ManicDDaily

Pants On Fire

I had been planning to write about Sarah Palin today –  I dreamt last night of her scoffing at Copernicus with an aw-shucks smile and a “now, don’t go all helio-what’s-it on me.”

Only that didn’t seem truly apt.   Copernicus’s theory of a sun-centered universe, as set forth in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was, in fact, revolutionary, hard for many to accept.   (See e.g. what happened to Galileo.)

A better illustration of what I’m trying to get at would be Palin saying that the sky isn’t blue.  (But even that’s not a great example – some could say that color is just an illusion of refracted light.)

What I’m looking for a flat-out lie.  How about focusing on Palin’s statements that Democrats are now pushing the largest tax increase in history and that it will have an effect on every American who pays income taxes.

The Pulitzer Prize winning Politifact characterized this as a “pants on fire” statement.  Poltifact details the various inaccuracies,  but one of the basic points is that the Bush tax cuts expire on their own in 2010; the Democrats are not terminating them.  If no one does anything – something this Congress is quite good at – the cuts will simply end.

More importantly, if Congress were to follow Obama’s and the Democrat’s plan – Palin says they don’t have one but that’s another flat-out lie – only the Bush tax cuts for high earners would be allowed to expire.  This would result in a tax increase smaller than one passed by (hero of heroes) Ronald Reagan.  Even if all the Bush tax cuts expire, and not simply those on high earners, the increase would not be the greatest in American History.  (It’s also worth noting that the expiration of the cuts returns the country to the pre-Bush tax regime; it does not push it to totally new tax altitudes.)

My concern here, however, is not  taxes, but political dialogue; the popularity of the flat-out lie.  One would think that speaking in front of a camera would discourage lying, but the cameras just spread the lie farther, faster, even endowing it with a kind of authority, something Sarah well (shucks) knows.

So, I was going to write about Palin.  And then I opened up the online Times to see Ahmadinejad denying the death toll of 9/11.  “They announced that 3,000 people were killed in this incident, but there were no reports that reveal their names. Maybe you saw that, but I did not,” he blithely announced.  (Where was he?)

I’m not comparing the substance of Ahmadinejad and Palin, or their general truthfulness.   I hesitate to even put them in the same post because I don’t wish to imply that their aims or world view are in anyway comparable.   I am struck though by the similarity of political tactic in this instance–the technique of just saying something that you think will resonate with supporters, even though you must know it’s untrue;  an audacity of cynicism rather than hope.