How many euphemisms can you think of for the word “lie”?
However many you can think of, the MSM can probably think of more—if they’re talking about the lies of a Democrat.
When it first emerged that Obama’s “if you like your [fill in the blank] you can keep your [fill in the blank]” Obamacare promises were exactly that—boldfaced lies—it was almost amusing in a sick, bitter, tragic way to listen to the excuses made by not only Obama, his aides, and his supporters, but pundits of the liberal/left persuasion.
I really can’t remember them all, but they were exceptionally creative and varied. The first was that he didn’t really say that, he said something else. They had to revise that one fairly quickly, because they’d somehow forgotten the existence of videotape, which proved their revisionism was merely a new lie. Another was that he wasn’t lying because he didn’t know what the effects of his own policies would be. Or, he wasn’t lying because it really only hurt such a small percentage of people (which was itself a lie, because it’s not as though all the people it will ultimately hurt are yet known). He wasn’t lying because Obamacare has good intentions and the people with the canceled policies had “junk” policies anyway. He wasn’t lying because that was the only way he could get Obamacare passed.
Many of the excuses for Obama’s lies came more under the heading of rephrasing—or, as they say in the therapy biz, “reframing.” He wasn’t lying, he just wasn’t accurate enough or thorough enough. Or he “misspoke” (love that nearly-meaningless word, which is only really appropriate when someone has a slip of the tongue). The plans weren’t cancelled, they were “transitioned.” And on and on and on.
Now we have another case of a favored Democrat flat-out lying through her teeth, although she’s not running for national office. The culprit is Wendy Davis, the telegenic Texas state senator now running for Texas governor, who gained nationwide fame when she filibustered against a Texas abortion restriction. She has a compelling life story involving early marriage and single motherhood and divorce, financial struggle, and proud graduation from Harvard Law School via student loans and bootstraps—oh, and a little bitty part she left out, involving a supportive second husband who took care of the kids while she was away, and who ended up cashing in his 401K in order to help finance her education (last two years in college and her entire time at law school). They stayed together for ten years after her law school graduation, but she then moved out (allegedly cheating on him, although the divorce was not granted on those grounds), and he got custody of the children in the divorce, which occurred right after he had finished paying off those school loans for her.
Davis describes it all this way:
My language should be tighter,” she said. “I’m learning about using broader, looser language. I need to be more focused on the detail.”
Sometimes errors are about language. But this is most definitely not one of those times. This doesn’t turn on a word or two; this is a false narrative. Plus, Davis is a Harvard-educated lawyer. Accuracy of language is one thing she already knew a great deal about.
But even the language of the headline of the story where these facts emerged reported the story in a gentle way: “Key Facts Blurred.” No, the key facts were not “blurred,” they were omitted. They were covered up, hidden. And no, this wasn’t a “gaffe,” as WaPo columnist Nia-Malika Henderson’s column calls it in its headline. This was no inadvertent error, no etiquette slip.
Davis made other misstatements, such as saying she was a bit younger than she actually was when she got her first divorce, or lengthening the amount of time she actually lived in a trailer. These are the garden-variety lies typical of a politician, and although not laudable, they’re not all that important. If that was all she lied about, I wouldn’t be writing this post about her. But her leaving out her second husband’s role in her rags-to-riches story is what one might call a material lie, and a large one at that.
It also was a gratuitous lie. Her story was good enough before that, and involved a certain amount of hardship overcome. Why did she bother to lie? I submit that public tolerance for lies (from Democrats, anyway) has become greater during the last couple of decades and most especially over the Obama years. It probably has not escaped her notice that the penalty is vanishingly small, the benefits potentially large, and that the best defense if caught is reframing, minimization, and counter-attack.
All this, in an odd and almost counter-intuitive way, makes the fact that she gave her and her former husband’s 14-year-old daughter to her husband’s care seem like good judgment, or perhaps evidence of an underlying nobility. Maybe she said to herself, in an unexpected outburst of honesty, “She’ll do better with him.”
Jamie Irons
Jamie Irons:
You haven’t seen the post right above this one yet, because I just published it. But take a look, and you’ll see just how pernicious Davis is.
neo: “They had to revise that one fairly quickly, because they’d somehow forgotten the existence of videotape, which proved their revisionism was merely a new lie.</i?"
