Chris Floyd: The Powerful Odor of Mendacity: From Wiretaps to War

[babylonsister]

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/1632/81/

The Powerful Odor of Mendacity: From Wiretaps to War
Tuesday, 22 May 2007
by Chris Floyd


Glenn Greenwald catches Bush's "intelligence czar," Mike McConnell, in howlingly flagrant lies in a Washington Post op-ed about the need to "update" the secret FISA court's powers over governm ent surveillance. Greenwald does a masterful job of demolition – but in the end, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. All he does is go back to Bush's own public statements after the FISA system was, er, updated in October 2001, and show how the Dear Leader himself contradicts every statement McConnell makes in his new piece. Greenwald writes with his usual passion and flair; but it's a job that any first-year journalism student could have done – and a job that Post editorial honcho Fred Hiatt should have done. For McConnell was not simply voicing opinions, or giving his interpretation of events; he was stating as fact things that were demonstrably false – falsehoods that could have been detected through a quick check of the Post's own files. It is precisely as if Hiatt gave editorial space to someone claiming that Saddam Hussein had ordered the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Well, the strange political proclivities of Mr. Hiatt are well known, and too banal to merit any serious attention. The man treats anything out of the mouths of the powerful as holy – and uneditable – writ, although it's true that he also publishes the occasional "dissenting" piece. After all, Post readers like to flatter themselves that they are big-picture people, seeing "all sides" of an issue and making their weighty judgments accordingly. They like to spice up the unrelenting flood of servile gruel that Hiatt dishes out with a bit of contrarian horseradish now and then.

What is most important about the McConnell piece – as Greenwald notes – is that it underscores, yet again, that the Bush Faction tells knowing lies in pushing its agenda, and always has. It's not a question of "spin," of "putting the best face on things," or being "clearer than truth," in Dean Acheson's sinister Cold War phrase – gilding the lily, exaggerating for effect. Nor, conversely, is it a case of self-deception, of "true believers" unable to take off their blinders, of "idealists" unwilling to bend their dreams to mucky reality, or even of fourth-rate dullards too stupid to see the filth and ruin caused by their own cretinous policies. They are not just spinning, they are not deceiving themselves, they are not too stupid to know what's going on.

They are lying – lying deliberately – lying brazenly and cynically, as in McConnell's case. They are lying because their causes are evil and cannot be spoken of openly: aggressive war for loot and domination; the callous rape and despoiling of their own nation for the profit and power of their wealthy cronies; the construction of a global gulag of secret prisons, eternal captives, carefully refined and officially approved torture; the deliberate, systematic destruction of the Constitutional system of government in favor of arbitrary, militarized tyranny; the deliberate, systematic sowing of division and rancor and hatred and fear among the people, to keep them disunited, weak, scattered, unable to resist the depredations of a small, criminal elite. If these be your gods, then of course you must lie to do them service.



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[tom_paine]

1. Floyd knows the score

Totalitarianism: 152
Loyal Americans: 3

The Loyal American Team has been losing since we allowed the Totalitarians to steal the nation in 2000.