Lies, Damned Lies, and the Romney-Ryan Speeches

I tuned into the Republican convention last Wednesday evening hoping to catch Paul Ryan's acceptance speech. Newt and Callista Gingrich were at the podium. After taking a few stupid swipes at Obama -- I don't even remember the particulars, given that I was pretty well stunned by what came next -- they brought up welfare reform. Callista praised the bipartisan welfare reform that was enacted by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in 1996. Newt followed her by slamming President Obama for "gutting" -- a violent imagery that has been widely adopted by Republicans in the current campaign -- the work requirements that were a central part of the 1996 welfare reform.

I was unprepared for this. So unprepared, in fact, that I was overcome by a sense of shock. My automatic brain kicked in, and before I knew it I had turned the TV off.

The gutting-of-the-work-requirement canard had so widely and for so long been fact checked and declared to be false that I could not imagine that a former Speaker of the US House of Representative would repeat it before a prime time nationwide TV audience. I guess I must have sub-consciously said to myself, "Man, this guy must think the country is really stupid." And that outrage must have made me reach for my remote -- reflexively, like someone snaping their fingers away from an unexpectedly hot stove top.

As I write this, I can recall in my mind's eye the faces of Callista and Newt, looking straight at the camera ... and lying. (And "lying" implies knowingly telling something untrue, I should add. These are political people; they read the papers; they weighed every word they were going to say on that podium.) I still can feel a chill, of the kind one feels when one looks directly at someone and knows that the other person is lying to them.

And yet, in a way, this ugly episode also shows how quick people are to forgive these politicians. I remembered later that I had known full well what a scumbag New Gingrich was. I had blogged about his scuzzy character before. And still, by the time I saw him last Wednesday on TV, I had forgotten all about it!

Meanwhile, Callista and Newt are not alone. Just as a fish rots from the head down, it is Romney and Ryan who are setting the pace in the lying department. Here are two dissections of their acceptance speeches in Tampa. Romney's performance was something to behold. He spoke as if he was constantly fighting back tears, pained to his core by what Obama was doing to America. But I have been following the current election campaign somewhat closely and I could see Romney piling on the lies one after the other. And he even got the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone just right. After a lifetime of making sales pitch after sales pitch, the master prestidigitator was making the sales pitch of his life. The point was to get the votes of the undecided and women voters, many of whom still think well of Obama. To accomplish this, it was crucial to apply the light touch. The tone was all important. The substance was not important at all.

Callista and Newt send a chill up my spine even now when I conjure up their faces in my mind's eye. But Romney and Ryan are better at faking sincerity. They can tell their lies with with a terrific sense of passion. They are smart and well informed chaps. They know that they are lying when they are lying. But they are able to grit their teeth and just get on with it. They have an incredibly deep sense of contempt for the intelligence and informed-ness of the good folks in flyover country, who do not read The New York Times. And they know that -- thanks to their overwhelming advantage in Super PAC funding -- they are about to start an avalanche of lies on TV screens all across the battleground states that will render the press naysayers comprehensively defenestrated. As I have written before, the tsk-tsk-ing from the media fact checkers will simply not matter in this plutocratic age when money will buy you a permit to lie. Michael Cooper in today's The New York Times seems to have sensed this:

The growing number of misrepresentations appear to reflect a calculation in both parties that shame is overrated, and that no independent arbiters command the stature or the platform to hold the campaigns to account in the increasingly polarized and balkanized media firmament. Any unmasking of the lies or distortions, the thinking goes, rarely seeps into the public consciousness.

(The reference to "both parties" comes from this: "The Obama campaign, for its part, ran a deceptive ad saying that Mitt Romney had “backed a bill that outlaws all abortion, even in case of rape and incest,” although he currently supports exceptions in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at risk." Ideally, the Obama ad should have clarified that Romney has flip-flopped to a new current position. But it is true that Romney has in the past opposed "all abortion, period" and has said, to Mike Huckabee, that he supports a constitutional ammendment, no less, stating that life begins at conception. See this video for the controversial ad and commentary from The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC.)

Finally, on the subject of lies, I saw Dinesh D'Souza's documentary, "2016: Obama's America" this afternoon -- in my local multiplex! More about this atrocity at a later date.