My voice is getting hoarse from yelling at the television today when the Republicans debating the Health Care BHill make statements which are patently untrue. The primary statement is one Boehner and his biddies keep making, that the majority of Americans have come out against this bill.
Now where is it that this has been shown, John? The various polls for weeks have shown the majority of Americans for this reform. Especially, they have shown a strong favor of the Public Option, something you keep saying all Americans are against.
Obama joined the leaders of Britain and France in accusing the Islamic republic of clandestinely building an underground plant to make nuclear fuel that could be used to build an atomic bomb. Iranian officials acknowledged the facility but insisted it had been reported to nuclear authorities as required.
Obama should try reading intelligence reports, like 2007's National Intelligence Estimate (the combined consensus report by all sixteen known U.S. intelligence agencies), which stated quite clearly that there is no concrete evidence of a weapons program in Iran. In July and August of this year, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed the lack of evidence although it refuses to state anything definitively. Yet still Obama, the D.C. political establishment, and the corporate media continue to lie to the contrary.
We've already been lied into one failed war, lied into ramping up another failed war, are so hurting for fresh soldiers that the Pentagon is now actively accepting white supremacists, yet still the establishment seeks to lie us into another conflict. And some people have wondered why my signature now has an image of Obama and Bush morphed into one unholy beast. Now you know.
Sarah Palin Resigns In A Mega-Blizzard of Lies--Revealing A Crucial Difference Between Libertarians and Liberals
It was a slow newsday, Friday before a holiday, so why shouldn't Sarah Palin suck up all the oxygen in five continents? If only that stupid Michael Jackson fellah hadn't died the week before, she could have totally pulled it off. As it was, she did pretty damn well for a couple of hours there. Her big secret? Same as it ever was: she lied. Seven ways from Sunday. She lied about being cleared in all the Alaska investigations; she lied about their cost; she lied about wanting to serve the people of Alaska; she lied about fulfilling her goals; she lied about people attacking her son Trig; she lied about being like a point guard; she lied when she said "and" and "the". She spoke, therefore she lied.
Why does Sarah Palin lie? She lies to get out of trouble; she lies to shift blame; she lies to get even; she lies to get ahead; she lies to hurt her enemies; she lies to amuse her friends; she lies to relieve boredom; she lies to have some fun; she lies because truth is bother; she lies as a key to strategy; she lies because she has no plan; she lies to confuse anyone trying to keep track; she lies to make sense to those not keeping track; she lies for power; she lies because lying works for her; she lies just for the hell of it; she lies because she can; she lies because that's how she expresses her freedom--a very libertarian idea of freedom, I might well add.
Liberals and libertarians are both about freedom, but their concepts of freedom are radically different, and Sarah Palin's compulsive, multipurpose lying is as a good a way as any to approach understanding the differences between them.
In sharp contrast, liberals characteristically express their freedom by telling the truth, inconvenient truths, as Al Gore put it. Truths about racism and war, such as Martin Luther King told, when speaking truth to power. Truths about the social order and tradition that are not supposed to be said.
In May 2005 we launched AfterDowningStreet.org to publicize the Downing Street Minutes. By June we'd had great, if fleeting, success. During the following months and years, mountains of new memos and statements emerged on the Iraq War lies, many of them more damaging than the Downing Street documents. But increasingly nobody cared, because evidence of crimes was less interesting once Congress had dropped the pretense that it might take action. The single most powerful, and yet largely ignored, document yet to emerge, might, now in 2009, finally, produce results. And, of course, it is our friends over in England who are, as always, two steps ahead of us.
The LA Times ran an article today that revealed a memo sent to the Bush cabinet members and higher-level staff entitled "Speech Topper on the Bush Record." The two-pager included items that he President expected to be pushed in public summing up the last eight years of his administration and claiming a variety of successes and triumphs that Bush wants to be remembered by.
Anonymous Liberal, who some of you may remember from his occasional pinch hits for Glennzilla, makes a point worth highlighting, The Media's Moment of Truth:
This election is a test of the political media in this country. If journalists can't find a way to dissuade the use of flagrant dishonesty as a tactic, they will have failed this country miserably.
Why are outright false ads even allowed to be aired? Even after they are debunked as false, they continue to air, the longer the run, the more (in both quality and quantity) voters at large become convinced it is fact.
I take it to mean that they are telling LIES. In an interview with Keith Olbermann he said:
"For them to run an ad that doesn't basically present an accurate record of their positions on issues. I think, should raise some issues on how they would run an administration," said Obama, referring to the ad where the claim is made that Palin was behind canceling Bridge To Nowhere funding.
So the McCain campaign has been lying with near impunity. Josh wonders:
The McCain campaign's ability to frame their message around a series of demonstrable lies is only possible because most of the press takes an agnostic position on whether his messages and ads are true or not. But if the press won't, don't we need to stop relying on the mainstream press to make that point?
ST. PAUL - Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska introduced herself to America before a roaring crowd at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night as "just your average hockey mom" who was as qualified as the Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama, to be president of the United States.
