Bird’s-Eye: Wikipedia has a fine section on the “big lie”, but the core idea is to not let reality get in the way of your beliefs. The crime rate is down in Canada, but the government stands behind its belief we need more prisons. Illegal immigration is down in the us, but that hasn’t stopped anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona, (though the courts may have.) Znet wraps up the discussion with an exploration of the gap between political rhetoric and reality.
* Crime Rate Continues To Drop, Statscan Finds -Toronto Star
The numbers, rates and severity of crimes reported to police dropped again last year, continuing a 10-year trend, Statistics Canada reports. The numbers fly in the face of the federal Tory government’s fretting about crime and the need for tougher laws and sentences.
* The Real Numbers On Illegal Immigration : The New Yorker
Senator John McCain, of Arizona, in a floor speech defending his state’s newly passed law requiring local officers to investigate individuals’ immigration status, described “an unsecured border between Arizona and Mexico, which has led to violence, the worst I have ever seen.” He went on to cite numbers for illegal immigrants apprehended last year “that stagger.”
In fact those numbers are surprising: they are sharply down, according to the Border Patrol—by more than sixty per cent since 2000, to five hundred and fifty thousand apprehensions last year, the lowest figure in thirty-five years. Illegal immigration, although hard to measure, has clearly been declining. The southern border, far from being “unsecured,” is in better shape than it has been for years—better managed and less porous. It has been the beneficiary of security-budget increases since September 11th, which have helped slow the pace of illegal entries, if not as dramatically as the economic crash did. Violent crime, though rising in Mexico, has fallen this side of the border: in Southwestern border counties it has dropped more than thirty per cent in the past two decades. It’s down in Senator McCain’s Arizona. According to F.B.I. statistics, the four safest big cities in the United States—San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso, and Austin—are all in border states.
* The Rhetoric-Reality Gulf Saul Landau Znet
President Eisenhower said “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
No major Republican or Democrat has addressed Eisenhower’s concern, or answered the question: how has nearly ten years of war in Afghanistan and almost as many in Iraq protected us? Does pissing away trillions of dollars equal defense? Recall a quote attributed to that pinko Eisenhower: “The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.”
The President has not addressed this issue, much less right wing Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats. As the already impressive gap between reality and rhetoric widens, teachers of peace might adopt a slogan: “Drill Baby Drill” – meaning holes in the heads of the 60 million Americans who voted for McCain-Palin in 2008 and millions more who grasp at denial rather than face the grizzly challenge of acting in their world.
