The Disease of Willful Ignorance

Who? Who do you serve? For whose empire and for whose whims?
Is your honor just violins? Craven cowards. Armchair warriors, you will serve them well - from "Servitude" by Fishbone

Willful Ignorance.

Rarely have a I heard a more appropriate description.

The [House Ethics] committee concluded that other people preferred to remain willfully ignorant — to protect Mr. Foley’s secret homosexuality, to avoid partisan embarrassment or for other political reasons.

Yet still, notice that these people can't see the forest or the trees.

Mark Foley was not "secretly homosexual" - his preference for males was well known in his home district in Florida - Mark Foley was a secret pedophile.

But most importantly, he's not the person who been putting our children's health and safety extreme risk for the past 4 years and remained willfully ignorant of the consequences - not hardly.
Way back during the 2004 Presidential debate, I used to have a Republican friend (actually I used to have several, but that's a long story) and we used to debate issues and public policy on a message group.

He of course supported the reelection of President Bush, I supported Kerry. We argued over Kerry's service record, I stated that he was clearly an experienced leader and war hero with two purples hearts, a bronze and silver star. He thought Kerry was a fraud based on the information provided by the Smearboat Liars.

I challenged him on the facts.

Why didn't any of the documentation support the Swiftboaters? Why does everyone on his boat still support him? Why is it they can claim Kerry somehow Doctered the After-Action report even though it was signed by someone else? How can they continue to make these claims without any proof what-so-ever?

His response?

It's what I choose to believe.

That people, is Willful Ignorance.

It's like a disease, a plague that infects the Conservative Movement. You can't be a legitimate Conservative unless you're capable to picking and choosing what to believe among a set of neutral facts, regardless of their relative validity. Conservativism can not exists without Willful Ignorance.

Case in point, Juan Williams losing it with Bill Kristol and Brit Hume this morning on Fox News Sunday.

After enduring years of posturing on Iraq by Fox’s Brit Hume and the National Review’s Bill Kristol on the Fox News Sunday roundtable, Jaun Williams reached his limit. This morning, Williams said, “What do you imagine that there's an American Administration that's just going to laydown or run away? Sometimes I just want to scream. You guys have been going on since this thing began.”

Williams noted that Hume and Kristol “don’t give credit to people, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, Barbara Lee,...who said from the start this is a mistake. You put them down.” Instead, “now it’s everybody’s a surrender monkey or impatient or squeamish or weak. Why can't you guys say that there's a real problem in Iraq?”

Willful Ignorance.

President Bush thinks he'll be rememberd like Harry Truman.

Bush began his talk [with congressional leaders] by comparing himself to President Harry S Truman, who launched the Truman Doctrine to fight communism, got bogged down in the Korean War and left office unpopular.

Bush said that “in years to come they realized he was right and then his doctrine became the standard for America,” recalled Senate Majority Whip-elect Richard Durbin, D-Ill. “He’s trying to position himself in history and to justify those who continue to stand by him, saying sometimes if you’re right you’re unpopular, and be prepared for criticism.”

Durbin said he challenged Bush’s analogy, reminding him that Truman had the NATO alliance behind him and negotiated with his enemies at the United Nations. Durbin said that’s what the Iraq Study Group is recommending that Bush do now - work more with allies and negotiate with adversaries on Iraq.

Bush, Durbin said, “reacted very strongly. He got very animated in his response” and emphasized that he is “the commander in chief.”

Willful Ignorance.

The Rumsfeld Book Club.

At a Pentagon townhall meeting today, outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said he began reading books about the U.S. Civil War, but “turned away from that” because he “there were so many people killed and wounded, and they were all Americans.” Rumsfeld said he began reading books about World War II instead.

Yeah, Civil Wars are sad stories - just like the one currently going on in Iraq.

Before the election you had Karl Rove and "The Math". How'd that work out for ya Turd Blossom?

Ted "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens (R-AK): The Internet is a Series of Tubes.

There was James Inhofe (R-OK) former head of the Senate Environmental Committee who called climate change “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,”

Rick Sanitorium and James Hoekstra (R) who still think we found WMD's in Iraq, and that publishing the classified documents recovered from Saddam's Regime - including plans for a Nuclear device - was a good idea.

Lynn Cheney who says "We got through Katrina".

We did? Who the hell is this "We" kemosabe? The Gult Coast is still pretty much fracked in my Reality.

And lastly Dick "Shooter" Cheney who still believes that the Iraq Insurgency is in it's last throes.

All of it Willful Ignorance.

It's a very clear pattern of behavior. It's not that these people are lying, they a deliberately keeping themselves in the dark about things that challenge their preconceived worldview. They simply choose to believe something else. Something other than the facts.

But the best example of this comes to us via the Foley Report, which itself is an act of Willful Ignorance:

The report’s authors were clearly more concerned about protecting the members of the House than the young men and women under their charge in the page program. And they made absolutely no effort to define the high standard of behavior that should be required of all members of Congress and their staffs.

The report concludes that evidence of Mr. Foley’s “creepy” interest in young male pages dated back to 1999. One woman who worked with the pages took to shadowing Mr. Foley when he was around them. The report makes clear that Mr. Foley’s misconduct became known to an ever-widening circle of his colleagues and their aides, including Speaker Dennis Hastert. But no one made any serious attempt to stop Mr. Foley or reveal his misdeeds. A few urged him to cut it out, for political reasons, but did not follow up.

So Hastert knew something was up with Foley. Boehner knew. Kolbe knew. Reynolds knew. Shimkus knew. And they all did nothing.

Meanwhile - despite the rabid flailings of Patrick McHenry (R-NC) - Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emmanuel didn't know. Democrats involved in the page board were specifically kept in the dark for political reasons.

After Foley resigned, Shimkus told another Republican member of the Page Board — Rep. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia — why he never informed the Democratic member of the board, Rep. Dale Kildee (news, bio, voting record) of Michigan, about Foley.

Shimkus said, 'Dale's a nice guy, but he's a Democrat, and I was afraid it would be blown out of proportion."

Hmm, ya think?

What's even more sad and disturbing is the likelyhood that these people think they're actually smarter than the rest of us. They think they have privy to some hidden truth, that the unwashed masses who tend to follow the prevailing winds of "commonly accepted fact" are the ones who are to be pitied. To paraphrase Adam Savage from Mythbusters:

"[They] reject our reality and substitute their own".

You see, to them - we're the stupid ones. We're the "Koolaid drinkers" - we're the lemming-like followers, the "Defeato-crats" with our Global Warming "fearmongering".

How Fracked-up is that?

Although those of us in the Reality-based Community have reason to rejoice now the sun has finally set on the 109th Congress - there are still strong reasons to remain vigilant and outspoken. The House Ethics committees complete and abject failure to hold anyone - anyone - accountable for clear and obvious negligence in protecting our sons and daughters in their care is inexcusable.

It's simply "Political as Usual" - and that simply can't be allowed to stand. We can't let it. And we won't.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - Neo-Conservatism is a Pathological Plague that must be stamped out, like Nazism and Stalinism. So dust of your pitchforks and torches people - we still got a whole lotta hell raising to do.

The Willfully Ignorant Class had best run for the shelter in the highest parapet - because trust me, we're coming for you with Subpeona's under our arms, and they won't be inserted gently.

Vyan