I have explained this slip up before…
Its not the first time.
The people on the left get their power from doing things over and over again if they work. a kind of cargo cultism with refinement…
almost all the books and writings on how to politically take control and do things are written prior to television… (but during radio).
so, their playbook has never been updated
why?
because they have yet to succeed in the modern era in a way in which the future can copy the prior success that does us tv and all that…
[this is why the left celebrated obamas use of internet and media, as if he would be that person to set that example and allow them to PROGRESS voorworts]
its one way you can know them…
they do what the instructions say, following the rules and techniquies without deviation. that includes deviation that would include television, cell phone taping, recordings, etc…
to them, these plays are like magic spells..
they dont know how or why they work. that would require a different kind of mind, thye only care that if they say or do the spell correctly, it has the magical cargo cult outcome.
its even more telling when you see it blow up. or that given times a changing, their spells dont work the same as they did before…
you can see a lot of this in the race baiting…
some of the people who openly know the lie are the people who existed so rarely before, that they were not included in the playbook..
what do you do when your racist target is married to another race? their chidren are mixxed, and this is no longer as rare as hens teeth?
most would update the plan…
but most would undertand the working principal and so could update the plan
they cant…
they just do what worked before…
and so you ahve a long list of people making history (falsely creating events)…
in fact two lists..
a list from the past where it worked…
and a list from now where it doesnt work but the cargo cultists keep doing it.
rosa parks…
contrived, orchestrated between government, law, and communist school teachings…
it worked… the new movie does not cover the highlander school, or that this was all orchetrated. they create the illusion that it was spontaneous cause she could not take it any more, and so on.
they orchestrated and created the false history..
today, we cant change it… its might as well be true
hangin a noose on your dorm door in the past and you get away with it..
do it today, and you find out that there are cameras, and all manner of security devices that are catching you!
Kind of reminds you of Aimee Whitchurch, Christel Conklin, Quinn Matney, Aubriana Banks, Sarah Marshak, Tawana Brawley, Crystal Gail Mangum, Kerri Dunn, Leah Miller, Ahmad Saad Nasim, et alia, doesn’t it?
the script is to fake a hate crime
and be the victim and get the reward…
in 1900… no problem
in 1930… no problem
in 1950… no problem
1970… starting to be a problem
1980… getting caught more often
1990… even more
2014… a website devoted to paged and pages of such incidents, videos, tapes, news reel, and more…
when was playbook written?
1930…
ANother thing this mimics… is the way a sociopath will get yhou to doubt your own memory of events by insisting your wrong and not give up!!!!
ie. you didnt see that, dont you remember?
lots of foils like that…
the point is that they rely on the fact they can change your thinking over having to remember lies and work hard….
its their nature…
and we all return to our natures
artfldgr:
In addition, I think something else is going on as well. It’s this. In some ways, they don’t care about the existence of videotapes proving otherwise (although they’d prefer they didn’t exist and would destroy them if they could). They are setting the tone for how to ignore the videotapes’ existence, for the faithful.
Photogenic? I don’t know about that, Neo. Eye of the beholder, I guess.
Liar? I agree.
arfldgr:
I see that, as you were writing and posting your second comment, I was writing and posting my comment. It turns out that—at least as I read them now—we are saying somewhat the same thing.
That might be a first of some sort :-).
Neo’s closing para. sums it up nicely. Somehow, being lied to has not made the LIVs cynical. It is as if they are lied to so much, so often, by so many that the lying becomes truth-telling instead.
For the Democrats, The Narrative has replaced truth. At least truth as we understand the term.
For Marxists, ‘truth’ is not truth as understood in terms of inquiry. Truth is determined by the dominant, controlling narrative in terms of adversary.
For them, truth is not found. Truth is created. When their narrative controls, then their creations are true.
The tipping point for me was when Clinton caved in to party pressure and reversed his support for Bush and the Iraq mission – support that was based on Clinton’s own very recent and freshly relevant presidential experience struggling with Saddam – in order to conform to the Democrats’ false narrative on Bush and the Iraq mission. Clinton has been amply rewarded for his betrayal of his former office for the sake of dishonorable fealty to party.
