Culture of Lies

“We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” said Neil Newhouse, the Romney campaign’s pollster.  And Romney’s performance at the first debate proved his point.  Fact checkers debunked 27 myths in Romney’s “winning” debate performance.  One in particular, that his healthcare plan will cover pre-existing conditions, has been walked back by his own campaign committee.  Yet he repeated it again during the debate.  Is he just forgetful or does he know he can pull the wool over the eyes of the American public?  I suspect the latter.

One of the latest media rationalizations for letting him pass off his untruths is “We just report what the politicians say.  It’s not our responsibility to verify if it is true.  Let the readers decide.”  That may have been sufficient when the media wasn’t divided into two echo chambers and the public heard both sides of an issue.  That also may have been enough before mega-rich corporations became people and the Supreme’s decided that these newly created “people”  had the same rights to free speech that we have – and could buy as much as they desired.

The effects of this inside-out era are an almost complete end of dialogue with people of the opposite persuasion.  Now we have hushed conversations with people of similar beliefs.  Hushed, because we don’t want to incite the name-calling that comes when the other side’s “facts” are refuted.   And the lies continue.

An example by Boston Phoenix political journalist David Bernstein: “Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, came under fire this week over a self-evidently false attack on President Obama's commitment to national security”; even though he authorized the elimination of Osama Bin Laden and almost all of the Al Qaeda leadership.   

“Thiessen's evidence was a report claiming that Obama has not attended half of his daily intelligence briefings.  The column itself was self-defeating: Thiessen acknowledged in the column that Obama reads his intelligence briefing every day, quoting a spokesman for the National Security Council who said that Obama "reads his [security briefing] every day." All Thiessen is quibbling over is whether Obama has his briefing dictated to him, or whether he reads it.”

This story from Alternet.org is even more egregious:  “The Right has painted a potential second term under Obama in apocalyptic terms. Fox News host Sean Hannity said that "if Obama is re-elected, it's the end of America as we know it." Pastor John Hagee, calling for 40 days of prayer for Mitt Romney, insisted that "Four more years of Obama will bring absolute socialism to America. Our children and grandchildren will never know the greatness of America that we have experienced." A full-page ad  that ran in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune blared that Obama would "force employers to give illegal immigrants the jobs of U.S. citizens," "force courts to accept Sharia law" and "force doctors to assist homosexuals in buying surrogate babies," among other outrages. And the popular "documentary" (it's fiction), "2016: Obama's America" paints a dystopian vision  of a country bled dry by Obama's supposed obsession with global wealth redistribution. “

This culture of lies can  have devastating consequences.  “The Daily Mail reports that a wealthy but mentally unstable man, Albert Peterson shot dead his wife, his two sons and himself, because he dreaded the thought of Obama winning the election.

He just did not want his kids inheriting this mess,' Maggie L, a close family friend, who did not wish to reveal her last name. 'Sometimes we thought he might take his own life when he was so depressed. We never thought he would take Kathie's.”

These lies constitute a deep and destructive menace in the American narrative and are doing immense damage to our society.  I wish that I could claim that they are coming from both sides of the aisle equally.  But that’s the biggest lie of all.

Robert DeFilippis