A World Defined by Ah-Ha Politics

There's an interesting phenomenon that has emerged over the last twenty years in politics that seems to have set the course for state in a way that cannot be disengaged. We see it almost every day in political affairs, and especially during political conflicts, such as elections and scandals. It usually consists of a politician saying he or she believes one thing and then one of his or her enemies unearthing a previous broadcast, book or set of smoke signals that indicates a previous opinion of an opposing nature. I tend to refer to this as "Ah-Ha" or "Gotcha" Politics. This is why Senator Kerry can be seen as hypocritical when he says he is a veteran proud of his country, yet condemned for things he said or did in protest of a war. It is why a senator can be ransacked by political opportunists when he or she says that he or she is against the Iraq occupation now, but someone unearths that he or she was a proponent of the war when it first started. This is why someone may desire to be for the stupidest policy decisions of all time, just in hopes of avoiding the "waffler" designation that goes to someone who might ever dare to change his or her mind.

Speaking of changing his or her mind, that brings up another sidebar topic: Who was for and against the Iraq War. This is one of those subjects that has been driving me nuts because before the war started, I wrote over and over again, spoke over and over again and wrote some more over and over again about how we should not be invading Iraq because the United States people will not have the verve to last through an actual occupation of rebuilding. People told me I was full of crap and kept talking about how great our military was. I told them over and over that I didn't question our ability to topple the Iraqi Government. I questioned whether or not the people of the United States can handle a long-term occupation of a country that won't want us there. Then, of course, I received the infamous, "but they'll welcome us as liberators." Well, we now know what happened.

But I'm not upset cause no one took me seriously. Okay, I'm somewhat upset because no one took me seriously when I predicted exactly what was going to happen; this seems to be a common situation with me, in which I make predictions that will come true because I look at everything from a game theoretic value system which means I'm only wrong when irrational actions take place, yet people keep looking at me strangely when I predict something that doesn't fall into their paradigm of what they believe is going to happen. Anyway, what upsets me is that those same people who were so for the war and so for the fantasy that everything would work out okay, are now trying to pretend that they were against the war in the first place, and that "they" were the ones that were ignored back then. I don't mind that they've changed their mind; they'd be irrational not to, but what bugs me is that they try to change the game itself to pretend that they were right all along, just because they have this ridiculous desire to never be seen as foolish in their future projections.

And that's because of this whole "Ah-Ha" politics thing. If we weren't so keen on holding people accountable for any mistake they might have ever made, people might actually be willing to take a step back and say, "woh, what was I thinking? Okay, let's change our mind here." But because people keep wanting to hold everyone to anything they have ever said in the past, we find ourselves stuck having to defend ideas that are archaic, even by our own standards. Can you imagine how refreshing it would have been three years ago if the Bush Administration would have just stopped in their tracks and said, "Woh, okay that didn't work. Let's cut our losses and do what's best for the country and not our own egos." But of course, that's never going to happen, or more appropriately, it never did happen.

This paints us into a really bad corner from which we may never escape. We may think it's really funny when Jon Stewart gets on his show and throws a politician's words back in his face with old footage that reveals the hypocrisy of a politician. And yeah, I laugh, too. But I think we're actually causing more problems than we're solving whenever we focus completely on making sure that people never change their minds. It's one thing to point out when someone claims "I never said that" and then show them when they did, in fact, say that, but when someone states that he or she now believes that Policy B is better than Policy A, making them look foolish for abandoning Policy A is exactly why that politician may never switch to Policy B (the better one) in the first place. We make it so that they are held accountable for bad policies and then force them to defend bad policies because the costs (in a game theoretic) would be higher to change the game than to continue to play out a bad hand.

So, what can we do? Well, we can actually start rewarding politicians for having the foresight to change their minds when a better alternative comes before them. Otherwise, we're going to end up in a situation where we force people to continue to play a hand that can't win because we're not willing to reshuffle the deck.

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