Put aside the avalanche of lies from Sarah Palin and John McCain the past few weeks, and answer this for me:
“How do they do it?”
How do people lie so easily and effortlessly? I have my fat ass on the exercise bike watching Bill Maher, and WSJ flunky John Fund, with a straight face, just stated that Barack Obama is more liberal than Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders is a flipping socialist.
So how do they do it? I have passed along things that were untrue, but believed them to be true while stating them. I can understand that. But how do people stand up in front of other people, and just tell complete untruths? At least when Pat Buchana is lying and he gets caught, he laughs and you know he is just bullshitting. But folks like Palin, who lie repeatedly about the Bridge to Nowhere (and conveniently drop the lie when in Alaska and people will know better) just shock the shit out of me.
Sociopaths.
*** Update ***
Best line of the show- being called elitist by cross-dressing Rudy Giuliani is like being called a douchebag by Andy Dick.
Incertus
I picked up on that too, and the only thing I can come up with is that Maher is right–Fund and those like him really do think that the average person is stupid. Well, that or they’ve done such a good job obscuring the facts that they know they can get away with it. I mean, it’s no mistake that every time a Democratic Senator runs for the Presidency, the National Journal says he or she is the most liberal in the Senate, while the Republican is the height of moderation.
MobiusKlein
Here’s how people swallow it:
“Sure they’re sociopaths, but their MY sociopaths!”
Incertus
Oh, and as for the whole lying with a straight face is concerned, I’m convinced that the conservative movement is way more post-modern than anyone has ever given them credit for. Not only do they act as though there is no such thing as an objective truth, they bash the opposition by saying that they don’t believe in them. They could be a fucking Dada film.
bs23
check out “bullshit” on wikipedia, especially the section entitled “bullshit in philosophy”. point is, they aren’t lying per se, because as opposed to a liar who cares about the truth, they don’t.
SGEW
Welcome to the Panopticon, my friends.
Porco Rosso
Are you going to add a tag for “But he wouldn’t agree to town hall meetings.”?
4tehlulz
>>So how do they do it?
Easy. For them, “truth” is based on utility; they need to be true, so it’s true, and since they believe it to be true, they are not lying.
Davis X. Machina
’m convinced that the conservative movement is way more post-modern than anyone has ever given them credit for.
They’re not post-modern, they’re early-20th Century.
That was the high water mark of Bolshevism, when ‘truth’ was just a bourgeois construct and the only thing that mattered was that the Cause be advanced.
If a statement promoted the Party in its role as Vanguard of the Glorious Revolution, then it was true, since it expressed Revolutionary truth, soaring high above ordinary ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’
The GOP is drunk on the dilectic. Gingrich is the best example, and all of his spawn. Sixty years too late to the party.
All Power to the Soviets of Preachers and Brokers!
Pennypacker
This quote says it all:
gypsy howell
Did you catch Mona Charen on Washington Journal this morning with Jane Hamsher? Now, I’m not the hugest fan of the FDL website (way too Jr High for my taste- Hi Jane!!!111! {{waves and hugs!!}}) but she was pretty good in the face of Mona’s unending stream of complete out-and-out LYING. Breathtaking in its chutzpah.
All I could think was the elite money class must really be worried about Obama to have a WSJ reporter up there just lying her ass off. About everything.
ellie
I watched Bill Maher too and the look on John “I beat women” Fund’s face when Bill said, “You can’t be serious!” really drives the point home that republicans are insane. Truly insane.
carsick
The more this ugly, venal, lying and hypocritical McCain campaign goes on, the better he does in the polls. He’s actually being rewarded for not offering domestic proposals or economic proposals and simply bald faced lying about his opponent and his positions. Not to mention the history of his VP pick.
Is this truly America?
Do we really reward such campaigning with a majority of votes?
Will the 2012 campaign be hosted by Omarosa and Ryan Seacrest?
Jon H
“All I could think was the elite money class must really be worried about Obama to have a WSJ reporter up there just lying her ass off. About everything.”
Charen’s not a reporter, she’s just a talking points-regurgitating op/ed generating tool, like so many on the Right.
jimmiraybob
There’s a lot at stake. This could explain a lot:
McCain/Palin/Rove/GOP 2008 Campaign Operating Manual
Reward points may be redeemed for political office and/or favors.
