Liar´s Club

Republicans hoist their banner of deception

by Alan Bisbort

Source: Hartford Advocate, September 9, 2004.

In her 1979 book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, philosopher Sissela Bok wrote, "Political lies, so often assumed to be trivial by those who tell them, rarely are. They cannot be trivial when they affect so many people ... . When political representatives or entire governments arrogate to themselves the right to lie, they take power from the public that would not have been given up voluntarily."

We are a nation filled with high-paid liars: politicians, lobbyists, spin doctors, press secretaries, White House correspondents. Most of their lies are not Platonic "noble lies" told to safeguard social harmony. Most are intended to ignobly deceive. In the process, they do irreparable harm to the body politic.

In that spirit, the Republican National Convention last week was a veritable Liars Club. It was willful deception as party platform.

Since G.W. Bush's presidency is one of the big lies in our history, it's no surprise that a convention aimed at keeping him in the White House four more years basked in mendacity. Even Republicans with a shred of integrity caught the bug: John McCain, whose inexplicable loyalty to Bush has nauseated former admirers; Rudy G., who shamelessly amassed a fortune milking 9/11; Arnold, whose attempt to portray himself as a rags-to-riches immigrant story was laughable; and Zell Miller, whose hate-filled speech evoked both the betrayals of Quisling and the dementia of Hannibal Lechter and is having a powerful backlash, even from conservatives.

Andrew Sullivan, for example, wrote, "Zell Miller's address will, I think, go down as a critical moment in this campaign, and maybe in the history of the Republican party. I kept thinking of the contrast with the Democrats' keynote speaker, Barack Obama, a post-racial, smiling, expansive young American, speaking about national unity and uplift. Then you see Zell Miller, his face rigid with anger, his eyes blazing with years of frustration ... . His speech was jammed with bald lies, straw men, and hateful rhetoric."

CNN's Joe Klein noticed it too, saying, "I don't think I've ever seen anything as angry or as ugly as [Zell] Miller's speech ... angry inaccuracies by the basketful."

Bush's presidency began with the biggest lie of all -- that he "won" the 2000 election. This is the truth: Bush lost that election by more than half a million votes and would have lost Florida had the Supreme Court -- and brother Jeb and Katherine Harris -- permitted a fair vote count. The next lie was that Bush possessed a mandate; indeed, he ruled as if his extremist right-wing agenda reflected mainstream values.

More lies: He destroyed the economy -- taking it from a record surplus to a record deficit, losing 6 million jobs -- but now says the economy's healthy. He destroyed 30 years of environmental success -- see www.nrdc .org/bushrecord for his "300 crimes against nature" -- but now calls his a "common sense" approach. He bragged about America being safer, yet homeland security has been compromised by his Iraq obsession (see "Red Alert," in the October issue of Mother Jones ). And he lied us into war (WMDs, "yellow cake"), taking his eye off al Qaida's balls.

The convention came in the wake of filthy lies about John Kerry: The Swift Boat charges that fully warrant a libel suit. This disinformation campaign worked just as Karl Rove designed it -- yes, despite the usual lying denials, the White House had direct connections to the Swift Boat liars. The Swift Boat story dragged out long enough to sully the media waters as thickly as Mekong River mud. And so, 41percent of the respondents to recent polls believe something that is demonstrably false: that Kerry lied about his war record. This is similar to Rove's campaign of lies leading to the Iraq war, ultimately creating the delusion that Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks. In a recent poll, 48 percent of Americans still believe this. That is, half the people believe a lie, and live in a pathologically delusional state.

As Bok suggested, this is what happens when lies are institutionalized. Taking the perspective of those deceived, she wrote, "We know how deception, even for the most unselfish motive, corrupts and spreads ... we have lived through the consequences of lies."

Her book offered post-Watergate reminders of how political lies unravel into national crises, such as LBJ's escalation of the Vietnam War or Nixon's cover-up of his links to the Watergate break-in. Though this cost Nixon the presidency, the cost was even more devastating to American democracy, Bok insisted. It turned Americans into cynics, non-voters who believe, "They're all the same."

In 2004, this is the biggest lie of all. G.W. Bush is in a class by himself.

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reprinted from The Hartford Advocate