Lying is Fun-Payback is a Bitch

My Inbox is still empty as many of my angry friends try to figure out how to cope with the shocking and disturbing news of the day.

Friday morning the government announced that roughly as many jobs were created last month as were lost. That was a far better result than was anticipated. In addition the unemployment rate dropped instead of going up again as expected.

Many of these friends--who are united in their hatred of the President of the United States--are already reeling from the fact that the stock market has gone up for nine months in a row producing the sharpest rally in our lifetimes.  And now this!

Throughout it all, angry and ominous emails have been arriving almost daily warning that President Obama is ruining the economy and the country with his horrible Obamanomics and terrible policies. These screeds of course have ignored the fact that when Obama took office the economy had already been ruined by his predecessor's policies and that the world was already facing the very real threat of a complete meltdown of the financial system.

They also have repeatedly bemoaned the fact that under Obama our national deficit would grow to more than a trillion dollars a year and our biggest and most irresponsible banks and financial institutions would be bailed out to the tune of trillions more. These expressions of outrage--which continue unabated to this day--also ignore the fact that all of that had already happened during the Bush years as well.

They are like a person who's dying of cancer going to see an oncologist to seek treatment and then blaming the doctor for giving him the disease in the first place. It seems ridiculous but, as we have all learned too well, if you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. Lenin said it first, Karl Rove refined it and took it to a new level, and bloggers, emails, and hate-radio and cable jocks have made it their mantra.

Despite this adoption of virtual reality as truth by so many friends, I have continued to cling to the old-fashioned notion that no matter how many people believe a verbal rant or a forwarded email full of falsehoods and distortions, a lie is still a lie. 

Like Bernie Madoff, Tiger Woods, and others, my friends are now finding that when you  build your life on a foundation of falsehoods, you need to tell more and bigger lies just to keep from having to admit you were wrong in the first place.  Eventually the liar has no choice but to admit that everything has been a fraud from the beginning. It can be dangerous. You can end up in jail for the rest of your life or lying in your driveway with a 3-iron lodged in your head.

This harsh reality is now confronting former CNN entertainer Lou Dobbs.  Dobbs decided a couple of years ago that he could develop a huge devoted following among American racists by spending all his time attacking illegal immigrants and essentially blaming all of our nation's real and perceived problems on them.

When that act got a little tired, Dobbs expanded his racist product line and became the poster boy for the Birther movement--those who didn't want to just come out and say that it drove them crazy that Americans wanted a black man as president so they continued to claim that Obama was really born in Kenya and wasn't an American at all.

Now Dobbs has been fired by CNN and wants to seek public office. Not surprisingly, he received moral and financial support from Americans for Legal Immigration (ALIPAC)--arguably our nation's most racist anti-immigrant group. But now, in his effort to become palatable to people outside America's most virulent hateful and lunatic fringe, Dobbs, who is now running for a Senate seat in New Jersey, says he might support just a smidgen of amnesty for some illegals.

Like all liars and those who count on the worst of us for their support, Dobbs has found that if you sleep with enough dogs, eventually you will come away with fleas. His most ardent racist supporters have now called Lou a traitor to the cause and have thrown him under the bus as well. So now Dobbs still has no support from the vast majority of Americans who stopped watching his racist rants years ago and got him fired from CNN and he also has lost his friends on the racist Right. What's a liar to do?

Most of us also get regular emails demonizing Nancy Pelosi from the same Obama haters.  We are repeatedly told that the Speaker is almost as evil as the president himself. They say she wants to tax us all into oblivion and take away our rights.


Of course these tomes ignore the fact that no one's taxes have been raised this year, no one's rights have been taken away, and now Pelosi is opposing the proposal of fellow Democrats who want a temporary War Tax be instituted so we can start paying for the wars we have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last eight years.

I'm still waiting for the emails praising Ms. Pelosi for working to keep our taxes down but my Inbox remains sadly empty.

By the way, the Speaker's decision not to make Americans pay for our wars is wrong and immoral.  As a fiscal conservative, I am a strong believer that we should pay our bills and that we shouldn't make our children and creditors pick up the tab for money that is being spent on our behalf today.  It is also clear that our economy and job picture are still dismal and in the very early stages of recovery.  Huge problems and challenges remain.

But this piece is not about political ideology. It is about the dangers of making a strong case for a position based on lies and distortions. It is sad that so many Americans have resorted to this and it is more outrageous that the news media have been so complicit.  As a result of their lax and often non-existent Balloon Boy style fact-checking, they routinely give a platform to liars in the name of balanced reporting.

If you live long enough, your choices can come back to haunt you. I feel concern for my troubled friends and wonder how they're going to cope. Their choices are limited.  They can kick the can further down the road with more lies and distortions or they can man-up, admit they were wrong all along, and change their ways.  Keep checking your Inbox and your favorite cable channel.  Their answers will show up soon enough.