Bald-faced lie (10 points plus 5 bonus points for obviousness of untruthfulness and delivery with straight face)
Fabrication (6 points)
Misleading (5 points)
Lying by omission (4 points)
Bluffing (3 points)
Dissembling (2 points)
Exaggeration (1 point)
Note: Use of truth and/or fact will result in deduction of 50 points per occurrence. Banishment from the Party may result if multiple infractions accrue.
Brian C.B.
This is an easy question to answer: The liars are the Real Americans. Or, so they think. They are Nationalists. They believe that America is blessed by Yahweh. That American bears a special Providence. They are Them, and the rest of us are, well, Us. The Other. We don’t count. The Ends Justify the Means. Torture is okay, when We do it. Killing the Innocent is okay, because we, regretfully, must do it so that our Blessed homeland, which is God’s hope for world redemption, along with our partner polity, Israel, survives. Why do you think that those people who voted for a government that kills, and tortures, and dismisses that thing for which our Framers were most proud, which is to say that the Framers universally assigned human beings autonomous rights, (the substance of the word “inalienable”), as some kind of Miranda warning of which a state-seized person might be unworthy, will care about leaders who lie to them? Have you watched professional wrestling? A British soccer match? Human beings can wrap themselves in murderous anger over melodrama or a bad referee call. The ends justify the means. Because, We’re Special. We’re Chosen. And, until us Chosen get the shit slapped out of us unmistakeably for our rampant authoritarian nationalism, I don’t think that things are going to change much.
Punchy
My Bears up 7 already on da road. Titties.
perception manager
I thought the most tell was when Fund said the election was just a contest for power.
Power for the sake of power. The ends justify the means.
JenJen
What really struck me about Maher’s show was someone as well-informed (albeit utter douche) as John Fund participating in The Big Lie: “Well, golly-shucks, I dun never heard of no Bush Doctrine, neither!”
Watching “This Week” this morning, my jaw dropped when George Will did the exact same thing. George Will’s taking his turn on the tire swing, and it’s really rather jarring.
George Will!! Wasn’t this the guy who had smoke coming out of his hears when Bush nominated Harriet Miers to SCOTUS?
One way President Obama could raise funds would be to levy a Smirk Tax on people like George Will.
tagged45
I think that the quote from Rogers (seriously, does this guy not come off as the biggest a$$hole in everything I see quoted from him?) tells it all — we’re doing what we have to in order to win, media bias, neener neener.
They’re lying, and they don’t care because the people who want an excuse to vote for the “good guys” don’t care. They want to be able to rationalize their choice and that’s what they’re being given… rationalization material. They’re outsiders! They’re mavericks! They take on the old boy network! They’re change agents! They’re being unfairly attacked! On and on and on, cowboys with all hat and no cattle. The only way to combat this is to have it eventually sink in through repetition that they’ve destroyed McCain’s brand which made him so appealing to independents in the first place. The question is, will it happen in time?
To that end, I’ve tossed $50 at Obama through the ActBlue page in hopes it’ll help them with their own counter-advertising.
Perhaps most depressing to me is the notion that people will vote for Palin’s ticket because she embodies some Platonic ideal of modern American womanhood. If she were running for Mom-in-Chief that would be fine; but will a nation of American Idolators approach the vote for [Vice] Presidency with the considerations that really matter for the office?
Bobzim
They know that the American public expects politicians to lie, and that it all comes down to “She’s Just Like Me!!!”.
wasabi gasp
Truth goes down better when its about cupcakes. Lies are cupcakes.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Da Bears!
mark
Let’s just get real and call the Republican party the Christian Nationalist party from now on.
Todd
Maybe they are thinking, “It’s a dire time for the country and some things just need to happen no matter what the costs.” Maybe it’s, “The truth is just too inconvenient and there’s a lot at stake right now.” Whatever it is, they have some kind of rationalization that makes it all OK.
Chances are they’ll never feel any remorse for it either.
What we all have to keep doing is pointing it out as what it is and reinforcing that lying is bad. It’s utterly repulsive that we have to do that. But we do.
georgia pig
What Brian C.B. says and more. A lot of folks seem to be animated by an internalized mythology that a certain ill-defined variety of generally caucasian/christian, regular-guy-and-gal “Americanism” should be ascendent. With Bush it included cowboy boots for a guy who never rides horses and now it includes mooseburgers and other paraphenalia from a state that has 0.2% of the nation’s population. I guess these folks look around at their failing businesses, the quagmire in Iraq, their declining schools and communities and the rise of external bogeymen like China and see that it ain’t happening, leading them to end-run around reality and grasp at shit that will never work. It does seem to be becoming more open and unfiltered as the failure proceeds. It also seems to be heightening with the rise of Obama, whom I imagine many of them secretly envy and resent for his talent, which, ironically, they amplify into complicity with secret Muslim conspiracies, cult-like mind control powers and the like. It’s a particularly toxic form of insecurity.
