Category: cognitive disorientation

Decoding the Note: Syllogisms of the Mad

Is it our imagination, or have the recent ADD-style efforts of the White House to recapture its fabled "message discipline" permanently frazzled the reasoning powers of the Note's Gang of Language Manglers? Witness today's entry, which kicks off with the now-standard non sequitur masquerading as an echt-insider rhetorical question: Behind the Locked Double Doors: Which Came Out, the Lady or the Tiger?

Why, we don't know, Note. Because actually, the fable you're referencing concerns the finality of a fatal choice, and we can't puzzle out what choice you're talking about. Drop-kicking Jack Murtha? Posturing indignantly over the "irresponsibility" of critics of prewar intelligence? Boxers or briefs? What, Note, what?

More Notely musings after the jump.

But of course, our brave Halperinites press on, heedlessly:

You should know that every Republican politician with a pollster knows where public opinion is on the war.

And that every Republican politician with a communications director realizes where the media is on the war.

And that every Republican politician with a TV set realizes that Secretary Rumsfeld didn't fully engage on the facts-on-the-ground questions he got on the Sunday shows.

Ooh! Could it be that Notesters are building to an actual critical conclusion, however gassy and obvious, instead of cooing "Shiny!" and "Pretty!" over each new White House press release that crosses their virtual collective desk. Well, no, actually:

What will happen in Iraq (and with the Iraq political debate in America) today, this week, this month, next month, and in the next eleven months?

That query is a rhetorical nod both to The Note's powerlessness to actually puzzle out 2006, and to The Note's "facts on the ground are all that matter" mantra.

Poor Note! Brought to the brink of an actual conclusion--e.g., "the Bush White House is melting down" or "Rummy sucks"--it withdraws into near paralysis, a state in which it can only nod--and even then only rhetorically, mind you, a literal nod apparently demanding too much from its enfeebled consitution--at its own powerlessness. Never mind that no one ever knows, really, what the next eleven months will bring--or that "facts on the ground are all that matter" is much too banal a sentiment to ever serve as an actual mantra--the technical purpose of which, after all, is to attain enlightenment. What the Note is awakening to, apparently, is the notion that reality exists elsewhere. Hence it quivers like a foundling birdie expelled from its nest in a raging storm. And so on its behalf, we implore: Hold the Note, Mr. Bartlett! Tell it that it never has to be frightened about knowing anything ever again! Be both its lady and its tiger!
-- HOLLY MARTINS

The NOte: Behind the Locked Double Doors

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