Life is tough enough for those us who try to tell the truth. I can only imagine how much harder it is for those who don't. I'm trying to feel sorry for them. It's not working yet but I'll keep you posted.

The Numbing Code of Hatespeech

In a recent post (I Just Don't Get It), I wondered out loud why so much of the criticism of President Obama is on the one hand so vicious and hateful and on the other hand seems to make so little sense. My article clearly struck a nerve with many people on both sides of the issue as it generated more than 110 strong comments.

It's sad but expected to see these types of over-the-top distortions during election campaigns--and we did. But once the country has made its choice and a four-year, no-cut contract is given to a new president, it is normal and logical for everyone to come together for at least a while to see how the new guy does.

But we are seeing the exact opposite. Since Obama took office six months ago, the hate, anger, distortions, and demonization has only picked up in volume and intensity--even as he has attacked head-on the numerous disasters and challenges he inherited.

I talked about this in my last article and was still left scratching my head. I just didn't get it.

Then Bill Maher came here to Aspen. He seemed to get it perfectly and gave us his version of the answer. "You know why all these Republicans and Right wingers are calling Obama a socialist, and a Nazi, and a terrorist, and a secret Muslim? Because they can't call him the word they really want to use. Nigger."

That sounded a little harsh to me but his audience--the average age was well above 60--all seemed to be nodding their heads and sending knowing glances back and forth.

The N-word is a little jarring for my taste but it got me thinking--and doing a little research. First I Googled "obama nigger" and came up with half a million links. . That seemed like a lot.

So I went further and checked a few of them out. Not pretty.

But aren't these racists really part of the radical fringe? Certainly most of them are. But all those liberals who were nodding their heads at Bill Maher's comments were saying something as well. As I've said repeatedly, I just don't get it. So let's dig deeper.

Townhall.com is arguably the New York Times of Conservative websites. All of the top Right wing commentators post there. So when I get an email from Townhall offering me 50 percent off on their latest bumper sticker, that's pretty Republican mainstream. And what is that sticker? It is a clever jab stating "Somewhere In Kenya, A Village Is Missing It's Idiot." The promotion goes on to point out that it is a well-known fact that President Obama was born in Kenya--not in Hawaii as his birth certificate says--so not only is he an idiot, he is a Black African idiot.

I then hear about the Missouri state legislator Cynthia Davis--the chair of the House Standing Committee on Families and Children--who has stated her strong opposition to continuing the government meal programs that provide free lunches to poor children through the summer. Ms. Davis points out that the program ignores the value of hunger as a motivational tool and she goes on to point out that giving hungry kids free meals in a group setting undermines family bonding. Her amazing and outrageous position (which she repeated several times during her week of notoriety) received national attention and now is yesterday's news.

But as someone who was born and raised in Missouri, I heard the Republican legislator and mother of seven from O'Fallon loud and clear. In Missouri, when you talk about programs for the poor, you mean handouts to black, neglected children from St. Louis and Kansas City whose irresponsible families are being supported by the good American (white) citizens of the rural counties who have the right values and raise their children properly. You just have to know the code.

And then there are the upscale Republican Women of Anne Arundel County (MD) who came out on their website last week encouraging all their members to wear something patriotic (and comfortable shoes) to the Annapolis Fourth of July parade. That was right above the paragraph in which their president wrote a piece comparing Obama to Hitler. Like Rep. Davis of Missouri, the suburban Washington D.C. ladies were upbraided on national television and eventually removed the attack from their site claiming it was the opinion of one person--not the organization. No apology from the group--but then again they only compared the new president of United States to a genocidal murderer. No big deal.

Yet another example comes from Republican strategist Frank Gaffney who declared after our president's amazing speech to the Muslim world in Cairo that Obama may "still" be a Muslim--our first Black Muslim terrorist president. He cites numerous code phrases used by Obama during his Cairo speech that gave him away. In his Washington Times column Gaffney goes on to say Obama might not be a Muslim but he is certainly like Hitler.

There's that Hitler thing again. Is it only crazy radicals who would make such an outrageous connection? Apparently not. A Google check of "Obama Hitler" yielded almost 7 MILLION links. The "Obama Hitler Similarities" check came up with only 1.6 million. As with "Obama Nigger" it makes for some pretty shocking reading and viewing.

So what's going on here? I have said that I just don't get it and even after Bill Maher's epiphany it is still somewhat confusing. Maybe it's that vicious spurious attacks have become so numbingly common that they're just part of the background noise. But I'm paying more attention to the code of hatespeech and things are becoming a little clearer. And a lot more depressing.