McCain's Contempt for the Truth

fr: http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/09/21/opinion/21rich.html?s=2

Mr. Rich,

"Truthiness"? Afraid there are darker forces at work here than just 'The Colbert Reports" ironic label.

The shameless disdain for and rejection of the truth in this campaign has reached epic proportions. While Obama's camp is not entirely blameless; but at least it has been transparent as to its goals and purpose and has made itself available to the media. McCain has not.

In the New Republic article "Liar's Poker", by Johnathan Chait, he cites many of the same examples you use. The evidence is irrefutable, John McCain has willfully embraced a strategy that is predicated on using lies to make his case to the American people. More disturbing is what we are to make of this development?

In Mr. Chait's piece, like yours, the facts presented about John McCain's "postmodern disdain for truth" are unsettling. Yet, McCain's strategy can hardly be said to be a 'thin air' creation. Its roots may be traced to the reactionary Goldwater positions some forty-four years ago; and in 2004 this truth-be-damned approach netted its first tangible results with the re-election of G.W. Bush. For the first time in American political history, the presidency was secured by mobilizing a political base largely through the presentation of half-truths and outright lies. The die was cast and the US was saddled with a Commander in Chief who is widely recognized by many of its citizens as a liar. Obviously, Bush's re-election offers abject lessons in how deception can pay political dividends. These lessons haunt us now.

It is not hard to 'speculate' as to why McCain has opted to show such contempt for the role of truth in the political sphere. McCain has decided he cannot win a fair fight. Thus, faced with impossible odds he has resorted to the now tried and true method used by George Bush four years ago to secure the Oval Office: lies. lies, and more damned lies. A la Bush, McCain has opted to forgo the normative untruths common to all campaign's. Instead, has chosen to mobilize the GOP political base by betting that, once again, it's loyalty will not waver in the face of media reports he is lying. He is wagering the GOP base will back him no matter what, despite his telling of 'big whoppers'. So fragile is the republican brand that its faithful are willing to embrace any strategy that promises victory via empty discourse and innuendo. Aware history and conventional wisdom are on the other side- they will do whatever it takes to achieve their goal.

The anti-media taint cultivated by the GOP Rovian apparatchiks in 2004 runs deep among the party's grassroots. As a result, they accept there is nothing wrong with McCain's faux indictment of the media's intentions and they accept he need not engage the US public through this prism. Easily swayed by McCain's claims that the Republican doctrine is the only true doctrine for America, they are readily mobilized. The attendant symbolism associated with the GOP's message (whether it be patriotism, guns, God, etc.,) is so simple and visceral in its construct it can only but invite a form of hyper-partisanship and instill a grassroots loyalty that is willing to look beyond 'truth'.

Unfortunately, the last time a troubled democracy in the midst of an economic crisis witnessed a Party Ideology with such an unreasonably strong sway over its followers was in 1930s Germany. Then, as now, many party members were inclined to look beyond facts, were intent on silencing any and all opposing voices, and they too were blindly committed to a patriotic 'mission': ready, willing, and able they were bereft of a moral political center.

Frightful.