Telling the right what it wants to hear

By now, most of you have no doubt seen the truly unbelievable quote from Rep. Chris Cox (R-Calif.) on WMD in Iraq.

“America’s Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd,” he crowed. Then he said, “We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq.”

Sheer insanity. A nine-term House member and first chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security told a roomful of people at the Conservative Political Action Conference the most transparent nonsense imaginable. This is what politics in America has come to — high-profile and powerful lawmakers offering their activists demonstrable lies and demagoguery.

That said, I was equally fascinated by Salon’s Michelle Goldberg’s report on the response to Cox’s lunacy.

Apparently, most of the hundreds of people in attendance already knew about these remarkable, hitherto-unreported discoveries, because no one gasped at this startling revelation.

And why would they? Like comrades celebrating the success of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, attendees at CPAC, the oldest and largest right-wing conference in the country, invest their leaders with the power to defy mere reality through force of insistent rhetoric. The triumphant recent election is all the proof they need that everything George W. Bush says is true. Sure, there’s skepticism of the president’s wonder-working power among some of the old movement hands — including the leaders of the American Conservative Union, which puts CPAC on. For much of the rank and file, though, the thousands of blue-blazered students and local activists who come to CPAC each year to celebrate the völkisch virtues of nationalism, capitalism and heterosexuality, Bush is truth.

All things being equal, I’m probably more disturbed by the crowd’s of-course-there-are-WMD reaction than Cox’s ridiculous claim. These activists have convinced themselves of their own reality, in which Republican claims, no matter how outlandish, have to be true, by virtue of a Republican making them. It no longer matters what’s true, just which side is making the claim.

Bush said there would be WMD, Cox says we’ve found them, and that’s good enough for thousands of activists who’ve made up their minds about what they want to believe. The mind reels.