“We’re putting conundrums on top of hypotheticals on top of conjecture here. We take it all very seriously, but I think we’re having the same conversation seven different ways, respectfully, and ignoring all the other things that the president, the vice-president, and the national security adviser are doing together,” Kellyanne Conway said on February 13 to MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki. At issue was the phone chatter between Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and whether they talked about sanction relief in the late days of the Obama administration, but really Conway could have been talking about any of the things she goes on television to talk about because she was using her three favorite rhetorical tactics. First, she casts doubt on the verifiable reality of the question at hand, painting the attempt to get at the truth as a Sisyphean task; then paints herself as the polite and respectful one, implying that her interlocutor is the one violating codes of civility; and finally claiming that the reporter is ignoring the day’s real events of substance, in this case the president’s meetings with Shinzo Abe and Justin Trudeau as well as phone calls with heads of state from South Africa to Nigeria. In the end, the administration is always the victim along with the hardworking disenfranchised American families who are being denied heraldry of its good works on their behalf. Except, by the end of the day, Flynn had resigned.
It would be exciting to be able to trace a lineage for the language of the Trump administration from the modernists through deconstruction’s destabilizing of the text, but the truth is, Conway & Co. engage so much in the simple act of lying that there are simpler models at hand, like Jonathan Swift’s “The Art of Political Lying” or Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man. As the administration grinds into its second month, Trump’s flacks have made increasing use of a variation of Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to”: “I can’t speak to that.” Or, as I like to translate it, “I haven’t prepared any lies to respond to that question.” The irony of Flynn’s termination is that he was fired for lying while working in a house full of liars. Among Swift’s requirements of a good political liar are that “he ought to have but a short memory,” that he be ready and willing to swear to “both sides of a contradiction,” and that he never consider “whether any proposition were true or false, but whether it were convenient for the present minute or company to affirm or deny it.” The listener, faced with such a liar, is best served by abandoning any effort at verification or interpretation or sorting the true from the false: “[T]he only remedy is to suppose that you have heard some inarticulate sounds, without any meaning at all.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t work on Twitter.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/how-kellyanne-conway-and-sean-spicer-get-away-with-lying.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
