It was wonderful to see Mary Ellen pick up on a term that suddenly came to me while in a Blue Voice group chat: Outrage Fatigue Syndrome. Yes, we've all had it and she captured the symptoms perfectly. Lisa expounded on the subject and came up with kind of a post-traumatic version of the ailment that has also hit some of us from time to time. There's a further stage of the disease when you're sick and tired of being sick and tired. No matter how bad things get, you just can't summon up any more outrage. It's a feeling of resignation that things are not going to get better until we've had a change of leadership. One symptom: you stop reading the news stories. The headlines will suffice. Maybe one or two paragraphs of the story tell you all you need to know because it's all happened before.
Some little twerp at NASA is telling the scientists there how to rewrite their research papers. Yawn... Alberto Gonzales is stonewalling the Senate committee about domestic intelligence. Oh well... Ann Coulter is "joking" about poisoning a Supreme Court justice. I've heard that before... Karl Rove is trying to intimidate Repub senators to stand behind the president. What else is new? You know that no matter the scandal Bush will still be there at the end. Jeez. We've got three more years of this? Well, two years, eleven months, one week, and five days (not that I'm counting or anything) until we inaugurate someone, anyone else.
I especially like Lisa's idea of a causality loop where we live the same moment in time over and over again. Writing in the Huffington Post, Peter Daou outlines the real causality loop, the "10 Stages of a Bush Scandal:"
1. POTUS circumvents the law...
2. The story breaks...
3. The Bush crew floats a number of pushback strategies, settling on one that becomes the mantra of virtually every Republican surrogate. These Republicans face down poorly prepped Dem surrogates and shred them on cable news shows.
4. Rightwing attack dogs on talk radio, blogs, cable nets, and conservative editorial pages maul Bush's critics as traitors for questioning the CIC.
5. The Republican leadership plays defense for Bush, no matter how flagrant the Bush over-reach, no matter how damaging the administration's actions to America's reputation and to the Constitution. A few 'mavericks' like Hagel or Specter risk the inevitable rightwing backlash and meekly suggest that the president should obey the law. John McCain, always the Bush apologist when it really comes down to it, minimizes the scandal.
Is any of this starting to sound familiar?
6. Left-leaning bloggers and online activists go ballistic, expressing their all-too-familiar combination of outrage at Bush and frustration that nothing ever seems to happen with these scandals. Several newspaper editorials echo these sentiments but quickly move on to other issues.
7. A few reliable Dems, Conyers, Boxer, et al, take a stand on principle, giving momentary hope to the progressive grassroots/netroots community. The rest of the Dem leadership is temporarily outraged (adding to that hope), but is chronically incapable of maintaining the sense of high indignation and focus required to reach critical mass and create a wholesale shift in public opinion. For example, just as this mother of all scandals hits Washington, Democrats are still putting out press releases on Iraq, ANWR and a range of other topics, diluting the story and signaling that they have little intention of following through. This allows Bush to use his three favorite weapons: time, America's political apathy, and make-believe 'journalists' who yuck it up with him and ask fluff questions at his frat-boy pressers.
8. Reporters and media outlets obfuscate and equivocate, pretending to ask tough questions but essentially pushing the same narratives they've developed and perfected over the past five years, namely, some variation of "Bush firm, Dems soft." A range of Bush-protecting tactics are put into play, one being to ask ridiculously misleading questions such as "Should Bush have the right to protect Americans or should he cave in to Democratic political pressure?" All the while, the right assaults the "liberal" media for daring to tell anything resembling the truth.
9. Polls will emerge with 'proof' that half the public agrees that Bush should have the right to "protect Americans against terrorists." Again, the issue will be framed to mask the true nature of the malfeasance. The media will use these polls to create a self-fulfilling loop and convince the public that it isn't that bad after all. The president breaks the law. Life goes on.
10. The story starts blending into a long string of administration scandals, and through skillful use of scandal fatigue (my emphasis), Bush weathers the storm and moves on, further demoralizing his opponents and cementing the press narrative about his 'resolve' and toughness. Congressional hearings might revive the issue momentarily, and bloggers will hammer away at it, but the initial hype is all the Democratic leadership and the media can muster, and anyway, it's never as juicy the second time around...
Rinse and repeat.
Jonathan Alter summed up the whole cycle last June in Newsweek, "If Watergate Happened Now." Check that out for a little outraged chuckle.
Yes, we've all seen this movie before, haven't we? Just keep telling yourself: Two years, eleven months, one week, five days. 1072 days, give or take. Or just a little over 64,000 minutes. Hell, that's less than 4,000,000 seconds from now. We can do that much time standing on our heads.
