Fighting lies with truth works better now than it used to

Dishonesty in argument is something that often dismays me about politics in our country. One of the observations I've always smugly considered to be an indication of the genuine moral superiority of left politics over right politics is the way arguments have generally been formed by the two major parties.¹ The left will make an effort to explain the actual idea they are proposing, and the right will make up outrageous lies, lies that can't possibly be true, to support their own. Ronald Reagan gained notoriety as a person who was good at this, and since then, his successors² have really developed hyperbole as a rhetorical tactic that is marvelous to behold. The beauty of the tactic of just making shit up is that if somebody comes out and says "That's not true." the burden of proof is magically on the accuser. You can say that atheists or Muslims are snatching children all over the country and turning their skin into kites every day, and it devolves to somebody else to fact-check that obvious hogwash.

Meanwhile, the liar wins the argument with their lie. In fact it's better than that, since people opposing the liar will now have to spend time straightening out the truth. The other side is continually on the defensive, playing catch-up with verifiable fact, which takes a while, to counteract the lie, which can be made up on the spot.

The bigger the lie is in the first place, the better. That way, the liar can backpedal from their original lie and say that they didn't mean that actual atheists or Muslims are actually skinning and kiting actual children on a literally daily basis, but rather that they want to, and that they will if we don't prevent it by cutting Medicare.

But I'm not troubled by this as much as I used to be. In a town hall setting, it was about winning the argument in front of the people in the room. The liar convinced a few hundred people, and the lie would persist unchallenged in a lot of those people's minds. Now, the way most people will hear about the argument is by reading an article that presents some analysis of the statements after the fact, ie, that they lied. This is great, because BS doesn't hold up to scrutiny. We have armies of people who can and do check facts on behalf of liars, just to demonstrate the liars' dishonesty in a larger public forum. This is a kind of journalism. So when Senator John Kyl says that "Well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does" is abortion services, Journalists all over the country are completely delighted, because it's so clearly not true and they can prove it. The next day, or later that day, even, there are dozens of articles about how that's not true. And the argument percolates to the Daily Show, where John Stewart shows that it's not true, and The Onion lampoons the lie, driving home the ridiculousness of the statement. Millions of people who never would have heard John Kyl's name have now been informed that he's a liar. Now John Kyl is the guy who lied while attempting to defund Planned Parenthood.

I'm not smug about it anymore, either. Because of the likes of the Huffington Post, it's no longer true that left-of-center political advocacy doesn't plunge wantonly into the sensationalist in the interest of winning. You can't believe headlines on Huffpost, since they're intentionally misleading. Just go there any day and pick a random headline and you will have demonstrated my point. They're not even the worst perpetrators. I get a lot of emails from left organizations that are trying to drum up support for different causes. Some of them are clearly written by dishonest people who don't even go on to educate the reader, and will then advocate calling or writing a legislator. They seem to think the end justifies the means. They figure that if enough ignorant hysterical people call up their senator and demand that they vote a certain way, it'll be worth it in the end. I'm pretty sure this isn't true³, and generally when I see a pattern of this type of email, I will unsubscribe from the feed and tell them why.

Of course, their are things people can lie about, even things that are certainly false, and they'll get away with it. Clinton lied about his personal life all the time. David Wu can lie about his sexual improprieties and his knowledge of pharmaceuticals. But these lies are mainly lies about their frame of mind and their perceptions. When Clinton said he didn't inhale, he was saying "I pretended to smoke a joint to look cool," which is kind of stupid. When David Wu said that sex with the 18 year old daughter of his lifelong friend was consensual, he's admitting a lot things about himself that call his judgment into question. When he says he thought the Oxycontin⁴ his friend gave him was ibuprofen, he's saying that he can't tell whether he's on powerful opiates or not. The lies don't help his argument much, since he's basically saying "I'm not a drug-abusing rapist, I'm just retarded." He still has to resign in the end.

Bottom line: You can't get away with lying about matters of fact anymore. It hurts you more than it helps you. It's not longer possible to successfully lie about what's factually true. You can only lie about what you believe, and then the lie reflects on you. The longer it takes for Republicans to recognize that fact, the better, since it makes them look like assholes.

Notes
1. Jesus, I know the Dems aren't left at all, but they play one on TV.
2. Who engage in a kind of hollow, ritual-worship of the man without really knowing anything about him. Sound like anything else to you?
3. Probably because I have enough contact with my legislators to know that they do not base their decisions on public opinion, but rather on private, corporate opinion.
4. Oxycontin is twice as powerful of an opioid as morphine. If you take it, you will become a 50's jazz musician. There is no way to fail to notice that you have taken Oxycontin, unless you take so much of it that you go on the nod.