The other night the writer Bill Montgomery - "Billmon" - went to see the new Al Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth, because, as he says here, "I needed a break from the gritty, existential realism of movies like Pirates of the Caribbean II and Superman Returns."

Right.

He notes that this film Gore's slide show "takes an enormously complex topic and turns it into a presentation that's both scientifically accurate and engaging enough to be worth a hundred minute movie. Al's fighting the good fight, and I salute him for it."

But then "there is something tragic, even a little pathetic, about Gore's stubborn faith in the ability of facts and reasoned argument to save the world. The scenes of him schlepping through airports - alone, laptop in hand, on his way to yet another city to show his slides to another room full of college students or environmental activists - hit the edge of bathos. They make Al look too much like Willy Loman. 'Attention must be paid to this man.'"

That's the problem. The man is the "earnest wonk who takes serious ideas seriously, and assumes his audience does, too."

That's both sad and oddly pathetic in a way. The days of taking ideas seriously have passed. They're long gone -

In that sense, Gore's project makes him the diametrical opposite - the antithesis - of the unnamed Cheney administration official quoted by Ron Suskind immediately after the 2004 election: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

There are, of course, some truly sinister overtones to that quote - echoes of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and totalitarian delusions about the mutability of "Aryan" or "proletarian" science. As a practical guide to running the complex affairs of a modern industrial superpower, it's certainly demonstrated its flaws, in Iraq and elsewhere. But as a political slogan - that is to say, as the basic operating principle of a propaganda machine based on lies, fear and the emotional manipulation of popular myths - it's proven extremely effective. Even now, when the regime's real-world failures are obvious to most, the consequences in terms of lost public support haven't been nearly as severe as one might otherwise have expected.

Riefenstahl, Hitler's filmmaker, fits here, as does the title of her most famous film.

Matthew Yglesias notes, in looking at the latest argument for bombing the snot out of Iran next (Reuel Marc Gerecht here) -

They seem to think that, roughly speaking, we can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force. The only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower.

What's more, this theory can't be empirically demonstrated to be wrong. Things that you or I might take as demonstrating the limited utility of military power to accomplish certain kinds of things are, instead, taken as evidence of lack of will. Thus we see that problems in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't reasons to avoid new military ventures, but reasons why we must embark upon them: "Add a failure in Iran to a failure in Iraq to a failure in Afghanistan, and we could supercharge Islamic radicalism in a way never before seen. The widespread and lethal impression of American weakness under the Clinton administration, which did so much to energize bin Ladenism in the 1990s, could look like the glory years of American power compared to what the Bush administration may leave in its wake."

I don't even know what else to say about this business. It's just a bizarre way of looking at the world. The wreckage that the Bush administration is leaving in its wake is a direct consequence of this will-o-centric view of the world and Gerecht takes it as a reason to deploy more willpower.

Your policy isn't working? It cannot be flawed. It must be you're not trying hard enough, and a character flaw in you. You need the will - and then you can do anything. Ignore the facts on the ground, and the empirical evidence. It's the triumph of the will that matters.

Well, the media ignored Al Gore on the environment, and everything else, all these long year, and mocked him - he's a "facts guy" after all and the New York Times' Maureen Dowd mocked his "earth tone" outfits.

But Montgomery hits on the real, underlying issue -

... their pro-lies, anti-reality spin isn't entirely a product of the familiar culprits: corporate control, concentrated ownership, and the elite biases...

There's something deeper at work here than just conventional media bias or capitalist economics, although they're certainly part of it. There's always been a powerful current of anti-intellectualism in American politics, just as there is in American life. It's the dark side of democracy: The pressure to accept what the majority, or the most vocal minority, thinks is true as truth - even when the evidence is entirely on the other side. When Henry Ford said history was bunk, he wasn't talking about the past but about the present, and his ire wasn't directed at historians per se but at the revisionist historians of the Progressive Era, who were telling him and his fellow know-nothings inconvenient facts they didn't want to hear. Pump Henry full of Hillbilly Heroin and put him on the radio, and you've got Rush Limbaugh, still making the same point.

The difference between Ford's time and Limbaugh's is that the political presumption against rationality is now shared, or at least pandered to, even at the top of the political and cultural pyramid. It's curious that people who are paid to think and write for a living, and who, like Gore, attended the "best" schools, are now nearly as susceptible to the politics of ignorance as your average conservative talk show host, but then the elite media ain't what it used to be. Like academia, it's fighting a losing rear-guard action against the spirit of the times and the angry, irrational prejudices that go with it.

