The Price of Lying

One of the longstanding themes of this blog is the astonishing mendacity of the Republican Party, how out of balance that mendacity is within the current political discourse (I mean, damn, we expect politicians to lie, but these guys never stop) and the media’s complicity in laundering those lies. This cycle, there has been some effort to point out the lies, misstatements and inconsistencies — at least in reporting on the results of factchecking organizations or giving your own factcheckers a highlighted role in a reporting package. Lies aren’t often named as such — you get lots of euphemisms, especially from the fact checking organizations who don’t want to be seen using the apparently more emotionally charged word — lie. I wondered if the cumulative effects of the factchecking, a tough primary which featured Republicans calling each other liars, Democratic efforts to sow doubts and Rmoney’s persistently low ratings for honesty were starting to take a toll when I saw this piece from TPM on Tuesday:

Paul Ryan said that Democrats’s strategy through the election is “to call us liars for a month” in an interview with Michigan radio host Frank Beckmann Monday. The day after Wednesday’s presidential debate, the Obama campaign released an ad saying Romney had not told the truth during the debate.

Yesterday, the signal piece starting to push back on any accountability for truthfulness appeared in the Wall Street Journal from two of their opinion writers — Daniel Henninger and James Taranto. Henniger’s piece is Obama and the L-Word:

“Liar” is a potent and ugly word with a sleazy political pedigree. But “liar” is not being deployed only by party attack dogs or the Daily Kos comment queue. Mitt Romney is being called a “liar” by officials at the top of the Obama re-election campaign. Speaking the day after the debate in the press cabin of Air Force One, top Obama adviser David Plouffe said, “We thought it was important to let people know that someone who would lie to 50 million Americans, you should have some questions about whether that person should sit in the Oval Office.”

The Democratic National Committee’s Brad Woodhouse said, “Plenty of people have pointed out what a liar Mitt Romney is.” Deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter says Republicans “think lying is a virtue.”

Explicitly calling someone a “liar” is—or used to be—a serious and rare charge, in or out of politics. It’s a loaded word. It crosses a line. “Liar” suggests bad faith and conscious duplicity—a total, cynical falsity.

Nowhere in this piece does he acknowledge that the Romney people have been misleading Americans on a routine basis, and nor does he think that the Team Romney lies are a problem. The problem, according to Henninger, is that the Team Obama has had the temerity to notice the falsehoods and to specifically name them.

James Taranto dutifully takes the baton handoff and his column presents a Bill of Particulars of a sort. He attempts to list those instances where liberals have called out conservatives for lying that he doesn’t like. He doesn’t defend the lies, as such (except for a weak pushback on Michele Bachmann’s armed and dangerous remark), but presents it as a checklist of bad behavior by Democrats and liberals who have crossed some new line where speaking the truth in plain language is a new offense. Don’t miss Taranto’s attempt to invoke Godwin’s law on Andrew Sullivan’s invocation of the Big Lie for the irony.

Conservatives are accustomed to pushing around the media and some (too many) Democrats in order to clear a space for their alternate reality. They’ve run up against a whole lot of people who are no longer willing to see lies as an alternate POV. I give Team Obama alot of credit for being mostly fearless in pushing back on the lies — but I also give alot of credit to many long term progressive and liberal bloggers who never participated in the mechanism for laundering the lies (and who I think created the current fact-checking craze). Conservatives are finally getting some pushback on their strategy to just say something often enough until it becomes the truth. And since the new terms of the debate require them to show their homework (which they can’t do), they’ve launched this new crusade to make the business of calling out a lie bad behavior on the part of Democrats and the media.

It is a small glimmer of light, but worth celebrating. And making sure we never shy away from the words lie or liar when they are justified.