(Dobbs) Lies, Lies, and More Lies
The future of democracy, the future of the world, depend on us figuring out who's lying, who's not.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Truth is not. A rhetorician might try to twist the definition of the word but at the end of the day, there cannot be two versions of the truth. Not in politics, not in wars.
Take a look at both.
One enduring joke in politics is, “How do you know when a politician is lying? His lips are moving.”
The other is, “It’s unfair that 99% of our politicians make the other 1% look bad.”
Having covered my share of politics in Washington, what’s actually unfair is to paint all politicians with such a broad brush. Many don’t claim an alternate version of the truth. Many don’t lie.
But many do.
That alone is not news. Nor is it new.
Maybe George Washington told the truth to his father about cutting down the cherry tree— if that whole tale isn’t merely a myth— but since then, history records flagrant falsehoods or obvious exaggerations or dishonest denials from presidents through the ages. Including some we all remember. Like Richard Nixon: “I am not a crook.” Or Bill Clinton: “I did not have sex with that woman.” And Donald Trump on the crowd at his inauguration: “I looked out, the field was, it looked like a million, million and a half people.”
No, Mr. Trump, it was nothing even close.
We’ve always looked at the trustfulness of some politicians with an untrusting eye. But the malignancy of their mendacity is mushrooming. As someone recently put it, many politicians have no more than “a casual acquaintance” with the truth.
Analysts have calculated, for example, that the majority of Republican candidates in this year’s 2022 elections still lie about the last election in 2020. You know, the “rigged election.” No less than 345 candidates on next month’s ballots for legislative, statewide, and federal office, despite their interminable failure to produce proof of any kind, have been identified by the Brookings Institution as “perpetuating former President Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.” Thursday’s headline on the political website FiveThirtyEight was, “60 Percent Of Americans Will Have An Election Denier On The Ballot.”
And some will surely win.
Dishonesty has permeated the DNA of the body politic. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon and it must be said, it’s not confined to the GOP. Heaven knows the Democratic Party has been soiled over time by falsehoods and fraud. Neither political party has a hammerlock on deceit. But today, in the cult that praises and parrots the personality of Donald Trump, it has gone beyond what his White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway once defended as “alternative facts.” It has pervaded the party of Lincoln. It has degenerated to the point, in fact, where you could begin to believe there are actually two different versions of the truth. The trouble is, if it’s truth, there is only one version that’s valid.
When it comes to two different versions of truth about a war though, that’s a tougher one. There still can be only one valid version, but in Ukraine, many of the charges each side hurls at the other, about who attacked what, cannot be independently verified. So while it seems very clear to me that Russia is doing a lot of lying about the war, we can only depend on our instincts to decide who’s truthful, who’s not. We aren’t there, we just cannot be sure.
In all the wars I covered in my career, I tried only to report on what I’d seen with my own two eyes, or at the very least, what I’d gotten verified by multiple sources I knew I could trust. But sometimes, where each side is trying to spin stories to its own advantage, there is no unimpeachably trusted eyewitness, no trusted source. So when it comes to conflicting versions of the truth, we’re left with logic. And common sense.
A current case in point: in the brutal battle for the logistically key port city of Kherson, occupied right now by Russian troops, the Kremlin last week accused Ukraine of shelling a ferryboat that was crossing the contested Dnieper River, killing and wounding many onboard. Ukraine insists that’s a lie. A spokeswoman for the armed forces maintained they were Russian shells, adding, “We do not attack civilians and settlements.”
What does logic tell you? What does common sense tell you? Mine tells me, Ukraine would not strike its own citizens, then blame Russia for the bombardment. The cost would simply be too high for the short term prize of the propaganda. But Russia? From what we’ve seen so far, beginning with the fact that it’s Russia that savagely invaded Ukraine and not the other way around, sinking a civilian ferryboat would be grotesquely consistent with the game plan it has played for the past eight months.
On the other hand, maybe someone on the battlefield just made a horrific mistake.
So who’s lying? As Fox News used to crow, “We report. You decide.”
Another dispute: there’s a dam on the same river which creates hydroelectric power and, with a reservoir behind it as big as the Great Salt Lake, serves as an essential source of water. Russia says Ukraine has been attacking the dam to cut off water to the nearby Russian-occupied territory of Crimea. Ukraine says Russia is planning to destroy the dam to let loose billions of gallons of water and inundate Kherson and other areas where hundreds of thousands of people live.
Common sense says, Ukraine won’t trigger a flood that inundates the homes of hundreds of thousands of its own people and tens of thousands of acres of its own land. It also says, from what we’ve already seen, Russia wouldn’t care.
Who’s lying? We can’t know for sure, but logic and common sense sure point the finger toward Russia.
And that’s nothing to say of President Putin’s lies themselves. They are countless. They are ceaseless.
So when he assured his marathon news conference on Thursday, “There’s no sense for us, neither political nor military,” to use a tactical nuclear weapon,” I wouldn’t bet a dime that he won’t fire nukes if his army’s fortunes continue to flounder.
Our world today is full of lies, lies, and more lies. The future of democracy depends on figuring out who’s lying and who’s not. The future of the world does too.
very good
There is truth and there is that which is not true. Putin and trump know that they can get away
with telling tall tails that have no basis in truth and lots of people will believe them. It's their hook.