Ms. Palin's appearance electrified a convention that has been consumed by questions of whether she was up to the job, as she launched slashing attacks on Mr. Obama's claims of experience.
"Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown," Ms. Palin told the delegates in a speech that sought to eviscerate Mr. Obama, as delegates waved signs that said "I love hockey moms." "And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities."
The clearest indication I have seen to prove that voting for McCain is the equivalent of voting for a third Bush administration is this video from the Larry King Show in 2001 that The Jed Report has put out on the web:
In the past few weeks, John McCain and his Republican sycophants have been trying to push his "100 years" comment into the memory hole. They know this is a devastating attack, that Americans don't want to stay in Iraq forever, and the Republicans are pissed that Barack Obama hits McCain over the head with this every time he makes a speech.
This video by Josh Marshall offers a pretty good rundown:
It is absolutely crucial for all of us in the progressive blogosphere to understand this issue, and know how to defend against it. The "100 years" comment is death for McCain's campaign, so we can't let them wash it away. More on the flip:
Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings recently wrote a piece called "Lies and Democracy." "Lies and Democracy" purports to be a piece about how folks are forced to become experts in order to deal with lying politicians, but the bulk of it is focused on the "lies" of Hillary and Bill Clinton.
I don't think the Clintons are "liars." I do think they are "spinners." I also think that every other successful politician is a "spinner," and that most politicians do not stick to the truth so well as do the Clintons. To take a stab at showing that, I want to take Hilzoy's piece, which is the very best and most detailed piece I have run across in either the blogosphere or the MSM, take on the "lies" that Hilzoy writes about, and show that in each instance the same kind of statements, and worse, come from Obama and his camp.
In his diary, The Lying Game , Matt writes about the ineffectiveness of simply revealing that a political claim is a lie, and people's mistaken reaoning about this:
Both Yglesias and Klein see this as depressing. Klein thinks that this puts campaigns unwilling to attack at a 'severe disadvantage', and Yglesias thinks that it means that telling your own lies might be necessary to 'fight fire with fire'.
In my experience handling attacks in campaigns, both issue-based and candidate-centric, neither of these is accurate. In order to deal with lies and misrepresentations from an opponent, you can't just call out the lies and misrepresentations, you have to call the opponent a liar. You have to tell a story about why you are being attacked instead of just illustrating that the attacks are untrue, and you have to use this story to reveal the character of the attacker. Political contests are contests of values and character, they are primary trust contests.
This is so obviously that it shouldn't need to be debated or discussed. And yet, it is equally obviously that barely one Democrat in a 100 who holds high office understands this. Here I want to revisit Matt's post, and expand on it in certain ways, because I think it's one of the most important discussions that we need to have amongst ourselves, and to spread to a wider audience.
Above all, what this means is engaging in a whole set of related ideas that conservatives have somehow corenered the market on, while liberals (and pseudo-liberals) have convinced themselves they're not really important. The big three are character, narrative, and values:
Pointing out that falsehoods are falsehoods, without any underlying narrative, is like discussing torture without pointing out the authoritarian nature of the regimes that use it as a tool. It becomes an isolated and irrelevant fact, a tragedy like a natural disaster. Lies are also not always bad; sometimes they are social lubricants and used to spare people's feelings. Lots of people say things that aren't true, in fact, most of us break our word to ourselves on a regular basis (check your New Year's resolutions list if you don't believe me). You have to use their lies to tell a story about their character.
The problem with calling a politician who lies a liar is that we not only all lie but we understand that all politicians lie, and that they expect the audience to know that, and to sort out which lies make their adherents feel good, and which lies will make the opposition feel bad. We are in effect expected to judge all political races as lying contests, just as we have been taught in western culture to judge all debates and other adversarial proceedings as lying contests.
Thus to call any politician a liar is begging the question of whether he is a bad or good liar, and whether his heart is nevertheless as pure as our own. We in fact will sometimes judge a good liar as potentially more effective than a persistent truth teller.
You touched on this when you discussed lying as a reflection of character and trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is the key word or factor here - if you label someone a liar, it has to be clear you mean he lies because he is at bottom untrustworthy, rather than he is untrustworthy because he lies.
And I seconded this by linking to a column that George Lakoff wrote in September, 2003, "Betrayal of Trust", in which his core argument is stated right up front:
The question of the L-word keeps coming up. Did the president and his chief advisors lie? I think this is the wrong question to be asking. The real issue is betrayal of trust.
Truth and lies have switched places: Lies continually repeated function like the truth, while truths that go unuttered function as if they were lies. A prime example of this in the 2000 election was the conventional wisdom that Gore was a serial liar, while Bush was a man of great integrity-a straight-talker.
Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths. A prime example of this is the so-called "war on terror"-something that makes absolutely no sense, if you stop and think about it.
Verbal formulations are used that are inherently non-sensical and cannot be used rationally-at least in the existing total environment. "Supporting the troops" is a prime example of this.
