Lies Lies Lies

Living almost 1000 miles away from them when I was growing up, I rarely saw my grandparents - in particular my grandfathers, who both died when I was 12. But of the times we did hang out with my mother's father, one thing I remember is he'd always tell us that we were related to whomever was on the screen, or even remotely came up that was famous. "Oh, him? Radar from MASH? Yeah, you're related to him." "Rabbit Marinville, Hall of Fame second basemen? Yeah yeah, we're related to him." He never even bothered to follow up with some backstory to convince us, he'd just say "yup, we're related" and we'd believe him. It never occurred to us to ask a follow-up question, or research it. He'd just throw it out there.

I wrote many times on this blog during the election about the new direction straight-up lying had taken over the last few years, peaking with some of McCain/Palin's whoppers and now coming up again with the "revising" of the Bush legacy. It used to be that someone would lie, but would do so in a confusing fashion to us, wherein we kinda THOUGHT so and so was lying, but couldn't really prove it. This bit here by Condi Rice is just the latest in the flat-out, if-you-took-a-few-minutes-to-look-it-up-you'd-KNOW-it's-a-lie-and-you'd-know-SHE-knew-it-was a-lie-but-she-says-it-anyway kind of lie. And there's no semantic gymnastics going on,she just flat-out says "oh, no American money was lost to corruption."

Now, obviously it took the ThinkProgress peeps about 12 seconds to compile evidence to the contrary. Do you not think Rice KNEW such quickly-gained evidence was available? Of course she did. And that's the point: it doesn't matter.

If you like Rice and the administration, then that's the answer you wanna hear, and that's that. If you don't like Rice et al, you'll call "bullshit." And if you have about 10 seconds, you can read the refuting data. So what impetus is there for Rice NOT to lie? Out of 100 people reading, 45 will say "damn right!", 45 will say "bullshit", and 10 are still reading it. No one I know from the right would call bullshit, and no one I know from the left would say hey, maybe she's right. No matter how crazy you lie about this kind of thing, nothing changes one way or the other. It's not as if the media is gonna nail you on a lie - and even if they THINK they're being tough, basically they're just replaying the scene of you saying "no American money was lost to corruption" over and over to viewers ad nauseum, which is what Condi Rice would want in the first place. As I said back in September,

Obviously the blatant, barely-pretending-to-hide-it lying by McCain is out of control. And, because the American voters are so fucking stupid, the shit works. My question is, why stop with the lies he's already propagated thus far? Why doesn't McCain go all the way - why not tell us that if we vote for him, he'll give us $100,000 each? Why not tell us that if they win, Palin will come blow in your ear for 20 minutes? Sound ridiculous? Actually, not really. Not anymore.

Tough for me to sell Palin out that way, as she's my aunt. :(