Herb
Delusion…just look through the comments on the larger Pajamas Media blog. Here’s an example: “This is not about the media being “mean” to Palin. Serious candidates demand serious vetting. What this is about is the media’s overenthusiasm in their vetting of Palin with their complete DISINTEREST in asking similar (or even substantive) questions of Obama.”
Say what????? This dude is either unaware that Obama has been under intense daily media scrutiny for the better part of a year…..or he’s deluding himself.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Barack Obama has been under intense media scrutiny and campaign opposition research for two years, longer than Palin has been Governor of Alaska.
Did you know that you can see Russia from Alaska?
Just Some Fuckhead
They’re not lying as much as they are existing in a different reality. The facts of that different existence manifest themselves in ways that are less empirical and more attuned to their own personal feelings about a situation or issue. They are only lying if you choose to not subscribe to their reality, which you are clearly guilty of.
PonB
I’m starting to recognize this pattern happening more often in general marketing campaigns…for example, the Microsoft “Mojave” campaign or the Pizza Hut “pasta” campaign. Essentially, the marketers rely on people’s general tendency to give the benefit of the doubt and lie to them, making them think they’re getting something special and then revealing that it’s their product. The general response is to say, “Hey, that means xxx is pretty good.”
Since I’m a card-carrying cynic, my reaction is, “Why do you have to lie to me to sell me your product?”
– PonB (written on a Mac, of course ;-) )
gbear
Given that I have never told a lie in my entire life, I am uniquely unqualified to answer your question. Sorry.
The Raven
There are people who lie like they breathe. My lover’s ex is one of them, and that one is a very rich person who has left a trail of human misery. Palin was apparently raised in an environment in which lies were the norm. McCain broke under torture, and for someone like him the problem is finding the courage to tell the truth. The others…I don’t know. Being an abuse survivor abuse helps; that breaks a person very early. And there do seem to be people born without normal empathy, but they are a small minority.
Caw!
SGEW
They are unethical, not necessarily sociopathic. Sociopaths very often actually believe the lies they spew out (pathological lying is only one of the hallmarks of sociopathy, as well) – these people just don’t care about the truth.
aimai
I don’t think its as mysterious as all that. McCain has always been “a liar”–its not that he “broke” something inside when he was tortured. Look, he was a hot shit loser, aggressive asshole in the bottom of his class. He has to have known that there were better men than himself who didn’t get into school because he did, whose place he stole, and that he couldn’t even live up to their standards and probably did worse than they would have. So, he took what wasn’t his from the get go because *he wanted it* and what he wanted was more important than the truth/the job. Same story with his marriage–he cheated to get his first wife, who divorced someone else to be with him. And then he dumped her when merely cheating on her wasn’t as useful to him as dumping her and marrying the next one. There isn’t *anything* in John McCain’s life that reflects real courage or honesty. He has exploited his experiences of loss and suffering rather than learned from them.
But as for the crack that the republicans are like the communists priviliging “the cause” over truth. I don’t think so. I don’t think most of the republican apparatchiks that we see on tv lying through their teeth really think anything at all, one way or another, about “the truth”–their *job* is to sell refrigerators to eskimos, to use an old phrase. Their job is to sell a disasterous foreign and domestic policy to the voters every four years. If they were honest about what they were doing no one would vote for them. And they know it. But its not like they don’t grasp how bad their policies will be for the voters/for the country. Its that they know for a fact that their policies will be a straight line cash cow for their own pockets and that is their goal. Truth or falsehood? those are words that we only care about if we care about democracy or honor or reality, if we are truly trying to align our actions with our desires with the will of the voters with the good of the people. If one of these is irrelevant, or all of them, “truth” or “falsehood” doesn’t really enter into the picture. John Fund and John McCain both want the same thing: more power to the republican party to funnel goods and services and power to its members. And they don’t care what they have to do to get it. Lying to the voters is just the start of what they are willing to do.
aimai
sfpolarbear
mark said
Let’s just get real and call the Republican party the Christian Nationalist party from now on.
