Lies

Part of being a good citizen is knowing when your leaders and would-be leaders are lying to you. 

Unfortunately, this happens all too often in our political culture today. For example, the disengagement of our populace from public affairs has contributed to the success of the "permanent campaign" tactics espoused by the Clintons in the 1990s and perfected by the Bush-Cheney-Rove GOP machine over the past 8 years. This school of politics is characterized by a simple philosophy: When governing, never let The Right Thing To Do get in the way of doing what will help you most politically. And campaign ruthlessly, usually by telling blatant, manipulative lies to the public, secure in the confidence that most people won't know — or care to find out — the truth.  

It is incumbent upon all patriots to expose these lies.  

With this in mind, I turn to the Republican National Convention. Following the Romney-Huckabee-Giuliani-Palin insult-fest on the convention's second full night last week, I couldn't help but vent to some friends and family via email. Here is a slightly updated version of that email:

Yes, it is beyond question that both parties play games with the truth in the midst of hard-fought election campaigns. But the Republicans have elevated prevarication into a fine, though distinctly malodorous, art form. For some truly stunning examples, take a look at this Associated Press story from September 3. I'll highlight and comment upon some of the most reprehensible of these canards now: the Huckabee line about Palin getting more votes for mayor of Wasilla than Biden did for President (Huckabee was off by nearly 5,000% yet said this with the straightest of faces); the false suggestion that the middle class will have a lighter tax burden under McCain, debunked beyond question by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center; and Palin's Kerry-esque "I was for it before I was against it" flip-flopping on the Bridge to Nowhere. 

Sarah Barracuda did a great job in her convention address of exceeding the lowest of carefully managed expectations and rallying the Angry Right, but nothing in her speech — and certainly not in Rudy Giuliani's mean-spirited, immature diatribe — is going to win over moderate, undecided voters. The Republicans were panicked, and it showed. 

One more thought on the GOP's pathetic attempt to mask this ticket's ample and obvious deficiencies by setting up the media and "coastal elites" as straw men to knock down. They need to hide the fact that McCain has transformed himself from a self-styled maverick, who frequently clashed with his own party, into a lockstep Bush-Cheneyite after being Roved out of the GOP nomination in 2000. They need to conceal the credibility-killing reality that Tucker Eskew, the man who helped direct the 2000 Bush-Cheney-Rove smear campaign against McCain in South Carolina, which intimated to voters that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock (referring to Bridget McCain, the Bangladeshi daughter the McCains lovingly adopted many years ago — and who must have been holding back vomit as she sat with her family in St. Paul watching Bush speak last week) is the very same person who McCain hired to shape the speech Sarah Palin delivered at the convention. They need to deflect mainstream voters' attention from Palin's extreme right-wing, very Bushian views and utter lack of the necessary qualifications to be a heartbeat from the presidency (this, after all, is a woman who last year said that her duties governing a state with one-quarter the population of Brooklyn had so occupied her that she hadn't gotten around to formulating a position on the war in Iraq — a fair enough statement for someone who wants to be the best possible governor of Alaska but not for one who wants to be vice president of our great country). So they conjure up a false enemy in the media (but not the likes of Hannity, O'Reilly, Dick Morris and the other Fox News talking-pointers who are as elite as elite can be). The words of Mark Twain are appropriate here: "Never pick a fight with a man who buys his ink by the barrel." It's also more than a tad preposterous that the campaign of Senator John McCain, who once referred to the media as "my base," is now demonizing that same media. 

After watching McCain himself speak on the convention's final night, I have to admit I liked many of the things he said. I remember at one point several years ago thinking that even though I vote Democratic more often than I vote Republican (though I absolutely have and will continue to vote for members of both parties) and am positively horrified with what Bush & Co. have done to the country, I could be happy with a President McCain because he would do what he thought was right for the country and not what was expedient politically. It is, of course, not impossible that McCain might still govern that way if elected. At 72 he is unlikely to serve a second term, and could fill his cabinet with solution-minded, bipartisan leaders while reaching out to Democratic legislators. But his near-complete abandonment, since losing the nomination to Bush in 2000, of so many of what he had previously set out as unshakeable principles — combined with the Palin selection — have damaged his credibility seriously and perhaps permanently.