If You Lie, They Will Come
By Paul Walfield
Jun 3, 2003, 00:20
Anyone paying attention to the Left’s tirades over the past few months has had to notice that as soon as one of them gets audacious enough to shout a lie loud enough, the rest, like lemmings, come running in, start a bandwagon, and the rest of the liberal elite are soon creating gospel out of bold-faced lies. No doubt hoping, that what they lack in veracity, they will make up in volume.
You can start looking at anytime after September 11th. Whether it is some nonsense about President’s Bush’s judicial nominations or the Left’s favorite, “Bush’s tax cut for the rich,” it doesn’t matter that they are lies; the Left speaks with one voice, the voice of lies.
Everyone remembers these: America was going to create a firestorm of terrorist acts if we went into Iraq. It wasn’t true, it never happened, but no one who professed that nonsense has admitted anything. Then, America was bogged down outside of Baghdad, the supplies were too thin, America woefully underestimated the ferocity of the Iraqi defenses, just more Leftists lies and no signs anyone who pushed that malarkey is about to admit they made it all up.
When the major fighting in Iraq ended, America is once again accused of underestimating the complexity of “occupation.” America is even accused of “negligence” or “vandalism” because America did not protect museum pieces that later turned out to have been actually stolen ahead of time by the museum staff itself. No one on the Left has apologized for the false accusations.
In spite of the fact that the Left has time and again been caught lying in the most absurd ways, the Left just doesn’t quit. In fact, they step up the attacks.
On May 30, 2003. Eric Alterman’s “Altercation" column on MSNBC.com perpetuated another whopper. This time it was the Bush Administration fibbing about why America went to war with Iraq. It seems Vanity Fair interviewed the Deputy Secretary of State and instead of printing his actual words, abbreviated his quote to make it appear that the Bush Administration, “for bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue – weapons of mass destruction – because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”
What was left out of the Deputy Defense Secretary’s “quote” was the following, “there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people.” To which he added, “The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy, even though I think everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around, that we've arrested that al Qaeda guy in Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke about in his UN presentation.”
Just as Leftist “journalist” Maureen Dowd had done a week earlier for the New York Times when she abbreviated President Bush’s quotation to make it sound like he claimed al-Qaeda had been defeated and was no longer a problem, so did Vanity Fair do the same with the Deputy Secretary of Defense. Only this time, it was about the Bush Administration putting one over on the American public. And just as the Left did with the Dowd lie, the Left picked up on the Vanity Fair lie. This time however, the Administration actually printed a refutation of the Vanity Fair article. The Administration explained how Vanity Fair took the words out of context and abbreviated the quotation to say something quite different than was actually said.
However, like is always the case with the liberals as of late, the Left ignores the truth and just keeps perpetuating the lie. Though, CNN did pick up the rebuttal to the Vanity Fair deception and did run an article explaining how the “Pentagon challenges Vanity Fair report,” in an article on May 30, 2003.
Paul Krugman, in an article for the New York Times on May 30, 2003, wrote, “the deputy defense secretary, recently told Vanity Fair that the decision to emphasize W.M.D.'s had been taken for ‘bureaucratic reasons . . . because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.’” Mr. Krugman also explained that the toppling of the Saddam statutes and the rescuing of Private Jessica Lynch, “seem to have been improved by editing.” Krugman goes on to explain that the real reason for America going to war with Iraq was for personal reasons. President Bush felt slighted by Saddam Hussein so he sent in the Marines, Air Force, Navy and Infantry to quell his sense of anger at being “mocked” by Saddam. Mr. Krugman quotes the Financial Times for that revelation. No one in the know is quoted accurately; just unnamed sources in unknown positions within and out of government are used to further the Lefts agenda.
From all indications, the Left will not stop their lies and vile innuendos. America has changed over the years, where we once prided ourselves on individuality and accountability for our actions; such is no longer the case. There no longer is any fear in the Left that anything they say or do will be held up to the light of day. Because even if it is, they simply move on to the next story, the next pack of lies.
While it is true that the New York Times removed one blatant abuser of the 1st amendment from its staff, and lost another because of self-indignation, the other blatant purveyors of fabricated reality continue to thrive and go on unabated.
<font size=5>Let’s all hope that the pendulum swings back towards integrity and truthfulness in the press, and more importantly in what we as Americans expect from the news media.<font size=3>
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Paul Walfield is a freelance writer and an attorney and counselor at law with an undergraduate degree in Psychology and post-graduate study in behavioral and analytical psychology. He resided for a number of years in the small town of Houlton, Maine and is now practicing law and writing about current events. Paul can be contacted at paul.walfield@cox.net
©2003 Paul Walfield All Rights Reserved
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