Today's Sunday New York Times editorial pages had a common thread running through them...the lies being told by the Republicans and more specifically by the McCain campaign in particular. I was both shocked and pleased by the forthrightness with which this subject has at last been openly addressed by anyone other than members of the blogosphere. The "Big Lie" strategy has been the core of Republican politics since the Nixon era. Since then, having learned from the dangers of too much lying in the case of Richard Nixon, they have honed it into a fine art. And they have also learned that the lies need not be spread on a large nation-wide scale. The highly effective but limited old-fashioned "whisper campaign" has been transformed from people chatting around the water cooler sharing "Did you hear that....?" stories into the massive dissemination of such tales through high-speed connectivity.
Frank Rich in today's Times:
A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.
Just as the Bushies once flogged uranium from Africa, so Palin ceaselessly repeats her discredited claim that she said "no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere. Nothing is too small or sacred for the McCain campaign to lie about. It was even caught (by The Christian Science Monitor) peddling an imaginary encounter between Cindy McCain and Mother Teresa when McCain was adopting her daughter in Bangladesh.
If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else.
The twin-pronged strategy of truculence and propaganda that sold Bush and his war could yet work for McCain. Even now his campaign has kept the "filter" from learning the very basics about his fitness to serve as president — his finances and his health. The McCain multi household’s multimillion-dollar mother lode is buried in Cindy McCain’s still-unreleased complete tax returns. John McCain’s full medical records, our sole index to the odds of an imminent Palin presidency, also remain locked away. The McCain campaign instead invited 20 chosen reporters to speed-read through 1,173 pages of medical history for a mere three hours on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. No photocopying was permitted.
This is the same tactic of selective document release that the Bush White House used to bamboozle Congress and the press about Saddam’s nonexistent W.M.D. As truthiness repeats itself, so may history, and not as farce.
Likewise, Nicholas D. Kristof:
Here’s a sad monument to the sleaziness of this presidential campaign: Almost one-third of voters "know" that Barack Obama is a Muslim or believe that he could be.
In short, the political campaign to transform Mr. Obama into a Muslim is succeeding. The real loser as that happens isn’t just Mr. Obama, but our entire political process.
A Pew Research Center survey released a few days ago found that only half of Americans correctly know that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March.
So the lies about Obama's record, history, religion, drug-use, having terrorist connections, consorting with know terrorists, being un-patriotic, not supporting our troops, not being a Christian, being a black extremist, being an elitist, supporting gay marriages, etc, etc having taken root and flourished within the last bastion of unabashed bigotry, the anonymical world of the Internet.
The lies, half-truths, rumors, gossip, deceptions, smears, slanders and propaganda of the far right who want to win at any cost have been enabled by the most powerful propaganda tool ever. It is so enormous and so wide-spread that it is literally impossible for these lies and smears to be either effectively challenged or corrected by any outlet of the mainstream media. It is an underground stream of disinformation that quietly flows throughout the land. It can neither be blocked nor diverted, nor stopped.
The question is though why do such untruths, etc, gain credence. Some of the most outlandish lies are egregiously self-contradictory. How can anyone believe that Obama attended a radical Muslim madrassa school were he was inculcated with the hatred for all things Christian; that he took his senatorial oath of office with his hand on the Koran; or that he is a practicing Muslim and at the same time believe that he is a follower of the radical anti-white Christian pastor Jeremiah Wright?
And I think the answer is that all of these things are simply balms to soothe the troubled mind of bigots who need an excuse, any excuse, to not vote for Obama aside from the most obvious reason: he's black.
Kristof again:
What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.
The result is this campaign to "otherize" Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.
He's just not "one of us".
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