People of the Lie

"Although I was aware they were illegal, we had become somewhat inured to using some activities that would help us in accomplishing what we thought was a legitimate cause."--Jeb Magruder, testifying about the Nixon White House during Watergate.

 "I didn't like Nixon until Watergate."-- New Right pioneer M. Stanton Evans.

"We ought to see clearly that the end does justify the means."--Evangelist C. Peter Wagner.

"If the method I am using accomplishes the goal I am aiming at, it is for that reason a good method."-- Jerry Falwell, describing his goal to destroy the public schools.


These are statements by some of the founding fathers of today's Rabid Right, quoted by Rick Perlstein in his Mother Jones piece, "Inside the GOP's Fact-Free Nation," with its subtitle: How political lying became normal.

Perlstein begins with examples of past political lies, particularly ones that got the U.S. into wars.  He chronicles the 1970s revulsion against the manifest lying of the Vietnam era, and how GOPers brought lying back but with this new quasi-religious rationale.

Now GOPer politicians lie as a matter of course, up to and including the various Big Lies that affect history big time.  In companion pieces, David Corn analyzes why the Obama White House couldn't correct GOPer lies about  health care reform ("government takeover of health care," "death panels") and another piece examines why the media (and others) are hoodwinked by liars, even when they are repeat offenders.

It's not a pretty picture.  Lies are effective when they are simple, shocking, sensationalistic stories, and new media carries them around the planet with the speed and jolt of electricity, far faster than factual corrections can be made.  I'm not sure these articles really explain why people believe them, and what some of the examples say about people who believe known liars over people they know and work with is pretty disheartening.

On the current GOPer tactic of being against anything and everything that President Obama is for, even if they were on principle for it before, Rachel Maddow said Monday,  "the kind way to explain this is as disgusting hypocrisy."  What's worse, she says, is the possible strategy--to create widespread suffering among ordinary Americans through economic deterioration, just for partisan political gain.  Right now those lies are the basis for action--refusing to honor the country's debts--that may well have nearly instantaneous consequences for every one of us, creating widespread and probably long-lasting suffering.  Update: If this seems an extreme charge, note this statement from a top economist at Moody and former McCain advisor who says that even a brief default is likely to cause a new recession.)

Creating suffering is worse.  But lying as a principle, lying justified as a necessary means to an end, particularly in a democratic society which makes decisions based on shared information, and even justifying it as God's work--that comes close to Scott Peck's definition of evil in his landmark book, People of the Lie.

Though the effects of evil can be sensed and named, naming something or someone as evil risks projection.  But a lie is much more defined.  As I've suggested in the Climate Inside posts, some of what public figures as well as ordinary people say is unconscious projection.  But there's plenty of evidence that many of these lies--and especially the Big Lies--are deliberate, excused in their minds for their political effect.

The effects of these lies are destroying us.  But so are the lies themselves.