Lie

Obama’s campaign and supporters seem to have hit upon the single argument they intend to zoom in on for why Barack Obama should be President as we approach the election: because McCain and Palin “lie” so much, according to them.

So, like, for example, when Palin claimed she visited Iraq, that was a “lie”, because she only visited a border outpost on the Iraq-Kuwait border. The fascinating thing is that Sarah Palin never, as far as I can can tell, actually claimed to have visited Iraq. Regardless, this is still a “lie”, just ask the left, and therefore we’re supposed to hear that magic word “lie” and think: ‘Well that settles it: Barack Obama should be President. I’d been basing my prior support for McCain-Palin on the belief that Palin visited Iraq. If she hasn’t, I no longer support them.’

I have no wish to wade through all the “lie” chronicles that have been created and no doubt will be created by the left. My impression is that McCain and Palin, being politicians, “lie” just about as much as most other politicians, including Obama and Biden. McCain, indeed, a little bit more perhaps. But the interesting thing is why the left thinks that this argument is somehow dispositive. If “lying” were to disqualify politicians from office we’d have no officeholders.

More to the point, did the “lie” argument work in 2004? 2000? The real question is why the left keeps, oblivious to the results, latching onto “they lie!” as an election strategy. We’ll see whether it works, I suppose, but I have my doubts.

I’m reminded of the OJ Simpson trial in which the prosecutor lawyer made “domestic violence” a crucial part of her argument as to motive, before a jury mostly made up of black females. The motive? “Domestic violence”, she said. That’s all she had to say, she seemed to think. One can imagine this argument worked among her friends and lawyer colleagues, who were responsive to any argument involving “domestic violence”; therefore, it was a good argument! And look how that trial turned out…

I suspect the same sort of dynamic may be going on here.