- "...Karen Hughes accused me of lying. And so I called
Karen and asked her why she was saying this, and she had this almost Orwellian
rap that she laid on me about how things she'd heard -- that I watched
her hear -- she in fact had never heard, and she'd never heard Bush use
profanity ever. It was insane...the way she lied was she knew I knew she
was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures
that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness...."
óTucker Carlson, Salon interview, September 13, 2003
-
- So many varieties of deceit have been offered by the
Bush Administration and its apologists for the past three years that the
alert reader and listener can't help but become something of a connoisseur
of lies. There's the "Oopsie" that the Bush administration has
made so completely its own, which involves lying, then later claiming that
the lie was a "mistake" and blaming someone else for it. There's
the operatic Limbaugh/Coulter approach of shrieking an unfounded accusation
like "liberals are all traitors" and then refusing to explain
or defend it, the Bill O'Reilly "Shut Up!" variation, which includes
drowning out the opposing view by turning off their mikes, the Bush White
House "That's-My-Story-and-I'm-Sticking-To-It," gambit, which
consists of dogged repetition, and so many, many more, some oblique, some
direct, some complex, and some with sledge-hammer, intelligence-smashing
simplicity.
-
- And then there's the gorgeous but not uncommon breed
that regularly bursts into bloom on CNN's "Crossfire." A dandy
specimen appeared last Tuesday in response to Paul Begala bringing up the
Bush administration's penchant for back editing documents and suppressing
information that might bolster arguments in opposition to Bush policies:
-
- "When President Bush played dress-up on the aircraft
carrier Abraham Lincoln, the White House Web site declared -- quote 'President
Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended' -- unquote. Of course,
later, that was changed to 'major combat operations have ended.' In a similar
vein, 'Education Week' has reported that the Department of Education is
stripping from its Web site thousands of files that dispute or contradict
the Bush administration's political stance on education issues. And now,
according to 'The Progress Report,' which is a new daily update from the
Center For American Progress -- I've already found this update to be indispensable
-- the Bush White House is altering its Web site so that certain Internet
engines like Google cannot be used to archive White House content on Iraq."
-
- Tucker Carlson, good conservative that he is, denounced
the Center for American Progress for "wasting their time playing around
with Google. That's pathetic. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard,"
then chuckled when Begala observed that "This president is hiding
information from us every day. He's doctoring web sites."
-
- "Doctoring Web sites!" Carlson chortled. "If
I see any evidence of that, I'll be the first to denounce it."
-
- Aside from the Escher Print absurdity of Tucker Carlson
promising to be the first to denounce the Bush administration for suppressing
online information after Paul Begala and the Center for American Progress
have done so, this exchange was striking because of Carlson's elaborately
mimed amusement and disbelief. Those who spend time online will recognize
Carlson's reaction as a version of what I've come to call the "ROFL,"
the first part of a two-step commonly danced by right-wingers when faced
by some especially egregious action on the part of the Bush administration.
-
- You begin by ridiculing as paranoid and ridiculous the
very notion that a policy is in place (often the letters "R.O.F.L."
meaning "Rolling On The Floor Laughing" are posted early on as
a sort of flag) then, after a short time has passed, you shift smoothly
into ridiculing denunciations of the policy as ridiculous. Thus, the unpleasant
moment when you have to actually say, for instance, "The government
should be able to pick up American citizens and hold them in secret without
lawyers or hearings" is avoided by simply jumping from pretended disbelief
into justifying it as a fait accompli. Carlson's variation allows him to
support a lie without actually enunciating the words, "The White House
web site never declared that combat operations in Iraq were ended."
-
- It's not surprising that an aficionado of this approach
would be revolted by the cave-woman tactics of Karen Hughes described in
the excerpt that begins this piece. For one thing, Hughes committed the
blunder of direct denial. Perhaps if she'd responded by laughing "Oh
yeah, riiiiiiight. Bush uses profanity, I am sooooo sure!" or just
described Carlson as "wasting his time counting cuss-words. That's
pathetic!" he wouldn't have been so angry. Few things can annoy a
believer more than clumsy tactics used by someone on the same side. Then
there's the sheer vulgarity of the fact that Hughes obviously "knew
I [Tucker Carlson] knew she was lying, and she did it anyway." Sophisticated
liars know the importance of a dab of self-deception, of offering themselves
a superficial mental alibi that makes it easier to project a veneer of
sincerity. When the words in the forefront of your mind are "gotta
lie" instead of "Oh those wacky liberals!" it usually shows.
