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Let's say you were looking for a new manager for
the accounting department of your business. You
ran a bunch of want ads and the only people that
applied for the job were Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson,
Ted Kaczynski, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin.
Most sane people would put off hiring someone until they would round up some resumes of people who were not serial killers and thieves. And of course the job would go unfilled. Of course government doesn't work that way. If the only people running for President in the upcoming Presidential election were Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, Ted Kaczynski, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin, the election would be held and the winner would become the next US President. And of course that is why people vote for the scum bag liars, and crooks that run for office. They don't have any choice in the matter. They can either vote for crook A, B, or C. They don't get any other choice. One thing that would be nice would be to have a "none of the above" on every election ballot. And if "none of the above" wins the election the office should be unfilled for the next term. When I lived in Nevada they actually had a "none of the above" on the ballot. But sadly it doesn't count. If "none of the above" wins the election the "human" that came in second place gets to have the office. I suspect if we allowed none of the above on every ballot and when none of the above won the office went unfilled over a period of time most elected offices would be unfilled and we would have a whole lot less government tyranny.
When Lies Become the Norm Sissela Bok Updated January 22, 2012, 7:00 PM Few members of the public have any desire to let politicians lie to them. Why, then, don’t they reject candidates shown to have lied? Sometimes they do, if the lie is important and there is clear evidence that it took place. But most of the time, the truth is hard to discern amid the barrage of accusations and counter-accusations about fraud, the broken promises, and the outright lies that fly fast and loose among campaigns. The worst outcome would be for politicians to lie when they think that they will get away with it, hoping that enough people will be misled and that others won’t hold it against them. If citizens do not trust what candidates say, then they cannot interpret the information they need to vote. This cuts at the very roots of what we mean by democracy, founded on the consent of the governed. The worst outcome would be for everyone to give up -- for voters to conclude that all politicians lie and for politicians to lie when they think that they will get away with doing so, hoping that enough people will be misled and that others won’t hold it against them. To reverse course, voters and politicians alike should set their standards for honesty higher. This calls for doing their best to distinguish between lies and honest mistakes; between lies that have been proved and lies that are only suspected; between deception through outright lies, half-truths and silence; between foolish promises or predictions and knowingly false ones; and between slipping into a lie and undertaking a policy of deceit -- choosing to be someone who deals with others through deceit. The temptation is strong, in our partisan climate, for politicians, their supporters and all who have a stake in their victory to view their own misstatements as innocuous compared with those of their opponents. To the extent that they choose to engage in distortion and allow others to carry out smear campaigns on their behalf, they will contribute further to public distrust and to doubts about their personal character and integrity.
Why Lie When You Can Evade? Todd Rogers Michael I. Norton Updated January 22, 2012, 7:00 PM “You get to ask the questions you like. I get to give the answers I like,” Mitt Romney told a reporter dissatisfied with an evasive answer. The ensuing criticism – “How dare he not answer our questions?” – seemingly suggested that Romney’s efforts to dodge questions was out of the ordinary. In fact, the only thing unusual about Romney’s dodge attempt was that it failed. Successful politicians elevate dodging questions to an art form, and our research suggests that dodging can be a surprisingly easy – and effective – way for politicians to hoodwink voters without technically lying. In voters' eyes, politicians are better off answering a question they weren't asked than inelegantly answering the question at hand. In our experiments, viewers watched videos of politicians answering questions during debates. Sometimes, politicians actually answered the questions they were asked – and viewers rated them favorably. This sounds like good news, but politicians who answered a different question than they were asked (answering a question about illegal drug use with a not-quite-related answer about health care) were rated just as favorably as those who actually answered the question. More disturbingly, politicians who dodged the question but did so in a smooth, practiced fashion were rated more favorably than those who answered the question but in a less fluid fashion: politicians are better off answering the wrong question well than the right question poorly. (Not all dodges go unnoticed – politicians who answered a question about the war on terrorism by riffing on health care were both caught, and punished.) So rampant is question dodging that Fox News and Twitter teamed up on an innovative strategy to catch would-be dodgers, encouraging viewers during last Monday's Republican presidential debate in South Carolina to tweet in real time about whether each answer was a dodge. This strategy is likely to work. In our experiments, asking viewers to focus on politicians’ efforts to dodge dramatically increased dodge detection. A second intervention also proved successful: posting the text of questions on the screen while politicians answered also improved detection. These interventions – easy to implement and essentially free – help to keep politicians honest and have an added benefit: they encourage viewers to pay attention not to surface features but to deeper content, helping us to remember to weight substance over style.
Half-Truths and Other Fractions Matthew McGlone Updated January 22, 2012, 7:00 PM Children are taught to always tell the truth, journalists are obliged to report only the truth, and court witnesses take an oath to give “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” If only it were so simple. The public recognizes that politics is full of gray areas, and that politicians will always try to render them in black and white. Despite centuries of scholarly inquiry into the enigmatic nature of “truth,” in most cultures a simplistic notion of a dichotomy persists: statements are either true or not, and speakers who knowingly produce the former are being honest and those who knowingly produce the latter are lying. There are situations in which this formulation works, but countless more in which we pretend the line is clear — even when we know otherwise. In particular, we know that many political messages are passed off as truths, although a little inspection reveals the statements have only some degree of truth. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed that “all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.” We don’t always see horns and a tail on the teller of half-truths. When we do, our decision to call attention to it depends on who we think is getting forked and how badly. Democrats cry foul when Republican attack ads wrench Democratic candidates’ words out of context to make them appear soft on defense, but stay silent about selective excerpting in Democratic ads that caricature Republicans as cozy with corporations. Although the public regularly calls for its leaders and aspiring leaders to be honest at all times, we are all seasoned communicators with a keen understanding of fractional truth. We know that our children shouldn’t tell Grandpa their true feelings about the savings bonds he gave them for Christmas. We expect an obituary writer to highlight an actor’s two hit movies, not his 17 flops. And we know that politicians must compete in public discourse, portraying their accomplishments as significant while playing down those of the opponent. Voters get it: Political deception is not so much outright lying as it is the telling of half-truths and other fractions.
