Swift boaters, to me! Attack, my flying monkeys, attack!

Like the Wicked Witch of the East summoning her minions to attack Dorothy, the Bush Administration, stung by the servile press suddenly reporting that Bush lied to get us into war in Iraq (or at the very least presented only the intelligence that supported his position to Congress and the general public, and ignored the intelligence that did not support his agenda), has summoned its flying swift boat monkeys to attack the truth-tellers.

In response, hoards of swift boat monkeys, flapping their little wings mightily while hooting and howling and flinging feces with fervant vigor, have dispatched themselves to regularly whine that the Democrats are "rewriting history" when they say that they were deceived by the Bush Administration. It's unclear exactly what history they're supposed to be re-writing -- does Bush really insist that he gave the Democrats access to all the evidence, including the evidence that did not support going to war in Iraq? But in the end, it doesn't matter. All that matters is how much feces can be flung, for if the flying monkeys fling enough feces, why, all the windshield wipers in the world attempting to clear the view will not succeed.

Goebbels had his "Big Lie" strategy, but the Swift Boaters have their own variant: the "lotsa liars" strategy, where they prime and pump their fecal orifices with sufficient feces to drown an elephant, gorging themselves on lies and slanders until the point of bursting, then take flight to fling feces with all the frantic intensity of a Halliburton executive seeking government money to do nothing. Under assault by these hoards of flying monkeys, truth becomes obscured under the feces flying everywhere, feces piling up in malodorous heaps of lies, libels, and confabulations obstructing the path of anybody attempting to navigate the body politic and arrive at what's best for the nation, rather than what's best for a small elite of small and venal men intent upon enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of the nation. In this way, they hope, they can re-write reality to be what they wish it should be, rather than what it really is. What need is there for Orwell's "Memory Hole" when what is true is buried under such a malodorous pile of biting-fly-swarmed monkey dung that it will never be dug up except by the most intrepid of explorers armed with respirators and full body mosquito netting?

And of course they are succeeding. Mightily attempting to buy off these hoards of flying monkeys before they can unload their feces, the servile press obediently gives lies equal time with truth, turning the quest for truth into a he said-she said affair where nobody reading the article can detirmine who's really telling the truth. But then, journalists rarely attempt to discover the truth nowdays, instead feeling their proper role to be that of transcriptionists, faithfully reporting both lies and truths as they are uttered by public figures without making any attempt to report on who is lying and who is telling the truth (I once got into an argument with a newspaper editor about this, and he insisted that his sole responsibility was to accurately transcribe what the politician said, and that was it). Is it any wonder, then, that the American public has no idea what is true and what is not? That the American public will buy ridiculous fabrications such as "Saddam supported al-Qaeda" when anybody with even an iota of real information about the region would have known that al-Qaeda and Saddam were mortal enemies who, at best, had an uneasy truce with each other?

What chance does truth have, under the attack of the flying swift boat monkeys and their seemingly endless supply of feces? When the layers of lies, libels, and confabulations press down upon the truth like tons of flying monkey feces, how many people will be adventurous enough to go digging through these mounds of feces to uncover the pearls of truth that lie underneath?

- Badtux the Truth-telling Penguin