Orson Scott Card on Obama, a lying radical leftist who breaks promises, and his incompetent clowns

Greensboro Rhino Times ^ | September 24, 2009 | Orson Scott Card

[Tolik]

We didn't have political articles by Orson Scott Card for awhile, and here is one with promises of more. For those who don't know who he is:

Orson Scott Card is one of the best living Sci-Fi writers. His Ender's series are enormously popular and translated to many languages. His websites attract attention of readers from all over the world.

Since 9/11 he wrote many political essays. He is a conservative democrat of a Zell Miller type (there are still a few around) who is upset with hijacking of his party by the Left. He considers himself a moderate, which (some disagreements aside) puts him squarely into our camp. His articles are more inline with the FreeRepublic spirit than with his own political website: http://www.ornery.org/index.html  that is heavily populated by American- and other Leftists who are delightfully annoyed by Mr. Card's conservatism. He does not post on that site and its moderated by somebody else.

Links: his articles discussed at FR: http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/orsonscottcard/index  and archived here (it is a must go place for all new to OSC political writing): http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/index.html

His literary, non-political website: http://www.hatrack.com

His fresh articles appear in the Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC: http://greensboro.rhinotimes.com/  (before being posted permanently on his The Ornery American website). Read his books/movies/and everything reviews: http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/ 

His "About" page: http://www.hatrack.com/osc/about.shtml

Check out one of his best essays: Featured on Rush Limbaugh 10/22/08   Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?   October 5, 2008

It was discussed here:

Orson Scott Card: Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights? (Devastating)

Monday, October 20, 2008 1:29:44 PM · by quesney · 108 replies · 9,266+ views

and here:

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

Friday, October 10, 2008 1:42:18 PM · by ventanax5 · 18 replies · 1,705+ views

---

---

People have been asking me why I haven't written a World Watch or a Civilization Watch in nine months.

At first it was because I wanted to give Obama a chance to show us who he is. I even hoped that maybe his pose as a middle-of-the-road bring-us-together candidate was actually true.

Now he's shown us that he's a radical leftist at heart and all his promises – every one of them – were lies. But he's still relatively harmless domestically because he's such an incompetent leader, unable to hold his course or persuade even his followers.

With ObamaCare on the ropes, his mischief is limited to not prosecuting his criminal friends (like the Black Panthers who openly intimidated voters in Philadelphia), appointing idiots to new offices that he invented so they wouldn't have to withstand congressional scrutiny and completely botching American foreign policy.

I never thought I'd live to see the day, but Hillary Clinton is actually looking good as secretary of state. At least she could go to a hellhole of corruption and fanaticism like Nigeria and speak truth to power.

Obama can't even keep a promise to the newly-freed countries of Eastern Europe to protect them from missile attacks.

Nor could he keep his promise to remain committed to victory in Afghanistan – a war we could win, but not if Obama caves in to pressure from the stupidest wing of the Democratic Party.

Obama has now broken promise after promise and told lie after lie. Yet our leftist media give him a pass every time. Meanwhile, I still remember that President Bush was called a liar constantly, even though – and I'm willing to stand by this – he was never found to have told a lie in his entire presidency.

(Remember, a lie is when you knowingly make a false statement, not when you simply turn out to be wrong about something that you believed to be true.)

So I flip back and forth between regarding Obama as the new Warren G. Harding – a man chosen as his party's candidate for president because he looked like a president, and who then governed with such incompetence that the only thing that saved his presidency was getting sick and dying in office – and dreading him as the leader of the fanatical left, a group with no regard whatsoever for fairness, consistency, honesty, promise-keeping or the rule of law.

If the left actually succeeds in achieving their agenda, we can kiss freedom in America good-bye. Fortunately, they are such incompetent clowns that even when they have the presidency and heavy majorities in Congress, they can't pass anything but standard old-fashioned pork barrel bills.

How stupid and incompetent are the fanatical left in America today?

They're so dumb that when they desperately need to change the minds of people who disagree with them about health care, instead of listening to their opponents and compromising with them (which is how actual governing is done), they insult and vilify and slander and misrepresent and impugn the motives of those who disagree with them.

Mr. President and your chums in Congress, here's a clue, since you are clearly without one: You can only build a majority by winning the hearts and minds of the people who disagree with you.

And if you insult those people, your chance of winning them over recedes into the infinite distance.

You'll notice that I have no qualms about insulting the extremists of the left, but that's because there is no way to win them over anyway. They are incapable of learning or even listening; they are contemptuous of logic or evidence; having learned all the things that "smart people" say, they just go on saying them without any sign that they are actually aware of the utter vapidity of their own dogmas.

