American Politics: The Lying Game

There are lies, there are liars and there are lying liars. 

You will recall that our leftist media titans and Democratic politicians often accuse President Trump of outright lies, if not of shading the truth. However much truth there is to this charge—and it is not completely empty—the reality is that Democrats and other left-thinking folk lie all the time for political advantage. Remember Hillary Clinton’s harrowing tale of dodging artillery fire in Bosnia. Turns out, it was a lie. Did any Clinton supporters find their faith in the nation’s leading enabler of sexual harassment shaken by the revelation? Of course, they did not. They are wedded to a higher truth. 

If the lie advances the right cause it is perfectly acceptable. Of course, if you do not adhere to the right cause, whatever you say is a lie. Remember: Bush lied, people died. No one bothered to ask whether the intelligence services of a dozen nations, all of which had concluded that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, had been mistaken. And thus, whether the American administration had been misinformed. Not at all. It's easy to say that Bush lied.

In today's America, a lie for one party is truth for the other. This means that we live in two different countries, run by different standards. What is good for one is bad for the other. If Bill Clinton is credibly accused of raping a woman, it’s the vast right wing conspiracy, trying to remove Clinton in favor of his pro-abortion vice president, one Al Gore. If any Republican is accused of groping a woman it’s a crime against humanity. 

Anyway, the race for Democratic presidential candidate is now coming down to a battle royal between Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden. KevinWilliamson reminds us that they are both liars. (via Maggie's Farm) And that the Democratic Party does not care.

Elizabeth Warren has a moving story about being fired from a teaching job because she was pregnant, a story that perfectly complements her political narrative that she is the tribune and champion of those who have been treated unfairly by the powerful. Joe Biden has a moving — and horrifying — story about his wife and daughter being killed by a drunk driver, a story that similarly could not have been designed more perfectly to bolster his political image as a man who can be counted on to soldier on in the face of adversity.

Of course, neither story is true.

The lies are supposed to advance an agenda. They work to promote a higher cause… which is, to win an election and to restore the Obama presidency:

Fiction, yes. Deployed, as we are always told when these lies are exposed as lies, in the service of a larger truth, a truth of which such habitual and irredeemable liars as Warren, Biden, Smollett — and Lena Dunham, and the so-called journalists of Rolling Stone, and the perpetrators of a thousand phony campus hate-crime hoaxes — are the appointed apostles.

We cannot but be impressed by the rank hypocrisy of the media lights who are rushing to defend Elizabeth Warren… with rank sophistry.

Williamson continues:

“Does anybody seriously believe it was not as everyday as sunrise that employers made pregnant women leave their jobs 50 years ago?” CNBC’s John Harwood demanded in defense of Warren. Perhaps it has not occurred to Harwood, who purports to be a journalist of a kind, that the relevant question is not whether this sort of thing happened in the past to a great many women but whether this particular thing actually happened to this woman, which does not seem to be the case: The minutes of the local school-board meeting quite clearly document that Warren was offered a contract for further employment, which she declined.

So, Warren made it up in order to draw attention to an injustice. Might she not have found a woman who was punished for being pregnant? Yes, she might have. She did not because she knows that her team, in the Democratic Party and the media, will rush to the barricades to protect her against incoming fire… the way they protected Hillary Clinton from her lies.

As for the fiction about the deaths of Joe Biden’s wife and daughter, it’s also a lie:

Similarly, people are killed by drunk drivers every day in this country. Joe Biden’s wife and daughter were not among them, in spite of his libelous claims that they lost their lives in an accident involving an irresponsible truck driver who, as Biden put it, “drank his lunch.” The man who oversaw that investigation, Delaware Superior Court judge Jerome O. Herlihy, repeatedly has confirmed that there is no evidence alcohol was involved. The survivors of the driver, who has since passed away, have publicly asked Biden to stop telling this lie and besmirching the memory of their father. Investigators at the time determined that the accident was not even the other driver’s fault — Mrs. Biden seems to have driven accidentally into the path of the truck.

Williamson concludes:

Warren’s fictions, and Biden’s, and Smollett’s, and Newsweek’s smear of Karen Pence, all have in common that they are lies that have been put into the service of the campaign against Donald Trump in 2020. (I assume, for the moment, that there will be such a campaign.) There is a supreme irony in that: Trump himself is not what one would call excessively scrupulous with the facts, but to resort to lies and inventions in the race against him is a confession of sorts.

These people insist on the pristine purity of elections. Because if the results are impure they threaten our democracy. And yet, as they denounce Trump’s defiance of the norms of democratic decorum, sanctimonious Democrats persist in breaking all of them. Beginning with their failure to accept the results of a fair election… and now including running campaigns based on flagrant lies, lies that their party systematically ignores.