Lies and the Conservatives Who Love Them George Lakoff Updated January 22, 2012, 7:00 PM When are you “lying”? When you make, or purposely convey, a statement that you believe to be false, a statement intended to deceive someone to gain, or not lose, some advantage, and which must in fact be false. You can also lie by naming (“the job creators,” “death panels”) or by purposely evoking a false framing of a situation. If accused of lying, you have excuses available: an understandable mistake, a white lie (harmless, technically false, intended to help), an uncharitable interpretation (not what I meant), a disagreement about word meaning (what is a “lobbyist”?), a misstatement (an innocent mistake in word choice), a social lie (What a pleasure to be here in Iowa in midwinter!), a technically true statement that indirectly entails a lie, a false statement you believed to be true at the time, a rhetorical statement (an innocent exaggeration, understatements, metaphor, etc.), an alternative framing, and so on. These can be either honest, or lying to get out of a lie. Politicians lie to protect or advance what they see as a moral endeavor, like invading Iraq or cutting off 'welfare queens.' All politics is moral. Politicians advocate positions that they claim are right, not wrong or morally neutral. Like anyone else, a politician may lie to protect his or her own skin. But more often politicians lie to protect or advance what they see as a moral endeavor (e.g., the invasion of Iraq, Reagan’s war on nonexistent “welfare queens,” Johnson on the Tonkin Gulf). In the conservative moral system, the highest value is protecting and extending the moral system itself. When conservative icons or ideas themselves are threatened, it is not uncommon for conservative politicians to lie in their defense (Reagan never raised taxes; there’s no evidence for global warming; “government takeover”). Voters tolerate lies they see as serving a moral purpose, or as having a reasonable excuse. They give more latitude to politicians they identify with.
Politics Is a High-Stakes Game Lynn Vavreck Updated January 22, 2012, 7:00 PM “All warfare is based on deception,” Sun Tzu wrote. To talk about lying in politics, we have to begin by appreciating that for most candidates, elections are a lot like war. Winning is everything and anything else that comes from running for office (advancing a policy agenda, gaining notoriety, becoming secretary of state) is a consolation prize. They run to win — and that makes the conflict epic. We might not tolerate lying from kindergarteners, but when candidates engage in half-truth, there is something in it for their supporters. We also have to define what it means to lie. For example, in the 2000 Democratic nominating contest, when Al Gore claimed he “took the initiative in creating the Internet” was he lying? Or did his comment seem more like a lie after it was misreported that he said he “invented” the Internet? Or how about this case: was it a lie in January of 1998 when President Clinton forcefully denied he had “sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” adding that he “never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never”? And in 2003, when Colin Powell reported to the United Nations that U.S. intelligence showed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, was he lying? In politics, reasonable people can disagree about the issues, like whether to invade Iraq. And people will also disagree about the extent and seriousness of “lies” like these. Al Gore did champion the development of the Internet in Congress, and most of his colleagues will attest to that. He didn’t invent the Internet, but he didn’t claim to have. The Clinton case is less straightforward, depending on the definition of “sexual relations” (and perhaps even “is”). And Powell’s example may be the least clear. Did he have reports about W.M.D.’s in Iraq? Yes. Were they from trusted, vetted intelligence sources? No. Why do Americans tolerate politicians who lie? [ Americans don't tolerate lying politicians. They simply don't have a choice. They can either vote for the Republican liar, or the Democratic liar. They can't vote for none of the above and demand that the office go unfilled. ] Because most political lies are exaggerations or contextual lies. They are lies of omission, or put the way a politician might, they are economies of truth. And while Americans might not tolerate lying from kindergarteners (for whom the setting of a moral standard seems very important) when a candidate from a particular party engages in a half-truth to win an election, it benefits that party’s voters — and that’s the truth. Partisanship is sewn up in the identity of most Americans who pay attention to politics at all. To call people Republicans or Democrats is to say more than what their positions are on policy matters. It is a statement about who they are and perhaps where they have come from or how they have “come up.” These partisan identities affect Americans’ perceptions of almost everything that happens in the political world. Take last Thursday’s Republican debate in South Carolina. Hundreds of G.O.P. voters applauded as Newt Gingrich blasted CNN’s John King for raising an accusation about marriage and sex in presidential politics. These same voters, I have no doubt, would have cheered Gingrich for doing just that in 1998 when he led the charge to impeach President Clinton for his dalliance with a younger woman who worked in his office — or technically, for lying about it, but you see the point. When Clinton did it, Republican voters called for his impeachment; when Gingrich does it and defends himself, they cheer for him. Winning is everything in this context, for candidates — and voters. |