In the fog of politics, we encounter ourselves

But her effort failed to stop the issue from becoming politicised. It came up again in the second presidential debate yesterday (Bangkok time). And the president rightly said that, as Commander in Chief, the buck did in fact stop with him. At the time when federal and congressional investigations are being conducted at full force to get to the bottom of this lapse in security and possibly intelligence measures, reason and decency should have dictated the cessation of the brazen exploitation of this tragic incident.  Unfortunately, it didn’t. And it is a given that it will come up again in the third and final presidential debate, on October 22, on foreign policy. It will also be played out in vicious ads leading up to Election Day. The fog of politics has proven to be thicker than the fog of war.
Such fog is now an integral part of politics around the world. So much so that “fog machine” has made its grand entry into the English lexicon. 
Fog by its very nature reduces visibility. Through fog, shadows are cast in three dimensions and, as a result, shadows of mist can appear to be no different than shadows of solid objects. It may be intriguing to ponder it, and the public seems to embrace and even love to “consume” it when it comes to politics and other aspects of our lives, but the fact remains that fog can be hazardous. People, though, seem happy and more willing to live dangerously anyway.
Maybe that’s how we want to see things and, more importantly, ourselves. We seem to prefer skin-deep arguments and observations; we prefer gaffes and “zingers” to substance, quick-fixes rather than a hard-earned solutions. We like the camouflage and love the mask for what it conceals. In medicine, more doctors are prescribing more steroids, in most cases to treat symptoms so their patients feel better instantaneously, preferring to worry about treating the disease later or, in some cases, not at all.
Take the presidential debates as a case study.  News coverage describes extensively what to “watch” for, the “energy level”, the “aggressiveness”, the momentum”, the “body language”, the “style” points. All this drivel, believe it or not, can make a candidate more electable, or re-electable overnight, as the shifts in polls suggested. And at one time, people ridiculed a grandmother who confessed to voting against Richard Nixon three times because she did not like his nose?
They say that truth is the first casualty of war. The same thing can be said about politics.
During one debate, there were people who counted that one candidate “lied 27 times in 38 minutes”. And we think a “hill of beans” is just a figure of speech.
Historically, no sitting president has been re-elected while the unemployment rate was higher than 8 per cent. During the Obama administration, that figure has hovered around that magic number in recent months.  Then, lo and behold, the latest figure dropped to 7.8 per cent.
China-bashing is the favourite subject of Mitt Romney. He stated that the reason for the demise in American manufacturing was China’s currency manipulation and blatant copyright infringements, etc. All these claims of misdeeds by the single largest holder of US Treasury bills may be true, but they are not the main cause of American manufacturers’ problems. No candidate dares to speak the truth – that the high cost of wages in the US has sent jobs overseas. No candidate dares to say that as the world turns, the mode of production changes and comparative advantages shift. If one looks at the Industrial Revolution, one will see why the textile industry moved from Great Britain to India. The “middle class” that all candidates have been talking about was first created by the Industrial Revolution, and it’s the “middle class” that for various reasons does not evolve when the United States consistently moves away from manufacturing to value-added, knowledge-based and service industries, which are suffering. President Obama, during the second debate, spoke the truth in saying that some of the jobs would not return to the US no matter how hard anybody bashed China or India. He correctly pointed out that education was the key. But in the fog of politics, not many people will pay attention.
The Republicans love to attack so-called Obamacare. But the fact of the matter is, his health programme lifted its key elements from the Republican play-book, and it is almost identical to the one Romney put in place in Massachusetts when he was governor.
There has been much talk of a bipartisan partnership, and Mitt Romney took credit for the highly cooperative atmosphere in the state’s legislative chambers during his tenure. Obama on the other hand was criticised – rightly to a certain extent – for not trying hard enough, and as a result beltway gridlock is the norm not the exception these days. However, anybody with a fair mind would agree that Washington has become alarmingly more partisan, not less. Gone are the days in politics when people were motivated by the best interests of their country, not their party. The new Washington politics might have Vince Lombardy turning in his grave with regret for uttering his famous statement that winning is not everything, it’s the only thing. With politics having assumed a life of its own above reality and facts, and winning being the ultimate creed, Washington is the world’s new emerging “fog city”.
In the final analysis, politics is shaped by people, devoured by people and perpetuated by people. Politicians tell lies because not only can they get away with them, but they prosper with or because of the lies. They keep on lying because we allow them to continue. Politics becomes toxic, divisive and trivial because we do not seem to mind. Fog is hazardous to visibility, just as the political fog is to our livelihood. But diamonds in the sky materialising through a certain hazardous substance may provide a temporary bliss that we have become addicted to and the reality is too harsh to behold.