Posted on 08/10/2002 5:29:09 AM PDT by PatD
August 9, 2002
Adolf Hitler is credited with being history's greatest exponent of the Big Lie. While I wouldn't want to take anything away from Hitler in this area, we must concede that some of the current practitioners are both skillful and innovative. However, they might not be skillful and innovative enough.
Hitler's lying was notable mostly for its boldness: the bigger the falsehood, he claimed, the more easily he could sell it to the German people. In accordance with that premise, Hitler never tried to finesse his audience or work on it with subtlety. He clubbed it over the head with the most outrageous deceits he could concoct. The Jews are responsible for all our ills! The world is against us out of envy, because we are the Master Race! Once we have sufficient lebensraum, Germany will create a paradise on Earth!
America's present-day political liars aren't quite that bold. Of course, it's not chic to blame all your troubles on a scapegoat-group any more, unless you're Leonard Jeffries or Louis Farrakhan. Still, I don't know of anyone who makes claims as grandiose as Hitler's were.
Take Al Gore's recent statements about the nature of his, and Bill Clinton's, priorities and tenures in office. In a recent screed printed by the New York Times, Gore leads off with: "There has always been a debate over the destiny of this nation between those who believed they were entitled to govern because of their station in life, and those who believed that the people were sovereign." In the balance of the article, he strives to depict himself and Clinton as populists on the side of the powerless masses, while he paints their Republican predecessors and successors as the paid servants of a privileged elite.
Al Gore? Who grew up in a penthouse apartment in Washington, DC, his father a Senator backed by Armand Hammer and Occidental Petroleum, Inc? Who attended elite schools as a child of privilege, and who skated through an abbreviated tour of Vietnam under the protection of a personal bodyguard? Who hired consultants at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to advise him on how to dress and carry himself during the 2000 Presidential contest -- and lost his home state of Tennessee because a majority of its residents felt he had nothing to do with them? That Al Gore?
I must say, it takes substantial brass below the beltline to claim to be a populist with a history like that. Especially when you toss in Gore's opposition to school choice for all but the wealthy, his condemnation of Bush's highly popular across-the-board tax cuts, his cozy relations with the media elite in New York and Hollywood, his use of litigation industry stars such as David Boies and Alan Dershowitz in his attempt to overturn the results of the Florida Presidential ballot, and his record of mutually profitable relations with that most double-edged of political players, Big Tobacco.
Ah, Big Tobacco. Now that we're on that subject...
This morning, on a New York news radio station, a state official read an anger-filled pitch against smoking. The anger, of course, was directed at the tobacco merchants, whom he accused of concealing both the hazards of smoking and the addictiveness of nicotine. The pitch, of course, sought to persuade young people not to smoke, and to persuade the already addicted to consult New York's anti-smoking program for help in quitting.
I hold no brief for smoking, a habit I thoroughly detest. And it is quite possible that Big Tobacco has deliberately numbed itself to the human cost of its marketing practices. But there is a gigantic irony buried in any government campaign against smoking that's premised on its dangers and its addictiveness. Big Tobacco is now a cash cow for a great many state governments, as the result of the settlement of a few years ago. The last thing they'd want to do, given its importance to those states' budgets, is to kill off its revenue stream. Compare this to the state's attitude toward heroin, which, according to New York State's own pitchman, is no more addictive and no more harmful than smoking.
Americans aren't stupid enough to overlook government's tolerance of one deadly addictive drug and its campaign of destruction against another, especially when the financial connections have become so plain. They're bound to ask themselves what accounts for the difference in treatment. Most will get the right an$wer.
To lie to a credulous audience can be tactically profitable, at least for a while. Hitler had for his audience a country that was economically unstable from the 1923 Weimar inflation, had been treated with unexpected harshness at the Versailles Peace Conference, and was riven by numerous forms of social and political discord. The Germans wanted to believe that there were simple answers to their problems, answers that didn't indict them as a people. Hitler provided them. The rest is history.
To lie to an audience that's seen your kind come and go like the changing seasons, and that's had its nose rubbed in the consequences of trusting government to manage its morals or its pocketbook, carries a greater risk. You have to be awfully good on the podium, you have to keep your listeners focused on the devil-figures in your theology, and you have to promise as little as possible, certainly nothing definite, nothing with a firm deadline attached.
Just now, our nation's political liars are botching it. Their designated devil-figures look pretty good, at least in comparison to their predecessors. As for promises of change, the audience is largely concerned with the anti-terror campaign and the value of its 401(K) accounts, neither of which the liars can plausibly promise to improve. In consequence, even some of their nominal allies are beginning to draw away from them.
And the Curmudgeon Emeritus is smiling his anticipatory told-you-so smile.
WHo is this guy kidding? He has power and he used his vice-presidency for his own self worship.
By the way, Robin Hood never was for power to the people, but power to the deserving and righteous. Robin Hood never sought the Kingship he protected. So AlGore can go to hell with his reveries and fantasies. I am not a convert of his stupidity.
The Liberals want us to believe that there are simple (usually monetary) answers to our (often non-existent or at least government-created) problems, answers that don't indict their ideology. The Democrats provide them. The rest is history in the making.
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