"Supporting the Troops" As An Inherently Deceitful Formulation
Sending soldies off to die in a worse than meaningness, counterproductive war is "supporting the troops." Trying to end that counterproductive war, and bring them home alive is "not supporting the troops." Sending them off to war without adequate body armor, medical care, and R&R is also "supporting the troops." Trying to ensure that they do have adequate body armor, medical care, and R&R is not "supporting the troops," it may even be "not supporting the troops." If they come back badly injured mentally, giving them bogus discharges for previously undiagnosed "personality disorders" is "supporting the troops." Trying to stop this heinous practice is not "supporting the troops," and even, very likely "not supporting the troops."
In sum, "supporting the troops" is supporting whatever Bush wants to do. But we don't say, "supporting whatever Bush wants to do." We say "supporting the troops," instead, because Bush has a long, long history of hiding his failings behind other people's reputations and virtue
Clearly, something very odd is going on here, and while many bloggers have commented on this over the years, I'm not aware of anyone who I think has fully nailed it. I'm not going to nail it either, because I think it might well take a 300-page book to do it justice, but I am going to add something useful, I hope.
Truth and lies have switched places: Lies continually repeated function like the truth, while truths that go unuttered function as if they were lies. A prime example of this in the 2000 election was the conventional wisdom that Gore was a serial liar, while Bush was a man of great integrity-a straight-talker.
Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths. A prime example of this is the so-called "war on terror"-something that makes absolutely no sense, if you stop and think about it.
Verbal formulations are used that are inherently non-sensical and cannot be used rationally-at least in the existing total environment. "Supporting the troops" is a prime example of this.
Part 1 explored the first idea. Now it's time to examine the second one:
(2) Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths.
The most obvious, and dominant example of this is the so-called "war on terror," which started off as the "war on terrorism"-a very different concept. Terror is a state of mind. Terrorism is a strategy, though the adjective, terrorist-as in "terrorist attack"-more frequently refers to tactics that are part of a terrorist strategy. Neither is the sort of thing that one can fight a war against. Wars on abstract nouns generally do not turn out well, for the simple reason that abstract nouns can never surrender. The fact that the "war on terrorism" imperceptibly morphed into the "war on terror" is indicative of how vacuous and non-sensical the entire enterprise is.
We are way past Orwell's 1984 here. At least Oceana and Eurasia were the sorts of things that could have always been at war with one another. But neither terror nor terrorism are this sort of thing. Indeed, it's not simply false to say "we are fighting a war on terror" (or "terrorism"). It is worse than false. It is meaningless.
The great 20th Century physicist Wolfgang Pauli coined an expression that is applicable here. Having looked at a paper by a young physicist, he remarked that it "wasn't even wrong," meaning that it didn't even get the problem right, much less the solution. And such is the case with the "war on terror/terrorism," as well-although actions taken in its name, such as the Iraq War, can be much worse than meaningless, by greatly worsening the realworld situtation that "war on terror" so meaninglessly mis-describes.
In a diary Friday, Matt asked for help in understanding something significant:
I've become fascinated by the effects of honesty/dishonesty in a culture. I live in DC, and I'm beginning to think that there are characteristics of those in power that are more reflective of a mass psychological disorder or strange cultural affinity for self-deception than 'money in politics', bribery, or corruption can explain.
This got me thinking, and revisiting some ideas I've been kicking around for a while. Here are three of them that I think are closely connected:
Truth and lies have switched places: Lies continually repeated function like the truth, while truths that go unuttered function as if they were lies. A prime example of this in the 2000 election was the conventional wisdom that Gore was a serial liar, while Bush was a man of great integrity-a straight-talker.
Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths. A prime example of this is the so-called "war on terror"-something that makes absolutely no sense, if you stop and think about it.
Verbal formulations are used that are inherently nonsensical and cannot be used rationally-at least in the existing total environment. "Supporting the troops" is a prime example of this.
I'm going to discuss all three in diaries today, beginning with the first point on the flip.
Despite the clear role that neo-conservatives have played in taking America to war in Iraq, they could not have done this alone. Nor could they have continued it. Once again we are witnessing the key roll that centrists play in spreading death and destruction. This can be seen especially clearly in the key role played by lies in taking us to war, and keeping us there. This includes the failure of centrist institutions--particularly the media--to challenge and expose lies and the failure of political centrists to base their judgements in fact.
The fact that centrists, ultimately, care nothing for the truth has been a key enabling factor in this whole abominable chapter in our nation's history.
Two windows expose this truth: a recent CBS poll reminds us of how many people still believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, while a review of the rush to war 4 years ago this month reminds us of how the lies were clearly visible as they were being told--and yet they were swallowed, just as they are being swallowed today.
My esteemed colleague Sam Smith over at Scholars & Rogues has written a bomb-thrower of a diary calling out the MSM for the sustained hit attacks on John Edwards.
If you're an Edwards supporter and are tired of hearing about the $400 haircut and the trial lawyer career, read this:
