Pondering Lies, Spin, and Policy-Making

03/18/2007

Paul Munnis


Spin is passed off as a “little white fib” designed to make the Administration look good yet it is really “a lie.” The trouble with a lie, even a little one, is that more lies have to be fabricated to cover up the original lie and soon a web of lies exists. When the original lie is unmasked then the whole Administration looks deceitful and incompetent.

That is the essential flaw in the Bush Administration approach to governing and has been the Achilles heel of the Bush Administration for the last five years of their government experience. We might add it is the reason that many human relationships fail – they are built upon a bed of compounded lies.

Lies have left voters feeling that the GOP can’t be trusted to do anything right and that is pretty much correct. They lie about everything and when the truth has out they are left looking thoroughly incompetent.

Since the beginnings of the Bush Administration we have had the Administration press secretaries running a spin machine to a point where the press secretary becomes a spokesman for the whole Bush Administration and often stands in front off the press and just wings it. Lies are created by an expectation that the Administration must know it all and have solutions to everything asked about. Watch a Press Conference and observe that it creates a real-time theater of the absurd masked as “competent virtual reality.”

Later, the Administration is stuck with the attribution and then has to live with it as a matter of public policy.

No one in government is more complicit in fabricating lies and binding the GOP to their ultimate effect than Dick Chaney. We will not give a laundry list of his fibs but just to cite two that are having very long-term negative policy impacts are his assertion that Iraq had “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” and that “Iraq was implicated in 9/11 as Saddam trained terrorists for al-Qaeda.”

Both were lies of convenience at the time but they are now unmasked and are leaving the Bush Administration looking really bad and not to be trusted. Not just some sort of bad either but “really bad” for policy actions costing many human lives has been woven around those lies. When these lies are added to by raids upon our public treasury by GOP thieves and then the staunch defense of those individuals by GOP Party spokesmen then it gives total credence to Hillary Clinton’s charge of the existence of a “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy...” There is such a conspiracy and it is a conspiracy based upon defending lies and of creating cover-up.

Lies are killing the GOP and they are on record of supporting those lies. Thus it is a fairly easy matter to defeat a GOP incumbent these days – just unmask the lie and then show that the incumbent fostered and supported the lie in both words and in thier deeds. People are so reviled by the lie that they reject the candidate, his Party, and they purge him of the office that he has defiled. Lies cost a lot of politicians their future. This has become a campaign ritual now – just track the statements of public officials and then hang them with the untruths that they told -- a total “no-brainer.”

William Shakespeare spent a lot of time reflecting upon lies and their effect on government. If you spend a moment and Google his name with a search of “Shakespeare AND Lies” you will see a long list of his reflections ranging from “Uneasy is the Head that wears the Crown,” to “Oh What a Wicked Web We Weave, When First We Practice to Deceive.”

I’m certain that some couplet of his can be quoted that will make me seem like I am lying about Shakespeare but that isn’t the point here -- the point is that lies unmasked are ruining our government and are the enemy of setting proper foreign policy. The failure to confront truth has produced warped policies, the warped policies then fail and then more lies must be fabricated to cover up the lies. The result is an Administration that is a total failure and that creates artificial constraints on policy formulation. Lies are costing public officials their positions and they can cause governments to fall.

This is an object lesson to Republicans, Democrats, and indeed to all people -- just stick to facts when you understand them and when you don’t have the facts – just say so. Policy needs truth as its foundation and no matter that your enemies can spin the truth to make you seem the liar or seem incompetent. In due time the truth will have out and the lies and cover-up will make you look worse than you did in the original situation that you tried to plaster over with convenient lies.

Some will say “Nonsense, people lie all of the time and they get away with it.” That is debatable as instance after instance can be shown. Look now at an Administration who claims: "We don't torture..." and look at the credability problem that creates when it runs a Git'mo Military Tribunal wherein a man is caled the "Mastermind of 9/11" yet has been incarcerated without an arraignment, or lawyer, and is the likely victim of closed door sessions with military interrogators. We all know that people will say anything to end torture and abuse. Is his "confession," then a lie to end the torture that we say that we don't perform?"

We need to try real hard to deal with the truth because it is the path to seeming wisdom and it reflects well upon a person when they can show a solution to a confounded problem that lent itself to a convenient lie but then the lie was avoided an investigation was run and then a solution became crystal clear in the sunlight of both the knowledge and the truth. Casting that sunshine upon a previously unsovable problem makes the investigator appear wise and valuable and it permits wise policy making to follow.

We ponder: “Was Moses really a ‘Wise Old Man’ or simply an ‘Honest Man who reaped the rewards of truth thus making him seemingly wise?’ ”

To be honest – we don’t know the answer to that question.