The Unbearable Lightness of Being Right

[Cross posted at Stump Lane.]

Take heart, my children, when Donald Rumsfeld says he lies awake at night, “deeply troubled by the success of terrorist groups in ‘manipulating the media’ to influence Westerners.” Let talk of this sort worry you not. I can assure you, Our Brave Warrior rests as well as a baby, or a log, or the Kevin Pollak character in the jail scene in The Usual Suspects.

You too may rest easy, my dear friends, for the purpose of Our Media, as we have molded it, is to record history as We see it. To frame issues, and bound discussion inside the constraints of an ordained Neo-Reality. So to allow— and then complain loudly about —a ‘liberal’ (i.e. ‘terrorist’) bias within the media, is as if to say, “Thus far and no further,” when it comes to analyzing the issues. It is to head the dysfunctional loons of paranoid defeatism off at the pass through which information flows into the Utterly Rational Public Mind which informs our national discourse.

Concern yourselves not with the so-called “third way,” precious lambs. For there shall be no such thing. There shall be not even a second way! There is only the supremely right way; and the radically wrong way. Though, fear not! The radically wrong way is but a far-away straw-imagining; painstakingly constructed— in accordance with 19 Quart Lobster Pot doctrine —to most efficiently show the wrongness of all things other than the supremely right.

For an illustration of this in practice one needs look only as far as Our Mighty Master Cheney’s recent utterance:

I realize, as well, that some in our own country claim retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone. But the exact opposite is true.

Now don’t all of you pessimistic demagogues of peacenikery who’ve claimed, “retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists,” feel stupid now? Now that your bizarrely wrong-headed notions about the war and terrorism is laid out on display, in all of its farcity, for all to see?

There is only one alternative to defeat in Iraq, and that is Victory! Thus spake Medium Lobster. Only through our unwavering faith, and unquestioning devotion may our rulers carve this necessary truth out of today’s Iraq.

—Chaplain Montag of the First Knights of the 19 Quart Lobster Pot