But I don't have to persuade them, because they are not the majority, though they were able to get nominal control of Congress by lying merrily and getting the media to go along with them. Even now they don't realize how much trouble they're in because the "mainstream" media barely report on their malfeasance.

More and more Americans, however, are getting their news from Fox and the internet; more and more Americans are becoming offended by the contemptuous way Obama and his chums stand there in the dark of night telling us it's daylight and calling us names if we disagree.

So ... why haven't I written a World Watch till now?

Because you already got the message without my help.

However, I do have a few essays up my sleeve, which will see the light of day in weeks to come.

Chances are, however, that I won't say much about the hot-button issues that are already being discussed to death. Contrary as I am, I'm more inclined to turn my laser-like – OK, Eveready flashlight-like – wit on the issues that I think have more to do with our daily lives than with current politics.

Besides, if Obama doesn't face a Congress solidly in control of the Republican Party after the 2010 election (the way Clinton did after 1994), it means that either the Republicans really are the "stupid party," or the American people are grimly determined to keep getting kicked by the same mule.

[Tolik]

Orson Scott Card  - PING  

[please freepmail me if you want or don't want to be pinged to Orson Scott Card political articles]

This article will be posted permanently (eventually) on his The Ornery American website http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/index.html

Links: his articles discussed at FR: http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/orsonscottcard/index and archived here (it is a must go place for all new to OSC political writing): http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/index.html

His fresh articles appear in the Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC: http://greensboro.rhinotimes.com/  (before being posted permanently on his The Ornery American website). Read his books/movies/and everything reviews: http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/ 

His "About" page: http://www.hatrack.com/osc/about.shtml

[dalebert]

agree

[Grampa Dave]

“More and more Americans, however, are getting their news from Fox and the internet; more and more Americans are becoming offended by the contemptuous way Obama and his chums stand there in the dark of night telling us it’s daylight and calling us names if we disagree.”

This fits right in with, Judge Judy’s famous summary of liars: “Don’t pee on my leg and call it rain!”.

[algernonpj]

Personally I’ve always found clowns frightening - they hid their true face.

[Sherman Logan]

(Remember, a lie is when you knowingly make a false statement, not when you simply turn out to be wrong about something that you believed to be true.)

Did some research on this a while back.

Actually, there are two meanings of the word "lie."

The #1 meaning is as Orson says.

Most dictionaries show a secondary meaning of making an untrue statement whether you believe it to be true or not.

[old curmudgeon]

Scott overlooks the fact that so much of our government is now managed by rules imposed by various cabinet secretaries; the EPA being the most obvious.

Therefore, it is possible to turn the US into a Marxist nation by cabinet secretary actions.

In addition to the danger we face from EPA, the FCC, czars like Mile Lloyd and Cass Sunstein come to mind.

And don't blow off the Justice Department. It can do harm far beyond failing to prosecute Black Panthers.

[Yardstick]

*Bump*

[Vigilanteman]

OSC is a national treasure and he hits it out of the park with this essay. My two oldest daughters had the honor of attending one of the half-dozen or so small Appalachian colleges which OSC regularly graces with his presence during their freshman year.

The tuition there was MUCH cheaper than anything in Pennsylvania, but still to dear for me to help them with beyond their freshman year.

They tell me that OSC genuinely loves the kids who make up so much a part of his customer base and that he's just as witty in person as he is on paper.

He is based in North Carolina and regularly visits a half dozen or so tiny no name colleges from Georgia to Virginia to teach a creative writing class, be a guest lecturer or whatever the little college asks. I'm not sure about the arrangements at the other colleges, but the one my kids attended told me that basically all the college does is pay his travel and lodging expenses. Average enrollment of any of the colleges on his circuit is around 1000 students, so everyone knows when he comes. I don't know if he is still doing this, but it is a great way to stay connected with his audience. Few celebs won't make even half the effort.

[Tolik]

I am less sanguine about the dangers of the Left than OSC. Their agenda - IF implemented - is dangerous. What gives me optimism is what I saw at the March on DC on 9-12: the most often shared impression by many people was that its their first time at any political rally ever! It translates into a cliche, overused but very proper at this time: the left woke up a sleeping giant. We are not going to slide into socialism because American people won’t let it happen. So, no despair, but stay alert!

[griswold3]

The villianous ‘Shadow Government’?
This ‘crisis’ has been a long time coming. The chaos being created now is to keep those interested off balance.

The ‘progressives’ underestimate the power of the ‘individual’.