But wait. There's more. And that would be the media owned and operated by corporations "vulnerable to the growing institutional and commercial pressures to tell the customers what they want to hear." Conservatives are the larger and more economically attractive audience, things move right, "which these days means the authoritarian right and the artificial reality it prefers to live in."

That about sums it up. Tell 'em what they want to hear. It is, in fact, "commercialized ignorance."

And it's bleak, or so Montgomery sees it that way -

... In my darker moments, it sometimes seems as if the entire world is in the middle of a fierce backlash against the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the ideological challenges they posed to the old belief systems. The forces of fundamentalism and obscurantism appear to be on the march everywhere - even as the moral and technological challenges posed by a global industrial civilization grow steadily more complex.

Climate change is only one of those challenges, and maybe not even the most urgent one - at the rate we're going, civilization could collapse long before the Antarctic ice shelves do. Maybe as a species we really have reached the same evolutionary dead end as Australopithecus robustus - intelligent enough as a species to create problems we're not bright enough, or adaptable enough, to solve. I don't know. But if extinction, or a return to the dark ages, is indeed our fate - or our grandchildren's fate, anyway - I think it will be a Hobson's choice as to which cultural tendency will bear the largest share of the blame: the arrogant empiricism that has made human society into an instrument of technological progress instead of the other way around, the ignorant prejudices of the masses, who are happy to consume the material benefits of the Enlightenment but unwilling to assume intellectual responsibility for them, or the cynical nihilism of corporate and political elites who are willing to play upon the latter in order to perpetuate the former, which is, after all is said and done, their ultimate claim to power.

Oh, that's cheery.

But why not just believe what you know is really not true? What not just accept what Arthur Silber calls The Monsters' Reality?

Here's how he sees it, in relation to what's up in Iraq -

In terms of the overall contours of our national debate, I think we may have entered new territory as the catastrophe in Iraq is on the very edge of exploding into uncontrollable bloodshed and unending mayhem on a very large scale. The massacres and violence in Baghdad itself are only the latest indication of what may be in store, and of a trajectory that it may be impossible to stop or alter at this point. The denial and avoidance of facts that contradict or call one's beliefs into question is a necessary part of the True Believer psychology. But when all the available facts are in direct opposition to one's preferred view of the world, the True Believer faces a stark choice: he can either begin to acknowledge the complete failure of his delusions, or he can reject reality completely. I do not exaggerate, and I do not intend to be at all humorous, when I say that the latter is the path to extremely severe neurosis, so severe that it should serve as a frightening warning to others about the grave dangers of placing the demands of a totalist ideology and of cult loyalty above everything else.

You might think that this kind of profound psychological disorder would disqualify a person from the role of prominent commentator on politics and world events. In our country today, of course, you would be wrong.

And he then examines an item from Fred Barnes of Fox News - there's joy in the White House, things are just fine, the "excesses of the press and Supreme Court are bringing Bush and rebellious conservatives closer together" - and the economy is super, so the poll number will go up. And there was that gutsy trip the president made to Baghdad, and they've had three elections over there, and Zarqawi is real dead and so on and so forth - "At worst, Bush has bottomed out. At best, he's on his way to renewed popularity."

Well, that's one way of looking at things. Either optimism or delusion - take your choice.

Silber quotes a friend in Baghdad, desperate, as many are, hoping the Americans stay and fix things but knowing nothing is working, and concludes -

Given the ungraspable nightmare that is their life every day, it would be more than understandable if many Iraqis temporarily retreated into fantasy, simply as a last means of preserving the few remaining strands of sanity we have left them. But to the extent they still desperately cling to life and hope to survive this hell on earth, they know that is a luxury they cannot afford. They must acknowledge and deal with the horrors that surround them, if they wish to survive.

Meanwhile, our leaders like Bush and Cheney, and supporters of theirs like Barnes, live in circumstances as close to perfect safety as possible - and they choose delusion over fact. They make certain that the horrors their policies have unleashed have no way of touching them directly, so they can continue to indulge in fantasy, and to refuse to acknowledge the agonizing death spasms of an entire country. And they do all this simply because they will not question their belief system, and because they refuse to admit they were wrong.

