Lying About Lying
By Gary Larson
CNSNews.com Commentary
August 11, 2003
"But it is necessary. . . to be a great feigner and dissembler; men are so simple, and so ready to obey present necessities, that one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived." -- Niccolo Machiavelli, 'The Prince,' 1537
Why do readers get upset about what's up in Iraq? Easy. Faulty news reports to start with, then consider also truth-shredding op-eds and editorials. One of the latter is found in the Minneapolis (MN) Star Tribune on July 20. It fits nearly all the criteria of doctrinaire liberal spin.
Facts are twisted, or just omitted. On its face, the editorial--ironically titled "Why matters"--holds out President Bush to be a warmonger, first lying to go to war, now lying to protect his rear.
"Lie" is the paper's operative word, brazenly equating the 43rd president with Presidents Nixon and Clinton. Such mischief recalls George Orwell about writers defending 1930's Fascism: "One need not swallow such absurdities...but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language."
Facts give way to spin slight and tall in "Why Matters." (Indeed!) Example of slight: After conceding Saddam is a real bad guy, editors tell us he murdered "tens of thousands of Iraqis and buried them in mass graves."
Only tens of thousands?
Try hundreds. Even the UN puts the ghastly toll at over 300,000. Not included are Iranian and Kuwaiti dead in two wars. Sure, "tens" times "X" adds up to hundreds. Why not say so? Why no mention of massive torture and rape? Shading grim reality? Okay, so I'm being picky-picky here.
More importantly, Washington Post 's Walter Pincus is quoted hinting that Iraq's well-documented pre-war uranium buying sprees didn't happen. Of Saddam's nuclear plans he says, "almost [emphasis added] all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by UN weapons inspectors" under the duplicitous Mr. Blix.
But even a suitcase-size "dirty bomb" wipes out a small city. Sorry, Mr. Pincus, "almost" doesn't cut it. Nice try, but not good enough, except maybe for antiwar antiBush pundits out to "disprove" dark realities.
"Evidence" is the buzzword in Dems' smears and allegations; it has the ring of courthouse talk, not war. God knows, I don't, why ardent liberals give evil-doers the benefit of doubts after 9/11. As if a lawyerly dream team, parsing liberals now wage war against an administration. What happened to the loyal opposition?
Sad part is, anything goes with the zealous "Bush-lied' mob. In a potential deadly game of one-upsmanship, John Ashcroft as prosecutor is the liberals' Enemy. Creating reasonable doubt is their objective, in OJ style. If the facts don't support your argument, make 'em up, or attack credibility. Lawyers do it all the time.
"Facts do not cease to exist," Aldous Huxley famously wrote, "because they are ignored." Most Americans are savvy now to spin, to omissions, to media bias. Thus folks turn to the Internet, to "blogs," to cable news. Is it any wonder?
One fact media largely ignore: Iraq did buy tons of "yellowcake" (uranium ore) from Niger, and possibly others, in the late '80s. Even the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirms that. In the late '90s, an Iraqi trade mission to Niger sought more, says a now-reticent IAEA. Are we to believe Saddam sought uranium for nuclear power plants to help his victims--er, his own people?
Still, media recite the liberals' con game, much ado about "yellowcake." Democrats and their media allies allege "faulty intelligence." They persist in echoing the fatuous charge that 16 "infamous" words in a State of the Union speech constitute "a lie." But that itself is a lie. The words were true then, and still are, notwithstanding all the red herrings and warlock hunts.
The editorial in question dismisses "evidence" in the style of a pretentious lawyer:
"There was no evidence of Scud missiles. There was no evidence that Iraq had reconstructed old nuclear weapons facilities. There was no evidence of links to terrorist groups. There was no evidence of mobile biological and chemical labs . . . ." -- from "Why Matters," July 20, 2003
Such a broad deconstruction zone, where to start?
*Scud missiles were found, hastily dissembled. Coalition troops pursue more, buried just like Iraqi jet fighters. Illicit missiles with ranges outside sanction limits--say, targeting Tel Aviv?--were smashed. Two got shot down by our Patriot missiles en route to targets in Kuwait. These are plain facts, folks.
*Plans for Iraqi's nuclear program are still being unearthed. Some literally, from under rose bushes in a nuclear scientist's Baghdad backyard. More to come. Same for well-hidden (buried?) WMDs.
*Terrorist training camps in northern Iraq blasted away. (Bye-bye, training 9/11 wannabes.) Terrorists fighting alongside Saddam's die-hards. Al-Queda emissary in official Baghdad. Hijacker of the Achille Lauro arrested there. Saddam's plea for a jihad to kill all Americans. Payments of $25,000 to families of Palestinian terrorists. Bombing the Jordanian embassy. The hits just keep on coming. What, no links to terror?
*Finally, no deadly labs? It's early. Stuff is buried. And what did our troops find looted -- two 18-wheel mobile fertilizer factories? Com' on. What killed over 5,000 Kurds in Halabja after airborne bursts of something chemical? Perhaps liberals so "full of passionate intensity," as poet W.B. Yeats put it, cannot admit to realities.
More editorial deceit: "Bush never said to them [that's us Americans]: We must invade Iraq to free the Iraqi people. The costs could be high. . ." He did. Loudly. Repeatedly. So did Cheney, Powell and Rice, et al . Was the editorial team snoozing? Ideologically deaf? If it knew, was this just more intellectual dishonesty? |