I like that and will start using it. After all it’s the truth.
Montysano
During Maher’s show, at a time when people were shouting over each other, Fund said something like “When are you people going to learn what it takes to win elections?” Fund smugly gave a demonstration of the rightwing strategy: tell a lie, and if people are too ignorant to know it’s a lie and too lazy to seek the truth, then that’s a Win, and it will happily be taken advantage of.
Thinking people are unable to go there.
And: go look up “Angry Left” in the dictionary and you’ll find a picture of Janeane Garofalo. Angry, smart, well informed, and angry again. She went for Fund’s throat, and it was hugely entertaining. More of this, please.
SGEW
Just watched the Maher show, and I just have to say: Janeane Garofalo is the most awesomest person ever.
If Jon Stewart ever wants to quit the Daily Show, she’s my choice to replace him.
LiberalTarian
Pardon me, going out on a liberal limb … people aren’t stupid. Their beliefs are.
My argument is a sophism, but the hoops they jump through to protect their treasured beliefs–even if they are as deluded as the day is long–argues that they are not in fact stupid. But functionally, if their beliefs could kill them, they’d be contenders for Darwin Awards. Unfortunately for the rest of us, for their beliefs cause tremendous human misery.
SGEW
I see your point (in a Sam Harris sorta way), but aren’t people whose beliefs are, well, stupid sort of culpable for those beliefs?
zuzu's petals
I hope to God someone pointed out to Will that Gibson actually explained to Palin exactly which “Bush doctrine” he was talking about- twice – and she STILL didn’t have a clue.
I was disappointed nobody pointed that out to Fund, as pleased as I was by the general take-down on Maher.
copithorne
When you are a victim, you don’t have responsibility for ethical behavior.
If you look at the Republican campaign, almost all the messaging is that white people in America are victims of society — notably the disdain of East Coast Elites.
These people will come up with anything to see themselves as victims. John McCain says he is not responsible for lying because Barack Obama didn’t have town hall meetings.
BTW, the Bears lost to Carolina. Go Pats.
tarrah begone
I watched Maher too. This after watching 538 started showing McCain winning the election this week. Then I talked to a friend of mine this morning. He said he heard on some show that there’s run on the shoes that Sarah Palin wears and the glasses she wears are sold out and on back order. I give up on Americans. When you have idiots believing that Obama is going to be teaching kindergartners about sex ed. I just plain give up. I’m beginning to think Obama should come up with something just as ridiculous. Oh, just say something stupid like McCain is for forced sterilization of all dogs or McCain is for lowering the speed limit to 55 or that McCain is for photo-cop cameras on interstate freeways to raise funds for his war.
crystal dawn
Real Time had one of the best episodes in a long time this past Friday. A must see. I especially liked how Janene G. kept insisting that Fund was bullshitting when he said that the Democrats should be passive and cordial when we all know that mean and nasty (as long as it is factual) is how to campaign. Attack first or die.
Montysano
tarrah begone said:
Won’t work. Our side doesn’t have the machinery in place to catapult the propaganda. NPR, Air America, et al are not going to repeat the lie; they’re going to agonize over whether it’s true or not. Hell, I’m not going to repeat the lie; it’s just not how I’m wired.
We don’t have the equivalent of a John Fund, or a Limbaugh, or Hannity, or Malkin, etc. ad nauseam. The only force capable of defeating Rovian politics is the voters themselves, which is why Rovian strategy is much more about voter suppression than it is about advocating for their candidate.
The average voter, i.e. the ignorant goobers like those with which I live and work, are our only hope. Feel better now?
Conservatively Liberal
Did you know that you can see Alaska from Russia? That means that Putin is ready to lead us!
What I find interesting is that there were a line of war heroes on the right who were ready, willing, able and quite happy to shred John Kerry and his service to our country. How do you think it would have gone if Kerry had been a POW and broke under
tortureapproved methods of interrogation? You damn well know that the war heroes on the right wouldn’t have hesitated in making hay out of it for their own gain.As a POW, John Kerry broke under questioning, gave aid and comfort to the enemy and now he wants to be president?!
That would just be the start. St. John of McCain gets a free pass though. For some reason the left won’t go where the right doesn’t hesitate to. Odd how that works out, eh?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
I prefer “the Native Sons and Daughters of America Party” myself.
tim
Sociopathology is my guess. No conscience, or one that is severely sublimated by practice and design.