Long Live Lying!

As many recall, one of the great fascist slogans was “Long Live Death!” Hereabouts I am proposing a new slogan for our politics – “Long Live Lying!” Lying is so endemic to our society that we are inured to it. On the level of the pathetic we have the recent spectacle of the Governor of New Jersey installing his lover as director of Homeland Security in that state (and now being sued by him) as a “gay rights” issue. Talk about “left in form but right in essence.” It would almost be a farce, if there weren’t innocent parties involved, like the governor’s two-year old daughter.

But on the more serious level, we have the continued absence of coverage of the Kerry/Cambodia affair in that great purveyor of “truth” The New York Times. Now perhaps they are engaged in a serious study of this issue, which will arrive as (conveniently) late as their analysis of the UN Oil-for-Food Program. Or perhaps they don’t think this lie is important, a mere misstatement, as the saying goes. Robert Pollock in the WSJ gives lie to that lie:

In 1986 Mr. Kerry argued on the Senate floor against U.S. support for the Nicaraguan contras, again citing the 1968 Christmas in Cambodia and “the president of the United States telling the American people I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared–seared–in me.” In a 1992 interview with the Associated Press the story came back: “By Christmas 1968, part of Kerry’s patrol extended across the border of South Vietnam into Cambodia.”

Now, trying to be honest myself, I was opposed to the Contras in those days too, though I would like to think I wouldn’t have lied on the Senate floor to make my point. Being for the Sandinistas then was cool. Omar Cabezas, their Minister of Culture and an author, a near Che-like figure, was an overnight guest in my house. Boy, did I dine out on that one! Years later I… and others… became curiously silent when it turned out the Sandinistas weren’t all they were cracked up to be. I’ll be honest about it now. The Contras weren’t the greatest guys themselves, but neither were the Sandinistas, two peas in a corrupt pod. I made a mistake. But I didn’t lie of the Senate floor. [Big deal. You weren’t a Senator.–ed. Hey, that’s a technicality.] Of course the silence by Senator Kerry and the NYT these days tells us all we need to know about their devotion to the truth.

UPDATE: The “Band of Brothers” evidently didn’t last quite as long as the Rolling Stones… or even the Beatles. How about a week? [Is that lying?–ed. Nah, exaggeration…]