Can there ever be forgiveness for this kind of deliberate self-blindness, or for this refusal to acknowledge the unbearable pain and suffering their actions and their policies have caused so many countless, innocent people? We are not gods; the perspective of eternity is not ours. In the human realm, where life and the possibility of happiness are the indispensable primary values, forgiveness is not possible, nor should these barely human monsters expect it. They are monsters by choice, and they may not now escape the consequences of their actions. In a tragedy beyond measure, many, many thousands of entirely innocent people will not escape those consequences, either.

Maybe they're really not "monsters by choice" but optimists and idealists. Maybe it's the same thing. Yeah, reality is a drag. Do we forgive them for disavowing it entirely? Probably not.

But then, sometimes it's a bit irritating, as we see that on Monday, July 10, we find out all this business North Korea and their nukes and their missiles, is all Bill Clinton's fault, and the White House Press Secretary, Tony Snow, late of Fox News, explains here -

I understand what the Clinton administration wanted to do. They wanted to talk reason to the government of Pyongyang, and they engaged in bilateral conversations. And Bill Richardson went with flowers and chocolates... and many other inducements for the "Dear Leader" to try to agree not to develop nuclear weapons, and it failed.... We've learned from that mistake.

Ah, but Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly says some facts are in order here -

North Korea first began reprocessing plutonium during the administration of George Bush Sr. and may even have built one or two nuclear bombs during that period. Then, in 1994, they began preparations to remove plutonium fuel rods from their storage site, expel international weapons inspectors, and build more bombs. Clinton threatened the North Koreans with war if they went down this road, and then, after sending Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang for negotiations, signed a deal to keep North Korea's plutonium under international control in return for the delivery of two light water nuclear reactors, shipments of heavy fuel oil, and normalization of relations.

For the next six years that agreement held together and North Korea built no more bombs. North Korea even made some promising overtures about missile development late in Clinton's term, but there was no time to conclude the negotiations and the Bush administration showed no interest in following up on anything that it associated with the Clinton era.

Or maybe that never happened. You could look it up, but do you trust historical fact, or your gut instinct that it was that Clinton fellow who messed this up.

Fred Kaplan foolishly likes the facts here -

On Oct. 4, 2002, officials from the U.S. State Department flew to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, and confronted Kim Jong-il's foreign ministry with evidence that Kim had acquired centrifuges for processing highly enriched uranium, which could be used for building nuclear weapons. To the Americans' surprise, the North Koreans conceded. It was an unsettling revelation, coming just as the Bush administration was gearing up for a confrontation with Iraq. This new threat wasn't imminent; processing uranium is a tedious task; Kim Jong-il was almost certainly years away from grinding enough of the stuff to make an atomic bomb.

But the North Koreans had another route to nuclear weapons - a stash of radioactive fuel rods, taken a decade earlier from its nuclear power plant in Yongbyon. These rods could be processed into plutonium - and, from that, into A-bombs - not in years but in months. Thanks to an agreement brokered by the Clinton administration, the rods were locked in a storage facility under the monitoring of international weapons-inspectors. Common sense dictated that - whatever it did about the centrifuges - the Bush administration should do everything possible to keep the fuel rods locked up.

Unfortunately, common sense was in short supply.

But resolve and showing strength of will wasn't in short supply at all. They were told that if the stopped all this we might talk to them, but not before. You don't reward evil doers. And the rest is history, or one version of it, the unappealing version, with the facts.

But Clinton will do. The media likes the narrative. That'll sell airtime. You just don't look at what you published or broadcast earlier. There's a reason the newspapers call their old files "the morgue." That's dead stuff. Doesn't matter.

Everyone likes a good story.

But can you make awful and real stuff, happening because of decisions you made, look good?

Over at the blog of The New Republic - the call it The Plank - Lawrence Kaplan tries here (paragraphing changed for clarity) -

Even by the degraded standards of everyday life in Baghdad, this report from CNN's Nic Robertson comes as a shock: "One international official told me of reports among his staff that a 15-year-old girl had been beheaded and a dog's head sewn on her body in its place; and of a young child who had had his hands drilled and bolted together before being killed."

From its gruesome particulars, the report goes on to describe the fear that has gripped even the most hardened Iraqis during this latest round of sectarian bloodletting. Robertson's dispatch points to a revolting truth about the war in Iraq - one that American officers discovered long ago, but which has yet to penetrate fully the imaginations of theoreticians writing from a distant remove. The fact is, there is very little that we can do to dampen the sectarian rage and pathologies tearing Iraq apart at the seams.