[sr4402]

Good to see Orson Back. His wry wit is superb:

"Besides, if Obama doesn't face a Congress solidly in control of the Republican Party after the 2010 election (the way Clinton did after 1994), it means that either the Republicans really are the "stupid party," or the American people are grimly determined to keep getting kicked by the same mule.

[MNJohnnie]

Great article

[The_Reader_David]

Most dictionaries show a secondary meaning of making an untrue statement whether you believe it to be true or not.

In that case most dictionaries should be burned or deleted using military-grade deletion software as tools in defense of the language against its politicized corruption and the beggaring of sense, and only the few honest dictionaries left preserved.

Haven't you notice that the left has a consistent method of corrupting thought by corrupting the language? (Just as Orwell predicted totalitarian movements would have.) Neologisms (like 'cisgendered' or 'homophobic') are bad enough, but the most corrosive tactic is to take a word with strong moral content (like lie or racist) and give it a new, broader definition while leaving the emotional charge of the definition understood by speakers of standard English unchanged.

In the feverswamps of the academic left, "racist" has been redefined in such a way that all white folk are involuntarily racists simply by being white. Redefining "lie" to include honest mistakes is an assault on sense and morality.

"Lie" means a knowingly told untruth, and "to lie" means to knowingly speak or write an untruth. Period.

[3catsanadog]

Most dictionaries show a secondary meaning of making an untrue statement whether you believe it to be true or not.

And I wouldn't be surprised if this secondary meaning was added during the Bush Administration.

[The_Reader_David]

Not enough coffee. The words “as tools” should be deleted from my previous post—they survived form an earlier version that has the phrase “as tools in the left’s corruption of language”.

I shouldn’t post more than a few sentences when sleepy.

[3catsanadog]

Justice Department will investigate the CIA, but not the Black Panthers or Acorn. What’s that say about where their intentions for this country are?

[TChris]

Most dictionaries show a secondary meaning of making an untrue statement whether you believe it to be true or not.

I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one.

Please give actual references and quotes from some of these dictionaries.

The definitive aspect of the word "lie" is that it is intentional deception.

[astyanax]

Most dictionaries show a secondary meaning of making an untrue statement whether you believe it to be true or not.
Personally, I find that absolutely ridiculous.
There is a huge distinction between being mistaken and lying.

[Valpal1]

Glad to see that OSC is on the ramparts. It’s going to take everyone to shout down the nutroots on the left and regain control of this country.

We must not think that others will step up and do it better than we can. We must all fight.

[rockrr]

You know, it should surprise me. But we live in Post-Reason America and anything is (im)possible.

The curious aspect of “a lie is a lie is a lie” is that in practice the only ones likely to avail themselves of this definition would be the relativistic left. If GW was to have said “The Sun spins around the Earth” I would know he spoke an untruth but I would call him ignorant unless I knew for a certitude that he was aware that it is the other way around.

We all know the “lies” attributed to GW and I agree with OSC that they weren’t lies at all even if a few of the circumstances turned out different than GW’s declarations.

A lie only becomes a lie with the addition of willfulness...

[John Valentine]

Most dictionaries show a secondary meaning of making an untrue statement whether you believe it to be true or not.

The dictionaries must have added that definition after the leftists debased the language. Without that key distinction between witting and unwitting we are left without a word to speak when an actual lie needs to be identified.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[John Valentine]

Absolutely. A lie is an untrue statement uttered with the INTENTION to deceive.

Intentionality is, was, and always will be the key ingredient of a lie, dictionaries be damned.

[Aggie Mama]

Which dictionaries did you use? The two definitions that I found were 1: to lay in a horizontal position 2: to intentionally make a false statement.

[Billthedrill]

LOL! Dang, Orson, don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel.

Mr. President and your chums in Congress, here's a clue, since you are clearly without one: You can only build a majority by winning the hearts and minds of the people who disagree with you.

I'm constantly surprised by the number of progressives who seem to think that once political ground is won, it's for all time; that there is no backflow to historical "progress," and that a majority of one vote is sufficient to guarantee the most radical wing everything their collective - it would be collective, wouldn't it? - heart desires.

Welcome to the world of practical politics. Old-line liberals such as Hubert Humphrey understood it perfectly well. Compromise is not a moral failing, it's the principal tool of running a government. You get your opponent to vote for your A by offering him his B. But significantly, you often have to do the same with your allies.

Not so for the radical. For him politics is war to the knife and the only acceptable outcome crushing one's foes utterly and dictating the terms of surrender. That's one reason radicals seldom linger long in majority. They're fine in minority when all that is necessary is strident insistence aimed at someone who actually will compromise; they're not so good in majority when they are called upon to do so and find they cannot, or, in the case of the "public option" in the health care bills, will not.

