Conventional Lying

There is every day political lying. Then there is conventional lying.  Conventional lying is actually a misnomer.  It is not the usual run-of-the-mill political lying. It is the kind of outrageous, continuous, and repeated (even sometimes bizarre) lying you can get away with at a political convention because you have an audience that is only too eager to believe the most incredible falsehoods imaginable.

This is what is now happening at the Republican convention in Tampa. Most likely, the same thing will happen when the Dems get their pack of lies all assembled and allocated out to their speakers at their convention.

Why is this happening?  If you have been reading earlier articles in this blog, you know only too well. 

The reason for all the lying is that most of the time the facts available to us do not fit together into a nice coherent simple story, but it’s the story –not the facts– that counts when people are putting together in their minds what they believe in and how they vote.

Facts are messy.  Facts lead to confusion.  Too many facts and too much truth seeking leads to uncertainty and the realization that we might not know as much as we think we do. In fact, taken to an extreme, it can lead to the realization that we don’t know very much at all about anything.

The human mind cannot handle that kind of uncertainty.  We need to know what the Hell is going on so we can act now. “Hey man, I got to vote. I can’t be bothered trying to figure out all that complicated macroeconomic budget and Medicare stuff.”

Over millions and millions of year, our brains have worked out short cuts that allow us to make decisions and act without too much time-consuming and burdensome thought, fact finding, and analysis.  After all who wants a course in zoology when you are about to be eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger?  Better to attack first and ask the scientific questions later.

Smilodon fatalis. Photo from Wikipedia Commons 

Get this guy with a spear before he gets you. Worry about what biological genus he came from later. If you start giving a lecture on the eating habits of Smilodon Fatalis, you will be dinner.

We have carried that biological survival lesson into the 21^st century.

If the facts don’t fit the simplistic story that we use to navigate our life, the answer is:  change the facts.  Make up some lies that will fit the story.  It is way too difficult and confusing to puzzle things out and change the whole story to fit the elusive and ever-changing facts. With a little twisting here and there and a little obliviousness and obfuscation of the truth, we can proceed happily on our way without any unnecessary interference from the complexities of real world.

Politicians are our story tellers in the modern world.  It follows logically, therefore, that they are the leading experts in fact “adjustment”. They are the authors of the political "narratives," as their consultants call the stories that motivate the voters.

Meanwhile, self-righteous political reporters and pundits are busily engaged in documenting all the lies and fact distortions emerging from the Republican convention.  In a week or so, they will be complaining about all the lies and distortions put forth by the Dems to justify their story.

Robert Reich, for example, who should know better, is disturbed about Romney because “resorting to outright lies -- and organizing a presidential campaign around a series of lies -- reveals a whole new level of cynicism, a profound disdain for what remains of civility in public life, and a disrespect of the democratic process.”[1]

Almost every major newspaper has articles about the recent convention orgy of lying.  James Downie at the Washington Post called Paul Ryan’s speech “breathtakingly dishonest” and quoted a Romney advisor as saying “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” [2]

The LA Times called out one of the most popular convention lies in its headline “Rick Santorum Repeats Inaccurate Welfare Attack on Obama."

The  NY Times took the Republican speakers to task one by one for a ”parade of truth-twisting, distortions, and plain falsehoods.”  The liars included Chris Christie of New Jersey, Bob McDonnell of Virginia, John Kasich of Ohio, and many others. The paper’s editorial board opined that “it was startling to hear how many speakers in Tampa considered it acceptable to make points that had no basis in reality…Voters looking for a few nuggets of truth would not have found them in Tampa on Tuesday.”[3]

What is the point of all this documentation of all the lies?  Every idiot on the street knows that the truth is not going to change anyone’s mind.  These experienced reporters should know what every politician knows: Facts don’t matter unless they fit the story.

At the moment, we have two stories in vogue.

One story is that things only work in life if every man is free to advance his own personal interests and exercise his special talents unfettered by rules and regulations. Anything else is socialism, and socialism is a proven failure. [4] A whole lot of facts need to be adjusted to fit that narrative.  Plus-- you need a big banner saying “You didn’t Build That.”

The other popular story is that we are all in this community together and the more powerful and stronger of us need to share resources to help pull along the weaker and less able of us if any of us are actually going to have a good life.  Anyone who thinks otherwise is cruel and selfish.  If that is your story, you are going to need to make some big fact “adjustments” concerning exactly how much free stuff the rest of the country can afford to hand out to the aged, infirm, and underprivileged without bankrupting the whole country.  Or maybe you can just ignore that awkward cost side of the equation, which is what the Dems will do at their convention.

There are still more lies to tell at the Republican convention. Each speaker seems to have his or her personal allocation.

Then come the Democrats.

Can the Dems outdo the Republican lying machine? Or at least match them lie for lie?

It will be a tall task, but they have a lot to work with and some of these guys came from Chicago --so I am not putting it past them.

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[1] Article in the Huffington Post about Romney’s well-funded lying machine.

[2] The link to Downie’s article is here. Elsewhere in the Post, other reporters noted the same trend. Jonathan Bernstein called Ryan’s “flat out” lying “staggering”. See his article here.

[3] The editorial can be read here.

[4] In his convention speech, Paul Ryan said that President Obama and the Democrats see “life as one “dull, unadventurous journey from one entitlement to the next,’ as part of a “government-planned life.’.” (You gotta love that statement!)