Did the Army make a mistake when it banished "counterinsurgency" from the lexicon of military affairs? Absolutely.

Does it matter in Iraq? Probably not. How can you win over the heart and mind of someone who sews a dog's head on a girl?

Would more U.S. troops alter Iraq's homicidal dynamic? Not really, given that, on the question of sectarian rage, America is now largely beside the point.

True, U.S. troops can be - and have been - a vital buffer between Iraq's warring sects. But they cannot reprogram their coarsened and brittle cultures. Even if America had arrived in Iraq with a detailed post-war plan, twice the number of troops, and all the counterinsurgency expertise in the world, my guess is that we would have found ourselves in exactly the same spot. The Iraqis, after all, still would have had the final say.

Josh Marshall unpacks that here -

The brutality described here is difficult to move past. But I want to try. As we walk around the carnage, it's worth noting too that there's a good measure of excuse-making Kaplan has bundled into this post. In those rhetorical questions toward the end, he is reviewing a series of debates which his side of the debate (the regime-change, Chalabi, transformation of the Middle East side) was now clearly on the wrong side of.

He raises them to dismiss them. Did we have a crappy post-war plan, Kaplan asks. Yes, he answers, but in the end it didn't matter one way or another.

My point here isn't to pile on. To a degree at least, on these points, he's clearly right.

What I want to focus on is the final, totalizing message - one that's worth taking note of. You could summarize what Kaplan is saying as, our guns and our money and ideas are no match for their history and their hate.

And that - phrased different ways or from different perspectives - was the conservative realist line of opposition to the whole enterprise - the arguments Kaplan and his compatriots vilified and slurred for literally years. Kaplan's one of the smartest and most candid of the neocons (not much of a compliment in itself, I grant you, but deserved in a fuller sense in his case). But here you have the final come-down. Not an admission of error here or there or in execution, but total - that the whole idea and concept and program was upside-down-wrong in its essence.

Mark the moment - that's the ghost given up.

Yep, the idea was fine, and even if we did make a few mistakes, not admitted here, what can you do with these people? It's a bit racist, and idealistic, and angry, all at once. These people just aren't good enough for what we tried to do for them. It's them, not us.

By the way, CNN's Nic Robertson said the dog's head sewn on the girl's body was a story going around, and some believed it was true. His point was this is what some assumed to be true, because that was what they expected to be true - and his story was actually about the psychology there and what rumors are given credence, and how awful things are now when such things are given credence.

You believe what you want to believe - here and there.

How did the old Doobie Brother's song go? "What a fool believes, he sees." (Listen here if you'd like.)

And a minor note on what happens when you don't believe, the case of the very conservative Andrew Sullivan, who thinks maybe we shouldn't torture people.

Mark Levin in the neoconservative National Review here - "Andrew Sullivan considers himself an opponent of torture. But he's not. He's against the war in Iraq, which has ended a great deal of state-sponsored torture, not to mention state-sponsored rape, state-sponsored executions, and all the other inhumanity unleashed by maniacs like Saddam Hussein."

Sullivan here - "So now I'm not only not a conservative, I opposed the war against Saddam. In the unhinged world of the Republican far-right, anything is possible."

One of Sullivan's readers here - "The far right has finally sunk to the level of Soviet propaganda. Just as Stalin had photos altered to remove those who had been shot or sent to the gulag for thoughtcrime, Mark Levin has erased your support for the Iraq war because you are guilty of thoughtcrime. In your case, the thoughtcrime is holding the United States' conduct in war to a higher standard than that of Ba'athist Iraq."

Sullivan's comment - "I was also told by someone present at the Ramesh Ponnuru/Laura Ingraham discussion at Aspen that two other conservatives are now regarded as suspect by the ruling Republican intelligentsia: George Will and David Brooks. I imagine William F Buckley Jr, who has pronounced the Iraq war a failure, is also no longer a conservative in good standing. The attitude of people like Ponnuru and Ingraham and Levin is indeed Stalinist in form, if not content. But when you have to defend a massive increase in government spending and power in the name of conservatism, this kind of newspeak is necessary."

So the Stalinist purges begin. Only the true believers will remain. Reality and the facts can get you in trouble.

When people are reminded of Stalin and Leni Riefenstahl on the same day, six days after the Fourth of July, something is up.

Things are coming to a head. Head for the hills, or someplace real.