-
- The version of bad faith that Carlson personifies on
CNN is one that has become increasingly common among those who like to
portray themselves as "reasonable conservatives." Typically they
adopt the persona of the good-natured opposition, responding to damning
facts by chuckling, sometimes even patting their opponents on the shoulder
and offering supposedly friendly advice about the danger of losing credibility
with "crazy" accusations of doctored web sites or fudged intelligence.
What else can they do, after all, but stall until the moment comes when
they can shift into directly touting the numerous and blatant deceptions
of the Bush administration as truth?
-
- Many liberals and moderates have a soft spot for Tucker
Carlson because they can remember his unflattering 1999 piece about George
W. Bush in TALK magazine, the one that prompted Karen Hughes' denial. Others
may shrug it off as no big deal that Carlson and others like him refuse
to acknowledge the Bush administration's consistent policy of suppressing
or altering information. When Coulter, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, et al are raging,
it's easy to find more well-modulated accents soothing, even reassuring.
-
- But consider this; In the bad old days of the U.S.S.R.,
few things aroused more derision in the west than the phenomenon of the
"vanishing commissar," that being the Soviet habit of rewriting
textbooks and encyclopedias and airbrushing old photographs to conform
with a version of history that omitted facts that might cause a Soviet
citizen to question the consistency, judgement and/or good will of Soviet
leaders.
-
- Absurd as this practice was, it made sense. Lies, after
all, are the life's-blood of modern tyranny, and both a knowledge and acknowledgement
of history can serve as an inoculation against deceit. It's interesting
to note that the changes made to Soviet texts and photos often involved
events that had occurred within living memory and so were unlikely to fool
many informed adults. Soviet leaders were not just attacking ancient history,
not merely trying to convince Soviet citizens to believe things that were
false. They were attacking memory. They were attempting to stamp out written
or photographed evidence of what they, and thousands of Soviet citizens
knew to be true, and hoping that in that way, as time went on and new generations
were born, the truth would eventually be lost.
-
- Suppressing previously available documentation and altering
published texts after the fact goes beyond the normal drive of a government
to massage or slant information. It's an attempt to ensure that contemporary
citizens are too bereft of reliable sources to assess a government effectively,
and that future citizens will be too ignorant to do so. Nobody who values
democracy would countenance it.
-
- And the chances are, Tucker Carlson is too knowledgeable
about history, (and in particular, as a conservative, the history of the
U.S.S.R.) to honestly dismiss concerns about this practice as unrealistic
or "pathetic." His bad faith may be less blatant than that of
Karen Hughes, but it's an even deeper dishonesty. The lie embedded in Carlson's
derisive response to Paul Begala's point about the suppression of online
information by the Bush White house is that Carlson and other conservatives
would care if they knew Begala's accusation to be true. It's a lie he compounds
by promising, "If I see any evidence of that, I'll be the first to
denounce it."
-
- There is a remote possibility that Carlson is as indestructibly
naive as his baby-duck good looks imply. It's been more than a week now
since he made that promise, plenty of time for him to look into the matter
and so far no denunciations from him are evident. But perhaps in a few
weeks we'll hear an embarrassed admission from him that the Bush administration
has, indeed been "doctoring websites," and an actual denunciation
of the practice from him.
-
- Or maybe, sometime in the future, someone will bring
up the old White House headline that "combat operations in Iraq have
ended," or dispute President Bush's stance on educational issues,
or bring up a contradiction between a past statement by the White House
on Iraq and a current statement. Carlson will offer that boyish smile of
his, cock his head and say, his eyes twinkling with amused satisfaction,
something to the effect of "That's not what the records tell us. Got
any documentation to back your claim up?"
-
- Which do you think is more likely?
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