of gradually being submerged by the ocean of bullshit that will immerse us from now through Election Day. It is coming at us from all sides and it is going to take all our energy to keep it from obscuring the simple, clear truths that emerged last week.

The joy and the energy that was supplied by last week’s events was due in large part to the fact that the messages of the convention were so damn straightforward that even the nattering of commentators and the counter-programming of the opposition and the disinformation of our enemies and trolls and bots and army of idiots on social media could not obscure them or diminish their power.

In fact, truth be told, I’m not 100 percent sure that most commentators knew how to cover the event other than to be quiet and let it speak for itself because otherwise they would have been forced to say things that would have instantly led to their having their official Big Thinker’s cards revoked.

After all, how do you hold your head up high at a DC cocktail party by reporting that the main message from Chicago was that this election is about good versus evil? That it is about honest, decent people versus corrupt, malevolent weirdos? That it is about a bi-partisan movement to help lift up all Americans versus a narrow-minded cult seeking to further enrich a group of valueless plutocrats? That is about protecting our freedoms about stripping them away? That is really, without exaggeration necessary, about democracy versus autocracy, the future versus the past?

All those stark difference have lifted up Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and the Democrats more swiftly than anyone could have imagined possible. It was just reported that in one month they have raised $540 million for their campaign and 200,000 people have volunteered to work for it.

Indeed, part of the reason that change in the fortunes of the Democrats has been so swift is that the ticket nominated in Chicago last week is, as I wrote a few days ago, so obviously, inarguably, the opposite of MAGA.

And that kind of clarity can’t be tolerated by many in our political system. The media, Trump and Vance, MAGA and their allies all have reasons to try to cloud the picture. But how do you do that if the truth is so straightforward?

Well, that’s where the bullshit comes in.

It takes all forms. In fact, sometimes, living in Washington, I’m reminded of the myth that Inuits have 32 different words for snow and I think, even if that is not actually true, we surely deserve a longer menu of words we can use for the different kinds of bullshit with which we are confronted daily.

Here are just a few different varieties.

• Let me start with a Tweet I saw today (Sunday) from Senator Lindsey Graham. It contained not one but five different lies. But each was a different kind of lie. The first was the underlying lie. It was a particularly bold sort of lie but one that is central to the Trump campaign and its surrogates like the morally adrift and generally pathetic Senator from South Carolina. We’ll call that Selective Memory Bullshit. Essentially, it is the kind of nonsense that relies on people’s willingness to pretend that facts and the past bear no relation to one another. In this instance, Graham was arguing as Trump off does that things were better when he was president. They weren’t. And I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have read this far (or been able to read this far) if you thought otherwise.

• Graham then offers some “proof” in support of his insupportable thesis. (A million people dead of COVID, the most corrupt administration in history, two impeachments, economic collapse, January 6th…do I have to go on?) His first point is what I would call Big Lie Bullshit. It operates under the same principle as other “big lies” like saying Trump won the 2020 election. It is that you repeat a lie over and over in the belief people will ultimately start to believe it. In this case the lie is that we had a secure border when Trump was president. No. No we didn’t. In fact, we have fewer people crossing our southern border today than we did when Trump left office.

• Graham’s next assertion was that gas was at $1.87 a gallon when Trump was president. This is Missleading Bullshit. If gas hit $1.87 for anyone in the U.S. when Trump was president, it was only because his mismanagement of the COVID crisis caused an economic disaster that crushed demand for gasoline. Gas prices actually rose the first two years of Trump’s presidency. They averaged about .70 more than the alleged price noted above. So not only is the assertion deeply misleading, but it is actually trying to reframe an economic collapse as a big win for consumers. Idiotic.

• His next assertion is that Russia was not invading Ukraine during Trump’s presidency. This is what we call Good Old Fashioned Bullshit. Russia was actually invading Ukraine for every single minute of Trump’s presidency. In fact, their invasion began two years before he won election. Russia was in Ukraine the whole time and Trump did not, as he has promised he could do, end the invasion with one phone call.

• He repeats this kind of bullshit with the his next point. He asserts there was peace in the Middle East while Trump was president. Really? If so, how did Trump “defeat ISIS” (more bullshit) during his term? Why did he launch an attack on Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani during his presidency? Why were U.S. troops in Afghanistan throughout his presidency? In reality, the war in Syria was continuing, fighting was taking place in Yemen, and fighting, of course, continued between Israelis and Palestinians throughout his presidency. Including, I would add, some that was likely egged on by Trump’s message to the Netanyahu government that it would support whatever it did in the West Bank, etc.

And that’s just one Tweet. During the past couple of days alone I saw myriad different forms of bullshit that were, I will admit, driving me a little crazy also.

• For example there is the Both Sides Bullshit we all know and hate. This comes from media outlets seeking to appear balanced even when the facts do not warrant it. (The reality of course, once again, for the millionth time, is that it is not the job of the media to be “fair and balanced.” Their job is to report the facts. Period.) A prime example here were pieces like the oped in the New York Times entitled “Joy is Not a Strategy" and the equally fatuous take in the Washington Post today “Will a Convention in Poetry Be Followed by a Campaign in Prose?" In both cases the thrust was, we’re not comfortable with this good story so let’s explore the possibility it may not last.

• Another example that goes even farther is Journalistic Malpractice Bullshit in which, for example, you have the case of CNN presenting a panel of voters as “undecided” when one of them (the one who said he was going to go for Trump after the DNC) was actually publicly, visibly pro-Trump all along.

• Don’t forget either the complete farce of Fake Fact Checking Bullshit. We’ve seen a million examples of this recently…in fact, it is a bit of bullshitidemic. The most recent is the fact that Tim Walz at one point said he got an award from a local chamber of commerce and it turns out that it was the local junior chamber of commerce. Which Walz’s team noted and corrected long ago just as soon as they saw they had made their typo. Trump is a lunatic criminal rapist racist who is pro-Russian and who is being given control of our nuclear arsenal but sure, let’s focus on typos in press releases put out by Tim Walz’s staff.

• In the interest of real fairness (not the kinds cited above) I should note there are forms of Self-Inflicted Bullshit. These include shots Dems take at each other that are unnecessary and ought to be toned down for the duration. One example, I’ve recently seen some folks implying that the people who wanted Biden to step down all wanted an open convention to follow that. That’s just not true. There were a number of us who clearly thought the only reasonable pass was for him to pass the torch to the Vice President.

I mean these are just the examples I happened to see while looking at the news this morning. And there are still ten weeks to go in this contest. And I tell you, I don’t know if I can take it. (If you have other examples of such BS, please share them so someday we can come up with the Bullshit Glossary the world deserves.)

Meanwhile, my strategy is simple. I’m going to emulate Kevin Costner and Jeanne Tripplehorn and focus on finding things that float to the surface no matter how deep the ocean of crap around them. As another (also not very good) movie once noted accurately “Hope Floats.” So too does truth. So does a shared sense of purpose. And I am going to fashion together a raft of sorts from everything that left me feel so buoyant during the DNC. And I will use it and the bright light of the stars who illuminated the night skies in Chicago last week to navigate all the way to the polls in the hope that in the wake of the Harris-Walz victory at least some of the sources of bullshit will dry up, the sea of excrement will recede and we will find ourselves on dry land with a brighter future ahead.