I’ve spent five years fulminating every day about Bush’s lies and incompetence and damage to this country. It’s easy to see (if you’re not part of the cult like my father) that Bush has a dull mind. But his handlers and speechwriters sometimes are amazingly good at propaganda.
Listening to NPR last night, I was struck by one Bush sentence that was played in a sound-bite. This was something Bush said Monday at Kansas State University, where he is taking the audacious approach of defending his policy of extrastatutory domestic wiretapping as a good thing that makes him better than Democrats.
He said this, adamantly and defiantly (I don’t have a transcript, but this is very close to an exact quotation): “The federal courts have upheld the right of the president to conduct foreign intelligence operations against our enemies!”
That sentence is a gem of misdirection, a masterpiece of propaganda. The sentence itself, taken out of context, is literally true! In context, however, it encapsulates at least three major lies. Count the lies! How many lies can you see in that one sentence?
<answer below>
Well, there are at least three:
- Yes, it is true that federal courts have made such rulings. But they were all prior to the enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. So they are no longer the controlling law!
- Yes, they permitted the president to conduct foreign surveillance. But we’re complaining about domestic surveillance!
- Yes, of course even a diehard leftie would like the president to be able to monitor “our enemies.” But we’re complaining about surveillance of us!
Especially after listening to me fulminate about Bush and Republicans for the last five years, my wife has become rather astute at reading between the lines and seeing past the piffle on television. However, last night I asked her if she could see anything wrong with that sentence (presented with no commentary), and it sailed right over her head. (Of course, she has been suffering from stomach flu, so she gets extra credit.)
I was thinking strongly, however: I bet the compressed lies in a sentence like that sail over the heads of the great majority of the population.
I don’t think you can “debate” with someone who is systematically spewing sophisticated lies like that. I don’t think you can “discuss” that kind of perspective in the media’s false-equivalence atmosphere. I think you have to use clear language: “That’s a lie. Here’s why. That’s a lie. Here’s why. That’s a lie. Here’s why.”
John Kerry has never been able to do it. Al Gore darn sure did this last week.