“Plus, Davis is a Harvard-educated lawyer. Accuracy of language is one thing she already knew a great deal about.” I submit that our President is also a Harvard-educated lawyer, and from him and from Davis, we can conclude that purposeful inaccuracy of language is something Harvard-educated lawyers know a great deal about. This is sad for me to concede, as a lawyer and the daughter of a Harvard-educated lawyer — but my father’s Harvard legal education took place in a different time.
Mrs Whatsit:
Well, it helps to know how to use language accurately before you can purposely use it with subtle inaccuracy. So my guess is that Harvard still teaches them how to use language accurately.
People who kill people are not people; they are murders who should be swinging with the wind from a lamp post near you.
All that needs to be said about Wendy Davis is, “another Democratic liar. Just like Obama.”
Wendy Davis is putting into practice all the lessons taught at Harvard Law. She is both a paradigm and exemplar of those lessons.
Wendy Davis: wrong for Texas, wrong for America, wrong for Humanity.
That bumper sticker, so many on the left were fond of, “Bush Lied People Died” should now read “Obama lies America Dies.”
Davis and Obama like to call themselves “killers”, but it’s only accurate in so far as they like pushing a button and using other people’s money to outsource the job.
Somebody else is always doing the dirty work, the real killing.
If you like your Democrat lie, you can keep your Democrat lie.
What really bothers me, is that it sound more like
2Thess.
2:11 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:
2:12 That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
ErisGuy: “Wendy Davis is putting into practice all the lessons taught at Harvard Law. She is both a paradigm and exemplar of those lessons.”
You know Ted Cruz and Mitt Romney, just off the top of my head, are Harvard Law grads, right?
Law school curriculums in terms of legal scholarship and practice are fairly consistent, if not entirely standard, from law school to law school. I don’t know whether she’s a Harvard Law grad, but you know that Neo is a law grad, right?
My reaction is due to this: I’m not a Harvard Law grad, but I have friends who are and they’re righteous.
Correlation, not causation. I don’t think Davis being a Harvard Law graduate is why she’s a liar.
What percentage of our most famous, verbally-expert con artists, in or out of office, have been Harvard Law grads?
Davis strikes me as a sociopath more than anything else.
“For the Democrats, The Narrative has replaced truth.” (commenter Eric above)
This might be the single most important fact to keep in mind as one surveys the political scene. What actually happened simply does not matter from the point of view of winning elections and ruling the country. The only thing that matters is what large numbers of people *think* happened, e.g. The Narrative. You can’t control the facts, but if you work hard and don’t care about the truth, you can control it.
I had the same thought as Eric about “narrative” versus truth. I’ve been thinking about this point a lot lately: life is not always neatly plotted, yet the Media Age demands exposition-> conflict-> resolution. But I think it’s more than just pounding on the Big Lie until people believe it, or hiding the inconvenient facts, or controlling the mass media so that the overriding message is the one you want people to hear. I think it’s a reaction to godlessness.
(Bear with me, atheists and agnostics. I have no quarrel with you – I just have a thought about human nature.)
In the previous age (that is, all the rest of human time), belief in gods gave the apparent capriciousness of life a purpose and/or an explanation. Humans are pattern-recognizers and storytellers; we strive, consciously or not, to make things make sense. My personal belief is that we’re made this way by (and “in the image of,” as the saying goes) a God who is also a storyteller. YMMV.
But we now live in an age in which it’s not only acceptable to reject gods but in which the more “scientific” you are (at least until you get into the more arcane realms of physics, when a clockmaker God reappears), the more you must be seen or assumed to reject them. But you’re still human; you’re still a storyteller. So you still feel that urge to find patterns and discern meaning.
So if a person’s hardships don’t yield sufficient benefit, the plot demands a mastermind working against him. Hence, conspiracy theories. And by the same token, if a person’s “life story” seems to lead to riches without sufficient rags, then rags must be invented to justify those riches. (That or the person himself is the evil mastermind.)
The Judeo-Christian answer to “Why do bad things happen to good people?” is “‘Where were you when I made the world?'” – in other words, “Because I said so” with a strong undertone of “Sometimes what you want is not part of the plan” – but it’s a lot easier to go Calvinist and believe that the good person must not have been all that good, or to go Hollywood and believe that the good person was necessarily stymied by evil. Either choice would seem to be unscientific and, well, regressive.
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