It is a little amusing - it would be more amusing were real people not getting hurt - to watch 0bama try to morph from the role of community activist - i.e. radical - to the helmsman behind compromise. He is proving crashingly bad at it and gets worse every time he chooses celebrity over accomplishment, but it's all he knows how to do. It's one reason political apprenticeship is not a bad idea. He skipped his, and everyone's paying, including his own party.

[Sherman Logan]

Note #3.

–noun 1. a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood.
2. something intended or serving to convey a false impression; imposture: His flashy car was a lie that deceived no one.
3. an inaccurate or false statement.
4. the charge or accusation of lying: He flung the lie back at his accusers.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/lie

[Humbug]

Most dictionaries show a secondary meaning of making an untrue statement whether you believe it to be true or not.

I would disagree with most modern dictionaries then. The 1828 Webster includes this in its definition of lie:

It is willful deceit that makes a lie.

And it is that "willful deceit" that makes a man a liar. Making an innocent mistake, getting one's facts tangled up due to faulty memory or faulty input, does not make one a liar. To include this alternate definition waters down the word and a word like "lie" should always be forceful or else it loses the impact it needs to have. When someone innocently utters an untrue statement you say that person is wrong, mistaken, that what he's saying is false. You don't (or shouldn't) say a person is lying unless you know for certain there is intentional deception.

[kevao]

3. an inaccurate or false statement.

LOL. So anyone who has ever written an inaccurate statement on a test is a liar.

Now I have to go look up a lot of my old college profs; I have a lot of apologizing to do.

[Sherman Logan]

I should have said that “some” dictionaries show this meaning, not “most” dictionaries.

I disagree with this definition, BTW. As you say it is utterly ridiculous.

I first ran across this based on a discussion with some liberals who claimed that Bush had lied because it turned out there weren’t any WMDs in Iraq. They were disinterested in whether Bush sincerely believed what he said. I researched it and found some dictionaries did indeed show this definition.

[pillut48]

"Ummmm!!! ORSON SCOTT CARD WISHES OBAMA WOULD GET SICK AND DIE IN OFFICE! HATE SPEECH! RACIST!!!! RUN TO AMAZON AND WRITE REALLY NASTY REVIEWS ABOUT HIS BOOKS!!! BOYCOTT BARNES AND NOBLE AND BORDERS UNTIL THEY REMOVE ALL HIS BOOKS OFF THE SHELVES FOR HATING OBAMA!!!!YADA YADA YADA!!!"

/stoopid liberal using waaaaaay overused meme off

[Cicero]

I’m a long-time Orson Scott Card fan. Have read almost all of his SF books. He’s a very perceptive writer about what you might call civilizations—their rise and fall, their sometime political stupidity and greed, and the difference that can be made by the appearance of heroes on the scene.

[Tolik]

Good points.

But after reading what you address to the Left, I can’t help but reflect that we are guilty of many same sins: “we” means freepers in the in-fighting when people get so angry with each other while insisting on uncompromising positions. Just see the resent Levin/Beck threads when both alternatively thrown under the bus. While I agree and disagree with both of them on good number of points, I think we need both of them, and Rush, and Sean, and Prager, and Bill Bennet, and Savage, and Krauthammer, and Coulter, and Newt, and Palin, and more and more - all quite different and all on our side of the binary divide.

[Tolik]

wow, that is a very good and short! summary. With your permission, I’ll borrow it when need to describe OSC to a novice.

[The_Reader_David]

Note also, that the redefinition of words is only applied to the discomfiture of political opponents: if “lie” really is taken to mean making a false statement, whether willfully or not, why the offense at Congressman Wilson’s “You lie!”?

If he was (according to the redefinition created to justify the chant “Bush lied! People died!”) merely asserting that the President’s statement was false (which it was, as the bill before Wilson’s chamber at that time would have covered illegal aliens), the umbrage taken was well out of proportion to what a truthful heckle should have evinced. Offense was taken because the word “lie” was understood to be an accusation of willful deception. (And, maybe, just maybe, given his incompetence in other areas, Obama wasn’t lying, but was actually unaware that the House had defeated amendments specifically aimed at keeping illegal aliens from being covered. Perhaps, when an aide came to tell him, Obama was practicing his Mussolini poses in the mirror, and told him “not now”, and the opportunity didn’t arise again.)

[Humbug]

The liberals saying Bush lied and pointing to some dubious definition of “lie” are just playing word games, of course. They know good and well when you say someone lied that everyone takes it mean that you are saying that someone was being intentionally deceptive.

