The Bizarro World of Politics

If anyone is still looking for a political "savior",
you have my sympathy.

Now you can wake up. It was all a bad dream.

Expect it to continue in your waking state.

As the Bizarro Effect continues to wreak havoc with the moral sense of millions, and especially in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., so far, in the Democratic Party presidential primary, a major candidate has proposed invading Pakistan – and the front-runner declares that we can't rule out using nukes to go after al-Qaeda, even if that means wiping out, say, the city of Islamabad.

Lest I be accused of partisanship, I hasten to point out that Dr. Strangelove is all the vogue in the GOP, too. At one or another of the Republican debates, all the GOP presidential aspirants – with the notable exception of Ron Paul – refused to rule out nuking Iran. The liberal-conservative bipartisan unity on this question of nuclear mass murder – extending all the way from Hillary on the left to Tom "Nuke Mecca" Tancredo on the nut-job right – is really rather breathtaking, and it illustrates an important point: when it comes to the intersection of war, nukes, and foreign policy, Hillary and her hickish/hawkish constituency are but a milder and less kooky left-wing version of the fiercely nationalistic Republican fundamentalist hicks, who positively welcome the prospect of nuclear devastation as a sign of the "end times" and the second coming of Christ.

There is a sinister campaign afoot to make the use of nuclear weapons, albeit miniaturized "bunker-busters," acceptable, and this, too, is part of the spreading Bizarro Effect: in a world ruled by moral inversion, the unthinkable is now being openly talked about and justified. In a further sign that the Bizarro Effect has taken over the national consciousness, Hillary refusing to rule out the possible mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis and/or Afghans is now considered a move toward the "center," while Obama's initial moral revulsion (quickly overcome) is considered a "radical" deviation from the norm.

Read.