Blaming the Band-Aid

This is from a news article about a recent book on our failures in Iraq:
On U.S. reconstruction failures — in electricity, health care and other areas documented by Washington's own auditors — Allawi writes that the Americans' "insipid retelling of `success' stories" merely hid "the huge black hole that lay underneath."

But it’s not just Iraq.  Anyone who insists on ignoring problems in order to encourage more success will almost always fail.  Because not only will ignorance not make your problems go away, but they’ll only become worse because you’re not doing anything to fix them.  As the cliché goes, the first step to solving your problem is to admit that you have one.  But for some people, that’s the last thing they’d ever want to do.

And so it should be no surprise that the Republicans have failed at just about everything they do.  Because all they’re concerned with is selling their product and think it undermines the sales pitch to bother checking to see if it’s true.  Their entire system depends on sleight-of-hand and deception.  Wishful thinking and prayers can solve everything.  If you think positive, things are positive.  And other such hogwash.  

And to an extent, they’re correct.  You can doom yourself by thinking about doom too much.  And having a winning attitude is usually a necessity to winning.  But if you have a real problem, that’s not enough.  You still have to solve it, and no amount of positive thinking will possibly make a real problem go away.  After all, if all you needed to do was to change your thoughts, then it wasn’t a real problem you were dealing with.

And that’s what’s wrong with the Bush Administration and the entire Republican system.  Not only can they not stop thinking about how they’ve been victimized, but they also don’t think they’ve done anything wrong.  And the only thing they have to fear is fear itself, so they just don’t think about anything they might be scared of.  You only have a problem if you think you have a problem, and these people refuse to think about problems at all.  And that’s why they have so damn many of them, and haven’t figured out why.

And in this case, they were so concerned with pimping positive news from Iraq that they forced themselves to entirely ignore the bad news.  But as usual, it didn’t go away.  And all the Bushies can think to do is to blame it on the other problems that they also failed to solve.  And of course, the liberal Democrats are to blame for all of this.  Had we not existed, then there would have been no political pressure for them to deny the truth.  But they knew we’d trumpet every bad news story that came from Iraq, so they were forced to spend all their energies denying that such bad things were happening.

After all, there were all those great schools, hospitals, and power plants getting built.  So how could things possibly be getting worse?  And the same applies for hurricanes, recessions, deficits, and just about every other problem this administration ignored.  The Bush Administration always did such a good job that they couldn’t risk undermining that success by suggesting they could do things better.  After all, a band-aid sends a clear message to your enemies that you’re hurt.  It’s better just to bleed.