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Who’s a Liar?
Posted on August 28th, 2003 by uruloki
Jack Shafer wrote an article for Slate yesterday in which he claims that leftists appropriated “a rhetorical trick from conservatives.” The trick is to call your opponents “liars.” Unfortunately, while Mr Shafer is correct in that both sides of the political debate use name-calling, he mistakes who exactly is calling who liars, and has been from the beginning.
Over the past decade, conservative TV and radio personalities—Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, et al.—have used variations on the liar-liar-pants-on-fire technique whenever they run into trouble or out of imagination to unhinge their ideological opponents. So, too, has fellow-traveler Bill O’Reilly, who dodges the conservative label. Liar-liar works magnificently against the TV rookie, the minor-league humanities professor blinking into the camera from a remote studio in the Midwest. But it can also give an emotional seizure to the media-savvy third-term congressman sitting in the studio with the host.
The problem is that conservatives don’t have to label their opponents liars, they do it to themselves. When confronted by hard facts, usually attached to a label such as Communist, they cannot do much more than sputter and try to dance around the issues. Anytime data appears to contradict their beliefs, they cannot refute the data and are reduced to attacking the purveyers of the message (latest example: global warming).Mr. Shafer attempts to point out the truth in the left’s own books on lying (I will not link to those).
Franken, Conason, and Corn aren’t just ginning it up. They accurately document the right’s most egregious lies and acts of hypocrisy. They uncover Coulter’s loony untruths, dissect President Bush’s tax cut claims, and rebuke him for his insincere promise to lead a more decorous political debate. If you ever doubted the GOP’s fondness for “crony capitalism” or its pork-barrel duplicity, you’ll find the complete story here. And so on.
Probably the biggest issue I have with that is the GOP is only relatively conservative. Both political parties only survive on their “pork-barrel duplicity,” if they attempted anything else, their constituients wouldn’t vote for them. As an acquaintence I had said, “I voted for Hillary because I know she will get the most money from the Federal government for my state.” Mr. Shafer does have one point that I do agree on: The popularity of liar-liar TV and publishing indicates a deepening interest in politics, but only for a political conversation that’s narrow enough to entertain simple-minded viewers and readers, many of whom regard politics as one of their hobbies, like clogging or license-plate collecting, or worse yet, as their secular religion. To dismiss the liar-lair books as preaching to the choir misses the whole point: The devout demand a Sunday sermon, and the last thing they want to hear is an open-minded lecture about atheism.
Unfortunately, the political conversation is necessarily addressed to the lowest common denominator, in order to reach the greatest possible audience. However, I disagree with him when he says ”[l]iberal scriveners may improve their team’s political lot by matching the conservative investment in liar-liar stock, but it will come at the expense of their credibility.” I don’t happen to believe that they have a whole lot of credibility in the first place.[Listening to: Dangerous Game – 3 Doors Down – Away from the Sun]
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