Lying our Way to Tyranny

On the morning of 9/11, I was enjoying the cloudless blue-sky vista out of my office window overlooking Dupont Circle, when someone yelled to check out the office TV about a plane crash in New York. And so we sat, and watched the 2nd plane come in, and soon were looking out across the low DC skyline (no building can be higher than the Washington Monument, about 12-14 stories) at the smoke rising from the attack on the Pentagon.

As has been noted many places, "everything changed." Now in the unfolding election, we are seeing the results of one of the most pernicious of those changes, John McCain's decision to abandon the last whimpering vestiges of any commitment to truth.

Will I live long enough to feel that I really knew what happened at 911? I think of the decades-long debate over the 1963 Kennedy assassination, and I doubt it. But I have little doubt that the official investigation was woefully incomplete, just as all previous such investigations are incomplete. Conspiracy or no, such investigations always threaten to pull into the light of day, at the very least, the grotesque incompetencies that fester inside every bureaucracy that our species has ever created. (Think about the breaking news yesterday about the lurid goings-on in the Interior Department's office regulating oil drilling on Indian lands, complete with rock concert tickets, good meals, and--are we primates or what--sex.) No bureaucracy looks good in the light of such intense scrutiny, and any government worth its salt is prepared to do almost anything to prevent opening the latest can of worms, regardless of whether there was any criminal intent or conspiracy.

Let's not be naive here. When have politicians ever felt compelled to stick closely to the truth? How about never? But when it came time to slop the hogs (or put lipstick on the pig, etc.), the long-established practice was to have someone other than the top of the ticket do the dirty work. Sometimes the hatchetman (almost always men, until recently) would be easy to identify: no one had any doubts who Spiro Agnew was carrying water for when he attacked the press as "nattering nabobs of negativism," a phrase that we should always remember sprang from the pen of the illustrious William Safire--whom the New York Times rewarded with a permanent editorial sinecure after Safire had written some of the most destructive and reckless political rhetoric in the country's history. The liberal media my eye.

As we saw in 2004, however, shadowy Republican millionaires and billionaires like T. Boone Pickens (he of the more recent claim to solve the country's liquid fuels policy by converting cars and trucks to natural gas--instead of electricity--a bad idea that would put billions more into his pockets and that of the oil and gas industry at the expense of the country's environment and a continuation of our dependence on fossil fuels) were happy to fund the Swift Boaters attacks on John Kerry's campaign. And the media proceeded to amplify these false attacks, while Bush stayed at arms length.

But McCain has abandoned the fig-leaves and pretenses of not having any contact with the 527-third-party swift-boat attackers. He doesn't need these hacks. He is testing an entirely new premise: that the presidential candidate of one of the two major parties can get up every day and spew out lie after lie without, at the least, suffering any damages in the polls, and possibly, if some polling is to be believed, actually increasing his chances of getting elected.

This way lies madness. We are rushing toward a tipping point, where the voters are being faced with as stark a choice as voters have ever faced: do we want to live in a country in which we require that our leaders at least occasionally touch bases with reality, or are we ready to sacrifice the last vestiges of civilization and the tattered rule of law and turn the country over to the destructive world in which our freedom as individuals and our destiny as a country is entirely at the whim of the last words to come out of the president's mouth.