A good post by Hunter on The Daily Kos regarding the role and operation of so called ‘think tanks’ in Washington, and how they have been used by ideologues to skewer the national dialogue for as long and as effectively as they have. Well worth the read.

Tax cuts? Global warming? War? They can pretend to be experts at all of them. Figure out the policy you want to support, then have Sowell or someone else scribble down the Very Erudite Explanation of why black is actually white, the sky is actually magenta, or Saddam’s secret still-really-really-existing WMDs have been spirited to the kitchen of an Applebee’s in… oh, let’s say “Syria”, this time. The whole point of think tanks is rank dishonesty in areas where serious educators, intellectuals, government workers, and other experts in the field in question have unanimously come up with an answer that conservatives don’t want to hear.

It’s serial dishonesty as a game, as played by the most very enfranchised players in America — conservative media figures, past conservative administration officials — whoever can lend that sheen of public credibility and bring the money in for the hacks to keep hacking. They’re the major league sports franchises of political lying. On any given day, you can have Richard Scaife provide funding to attack George Soros in yet another battle of the So Goddamn Fucking Enfranchised That You Couldn’t Possibly Get More Enfranchised If You Ate George Washington’s Shriveled Corpse For Breakfast.

What I find interesting (in a strictly car wreck, we’re-all-going-to-die sort of way) is while the think tanks started out to provide thin but important-sounding justifications for whatever conservative graft or manipulation was being attempted during any particular period, the think tank model has now entirely transferred to the White House itself. Listening to Tony Snow (or any of the previous press secretaries) is like listening to an off-off-Broadway theatrical production exploring the pathology of compulsive lying. They don’t care what the truth is: after spending every minute of every day reinforcing their fragile little bubbles of newspeak, in fact, it’s not even clear they know what the actual truth is.

Which is why, in a nutshell, we’re in Iraq to begin with, the perfect think-tank-produced war — because the policy came first, and actual knowledge was ignored as new “facts” were fixed around that desired policy. And all of those facts — nearly every single one of the “big” facts used to enter the war — turned out to be either fabricated or a product of extraordinary incompetence.

Is it any wonder why many refer to them as ‘coin-operated’ operations? Drop your money in them, get the product you want.

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