[Cicero]

Besides which, he was factually correct. Saddam Hussein WAS involved with the 9/11 bombing, although George Tenet managed to dismiss the reports of the meeting in Prague. And Saddam DID have WMDs. He used chemical weapons against his own people, and he bought yellowcake from southern Africa.

Moreover, they found a large store of yellowcake, which was removed to the U.S. toward the end of Bush’s second term. Bush kept that secret until after the removal, being more concerned about security than political reputation (perhaps foolishly, since political reputation had a negative effect on the war effort). And of course the press never really publicized it, or pointed out that it vindicated Bush.

[LexBaird]

–noun

3. an inaccurate or false statement.

It is the false statement that is a lie in this definition (noun), not the action of the person stating it (verb).

"Thousands of students each year uncritically repeat the lies they have learned about climate change."

[nina0113]

"Lie" means a knowingly told untruth, and "to lie" means to knowingly speak or write an untruth. Period.

Having grown up in Washington, I'm willing to argue that deliberately deceiving someone, even if you do it without speaking a single untrue word, is also lying.

[mvpel]

I wonder if Card has finally realized the rotten core of the Democrat party and changed his registration.

[Tolik]

Yes.

And to add to this: Everybody thought that Saddam had WMDs and even more specifically: that he was well under way to get nukes. There were specific preparations before the invasion against chemical weapons. Saddam received plenty of opportunities to come clean (as Libya did just a short time later). He refused. It was in his benefit, as he thought, for everybody to think that he does have WMDs. Reason? A deterrence factor. If everybody afraid that you have them, it does not matter if you really have them: phantom WMDs provide the same deterrence. Unfortunately for him, his bluff was called.

If his bluff was not called, he would, eventually, get them.

Another aspect did not play in the left-stream-media: fertilizer plants of dual capabilities, that can also be quickly reconfigured to produce chemical weapons. Even when they are in the civilian configuration, one must ask: why spend so much more money on making them dual-purpose ready if you have no intention producing chemical weapons?

[Constitutionalist Conservative]

My nomination for “Most Excellent Rant of the Week”.

[I_be_tc]

Great article. Thanks!

TC

[RipSawyer]

I resent the comments comparing Obama and Warren G. Harding. In reality Harding towers over Obama. Obama would have to climb a long ladder to tie Harding’s shoes.

[Nowhere Man]

Bookmark Bump

[RipSawyer]

This fits right in with, Judge Judy’s famous summary of liars: “Don’t pee on my leg and call it rain!”.
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

I am 65 and I have been hearing some variant of that for as long as i can remember.

[RipSawyer]

“Having grown up in Washington, I’m willing to argue that deliberately deceiving someone, even if you do it without speaking a single untrue word, is also lying.”
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Actually that is possibly the MOST despicable form of lying.
I would say that indeed the worst liars are those who can never be caught in a lie as it is usually defined but they use words in a way that they know full well will leave the hearer believing the opposite of the truth.

The sort of thing I mean goes like this, “Joe took my car yesterday and didn’t come back for three hours. I had no way to go anywhere, I sure was lucky that I didn’t need it during that time”. The statement is perfectly true but what is left out is that the speaker gave Joe his car keys and asked him to please have the oil changed for him and told Joe that there was no need to hurry. The listener is left to believe that Joe is an inconsiderate bastard who borrowed the car without permission or kept it far longer than he was supposed to or both when in fact Joe was doing a favor. The story I made up on the spur of the moment but I have actually seen far worse examples than that.

[OneWingedShark]

>If GW was to have said “The Sun spins around the Earth” I would know he spoke an untruth but I would call him ignorant unless I knew for a certitude that he was aware that it is the other way around.

Funny thing that; it would be an absolutely-true statement if the coordinate-system were fixed-with-respect-to-Earth (that is a relative positioning system).

[nina0113]

I would say that indeed the worst liars are those who can never be caught in a lie as it is usually defined but they use words in a way that they know full well will leave the hearer believing the opposite of the truth.

And then they look right at you with wide-eyed injured innocence - "I told you the TRUTH - what's the problem?"

GRRR.

[Grampa Dave]

“I am 65 and I have been hearing some variant of that for as long as i can remember.”

My grand dad had a variant that he only used around adult males. He loved to use it with two of his SIL’s, who were FDR loving liberals. One of these uncles was bald headed, and he would turn scarlet red starting at the top of his head with the scarlet red running down his face, ears and neck into his shirtline when my grand dad’s variant was verbalize in a loud and clear voice.