You Just Get More

Any old amateur blogger can reprint for you some funny and ironic political quote that, by the time it appears, everyone has already seen on account of they, too, watch The Daily Show (you dumbshit). But here at The Odds Are One™, we give you more. We'll actually delve into the quote, go the extra mile, give you that extra insight that you just can't get anywhere else. We can offer this unique service because we sit around reading our own damn blog while we eat dinner--that's just how pathetic we are. Or else it's because of how much we care about you, the loyal reader. I'm sure it's one or the other.

Anyway we here at the Odds Are One™ are reading the A.G. quote below and it's suddenly struck us, why would he say that? I mean, that's really weird. That's like, mental short-circuit weird. It's Meta-Freudian-Slip reverse syllogism weird. Let us go over what we know: Gonzales is an intelligent man, and quite possibly in some metaphorical and/or non-metaphorical sense, Gonzales has sold his soul to a neo-religious ideology that, as most of them do, tells itself that its actions are for the good of the many when they are in fact good for the needs of only a very few. I'll come back to that in a moment, but one other thing we should take as an a priori is that Gonzales is in fact cognizant of the fact that the attorney firings are in the news and that he is aware that he's there in the House testifying about it.

Here's what I'm coming up with:

The Slip seems pretty straightforward: he's been rigorously coached, or coached himself, to repeat that there was absolutely nothing improper about the attorney firings. But he clearly also knows it isn't remotely true. His cheatin' heart will tell on him. His conscious mind isn't going to let anything slip through his mouth that betrays this fact, but his subconscious is just dying to let it out, and subconscious outwits the conscious by constructing a reverse logical syllogism that Alberto's forebrain can't quite parse in time to intercept the FTP packet his cranial nerves have sent to his mouth. "If there were a crime present the press would be reporting on it. So clearly there is no crime here, because if there were...oh...crap."

At the same time, this seems to clearly pinpoint his own internal ethical compass. Imagine the logistical nightmare that you'd have to engage with in your moral center in order to be where Gonzales is: "Sure, I'm an intelligent man and I've done a lot of things you wouldn't have liked to have done in the name of the ideology but I was doing it for the benefit of the party by getting more members of that party elected to office, which I owe to the party because people before me did what they had to do to get me where I am so I can...do a lot of things I wouldn't have liked to have done...wait a minute, wasn't I just here?"

So he knows that he's doing something wrong here, but he tells himself it's not really wrong. If it were really morally wrong to fire attorneys for partisan gain/lie in front of Congress/Start A War That We Know To Be Wrong But Is For The Greater Good And Will Stabilize The Source Of Our Energy Needs For The Next Century Or Two And Will Hold Those Interests For Our Children And Our Children's Children So They Can Live In Peace And Security Even If The Rest Of The World Goes To Hell On Account Of Fuck Them...*ahem*, if doing any of that were really wrong, the Freedom of The Press, the great protector that is our Fourth Estate, would come to our rescue and report the truth, and the people would rise up against them. I'd aver he thinks this because he is a child of Watergate, but I'm just guessing. This must be the specific form his own personal cognitive dissonance is taking right at the moment he's speaking (or maybe this is just what's on his mind this month, or, you know, this career). "If what I am doing were wrong, the press would be reporting it and people would be demanding answers, but what I'm doing is not wrong and I know this because...crap...here I am again." In one sentence he's given you a perfect zen koan for his own personal mental state.

If in fact someone -- if a career investigator or prosecutors felt that we were making decisions for political reasons to interfere with a case, you'd probably hear about it.

Yeah, Al. You'd probably hear about it.