MOTUS A.D.: Inconvenient truths, Half-truths, Lies and Damn Lies

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Inconvenient truths, Half-truths, Lies and Damn Lies

"In wartime, truth is so precious, she should be attended by a bodyguard of lies." - Churchill to Stalin at Yalta.

You may recall from back in the day of the Bubba bimbo eruptions that “everyone lies about sex.” The efficacy of that defense started a new trend in government relations (no pun intended). Now everybody lies about everything.

The Attorney General lies:

Washington ain’t what it used to be: The quality of lies is in steep decline.

Former Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska once damned fellow Democrat Bill Clinton with faint praise by saying he was “an uncommonly good liar.” Now we have Eric Holder.

Despite lots of practice, the attorney general remains an amateur with whoppers. His claim to Congress that he never heard of the Justice Department’s “potential prosecution” of a journalist for reporting classified material wasn’t just misleading — it was provably false.

the Director of National Security parses his lies:

“I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying ‘no,’” Clapper told NBC News on Sunday.

On Sunday, Clapper elaborated: “This has to do with of course somewhat of a semantic, perhaps some would say too cute by half. But it is—there are honest differences on the semantics of what—when someone says ‘collection’ to me, that has a specific meaning, which may have a different meaning to him.”

Translation: It depends on what the meaning of “is” is.

The Press Secretary is a full time “paid liar.”

The former Secretary of State is a seasoned liar:

Despite then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's denials that pleadings from Ambassador Chris Stevens, killed in the terrorist attack, never reached her desk, the interim Benghazi report concludes that:

"Reductions of security levels prior to the attacks in Benghazi were approved at the highest levels of the State Department, up to and including Secretary Clinton. This fact contradicts her testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on January 23, 2013."

The former US Ambassador to the UN lied to throw off the dogs:

Susan Rice, a spectacular fivefold liar as US Ambassador to the UN, has now been rewarded by the president to be National Security Advisor, for her laying down the scent to divert the beagles and hounds in hot pursuit of the truth about Benghazi.

And of course some people think that if you throw in lies of omission, half-truths and obfuscation that even Big Guy has been forced into lying to us. Constantly.

We’ve been advised that “al Qaeda is in retreat.” We’ve met the “bodyguard of lies.” The only questions remaining are: 1) against whom, precisely, is this war being waged?

“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”