| Inverting Truth and Lies
(1) Truth and lies have switched places: Lies continually repeated function like the truth, while truths that go unuttered function as if they were lies.
Bob Somerby, at the Daily Howler, the blog before blogs were named, covered the 2000 campaign on a daily, blow-by-blow basis and meticulously detailed how the press corps manufactured a completely bogus narrative about Al Gore as "serial exaggerator," their "we're being nice and civil, so why can't you" way of calling him a liar.
Just check out his 1999 archives index, for stories collected under headings like, "ANATOMY OF A PSEUDO-SCANDAL! Love Canal is like Love Story! They both have been all gimmicked up," or "TOTALLY BY THE BOOK! A strange book review in the New York Times shows the power of conventional wisdom" or "A HOWLER BIG PICTURE REPORT! It's time to ask an awkward question. Is the press corps sand-bagging Gore?"
There was a dominant pattern that ran throughout most of the "serial exaggerator" stories-the media either made things up, or severely distorted them before attributing them to Gore. He did not, for example, claim to have invented the Internet. He claimed to have played a key legislative role in transitioning the
Salon's Scott Rosenberg (no relation) presented a good overview of this particular lie about Gore, noting, among other things:
Several of the people who could claim to have "invented" the Internet, or key pieces of its protocols -- in particular, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn -- are out there on the Net today defending Gore, asserting that he was the politician in Washington who took the "initiative" to support the Net in its early days.
Implicit in their argument is a broader awareness of what it took to create the Internet. Anything as successful as the Net is not and cannot be successful as technology alone; technology does not exist in a vacuum. And just as the Internet required the services of brains like Kahn and Cerf and all the others who contributed code to its foundations, it also needed bureaucratic and legislative patrons.
It took social engineers as well as software engineers to build the Net. And that may be why the response to Gore's original statement was so savage: Not because his claim was a lie, but because it was a truth that a lot of people today are trying to forget or bury.
This is an excellent piece of dissection-the lie about Gore claiming to have invented the internet is not just intended to turn an individual positive-Gore's record of legislative foresight and support for emerging technology-into a negative. It is intended to make a signature accomplishment of government radioactive, so that none of us can talk about one of the most ubiquitous government success stories in our post-modern lives. In short, it is a superlative example of how a lie takes the place of the truth.
On the other hand, George W. Bush was treated with kid gloves, despite being one of the most dishonest candidates to run for President in some time-and that's really saying something. Here's an excerpt from a story I wrote about David Corn's book, The Lies of George .W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception:
The week before Christmas, The Nation magazine's Washington editor, David Corn, gave a talk in Long Beach about his recently-published book, The Lies of George .W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. Corn began by reading the first paragraph of his book, which ends by saying, "So constant is his fibbing that a history of his lies offers a close approximation of the history of his presidential tenure."
In the book, Corn proceeds to prove this claim in chapters devoted his tax cuts (separate chapters for 2001 and 2003), energy policy, global warming, stem cell research, missile defense, forewarnings of 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, his relationship with Ken Lay, and the invasion of Iraq (one chapter on pre-invasion lies, a second on post-invasion ones). But Corn doesn't limit himself to Bush's presidency-he begins with Bush's campaign, including his abysmal record as Texas governor, and his spotty service in the Texas Air Guard during the Vietnam War.
Bush took credit for measures he had opposed-such as a patients' bill of rights and health care coverage for 200,000 children he had wanted to leave out in the cold to help pay for his tax cuts. He claimed to have cleaned up the air in Texas, but the Environmental Protection Agency said it that industrial pollution was up 10 percent during his term. And he took credit for an statewide education "miracle" that he had little to do with, and was a lot less miraculous than its promoters claimed.
Bush's policy proposals were similarly dishonest. His health care tax credit, for example, promised to pay 90 percent of family's health insurance cost-$2,000 for a family earning $30,000 a year. But the $2,222 dollar health insurance plan this promise was based on simply doesn't exist. It would actually costs $5,000 to $6,000, experts said.
Amidst all these lies, Bush brazenly campaigned as one who would restore integrity to the White House, and the press obliged by painting Gore as less-than-honest and Bush as perhaps a bit dumb-certainly not clever enough to fool them. Perhaps because he's a member of the Washington press corps, Corn doesn't say much about the media's role. But he does cite the end result-"An Election Day exit poll found that 25 percent of voters considered 'honesty' the 'most important thnk to consider' when voting, and 80 percent of them voted for Bush." Thus, the pervasiveness of Bush's lies about particular issues also give the lie to one of his most basic and crucial claims-his claim to integrity.
Obviously, lying did not begin with George W. Bush. But the 2000 election clearly marked a watershed of sorts. For most of his career, Al Gore had a reputation as a "Boy Scout," if anything he was too meticulous about the truth. George Bush, on the other hand, was an admitted wastrel who claimed to have reformed, but had a series of deceptive actions on major issues while serving as governor of Texas. Yet, the media during the 2000 election completely reversed the two men's records for integrity, and this reversal has become deeply ingrained in our political culture ever since-with, of course, a major assist from Osama bin Laden and his 9/11 gift that keeps on giving (slack) to George W. Bush.
Consider just how many impeachable offenses Bush has committed, yet how all discussion of such matters is "off the table". The Downing Street Memo, for example, provides irrefutable proof that Bush lied repeatedly about his intentions and his reasons for going to war with Iraq-and it's just one piece of evidence, part of a far-flung tapestry of documents and eye-witness accounts that make it perfectly clear the Iraq War was a put-up job that was on the drawing boards well before 9/11. Yet, in Versailles today, this well-established fact falls into the category of "truths that go unuttered" which "function as if they were lies."
In contrast, we have the notion that Iraq War is central to fighting the "war on terror," a notion that flies in the face of everything that real Middle East experts know about the situation there. The American people have long since seen through this shibboleth, but in Versailles-even with a Democratic majority in Congress-it remains a holy lie, one that must be treated more reverently then the truth. For to question this lie is to open up a Pandora's Box, which ultimate leads to questioning the very notion of the "war on terror" itself. And that is the subject of the next diary in this series. |
