Truth is Beauty: When Is It Lying and When Is It Art?

The answer is easy on DU. When the story teller is Barack Obama in his best selling autobiographies it is art. When it is Hillary Clinton telling an animated story about her adventures in a war torn country, it is a big fat lie.

If only the real world were so simple. The truth is there is no such thing as nonfiction story telling. Everything is a fiction. Some fiction pretends that it is truer than others. However, a story is always told through filters---the author who has some conscious concept of the "truth" which is colored by emotion and a host of other factors too numerous to list but including the multiple motives for telling the story (in Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner or Heart of Darkness or this motive for telling the tale becomes the centerpiece of the story). There is also a listener included within the story above and beyond the actual reader or listener. In some stories, the fictional listener is the centerpiece as in Absalom, Absalom . Add on top of that the intended audience and then any unintended audience---for in the modern age, Roland Barthe has decreed that all stories are now created as much by the listener as by the teller ( therefore Ulysses is at once a revolutionary novel appreciated by the intelligentsia on the first half of the 20th century and a novel deemed pornographic by the Philistines and the basis for a trial and a textbook on many college syllabuses in the later half of the 20th century and a book that will win you admiration if you carry it around with a book mark stuck halfway inside and an excellent paperweight)---- and you have an infinite number of stories from one telling.

If a child sees a bear shaped shadow while lost in the woods at night and hears a growl, adrenaline will surge and the child will remember images of bears. The image of a bear will appear very clearly in the child's mind at that moment. Later, when the child is safe at home, she will be asked what frightened her and she will say "A bear!" If there really are bears in that part of the country, her family will panic. A search will be conducted. The ensuing alarm will convince her that she saw a bear. Years later, she will tell her grandchildren about the time she ran away from a bear. It will become one of their favorite stories. Every time she recalls it, she will feel a surge of adrenaline, a reliving of her panic but also a sense of warmth, for by then the bear story will have become precious to her. It will be a part of her identity, reaffirmed by each telling.

This is how family myths become fixed and precious. No one sets out to lie. The stories are told over and over. Someone mishears or mistakes a word. That word is included and it becomes part of the ritual, and its mere presence in something so familiar as a family story makes it comforting in its predictability.

It surprises a lot of people when they find that Robert Heinlein was able to deconstruct all stories to three basic story elements. The Brave Little Tailor. The Man Who Learned Better. Boy Meets Girl. Except for humor which turns this on their heads, these are all we have. Aggression. Sorrow. Love. That is the essence of all stories. When we tell a story, we take one or more of these basic forms and fill in details. A story is satisfying to the listener if it meets the criteria of one of these basic story units. Why? Because when we tell a story, we wrestle with an emotion, or two or three. Therefore, when one tells a story of going into a dangerous area, there will always be trials that must be overcome. The story requires it. If we write about a missing parent, there will always be a reconciliation, spiritual if physical is impossible. Otherwise, the story teller will be unable to complete the tale, because the story is not told merely for the audience. The story is told for the storyteller himself, to complete some internal quest. If a woman needs to bolster her courage, she survives a battle. If a man needs to reconcile himself with a part of himself that has been denied, he will do this through the metaphor of reconciliation with the father.

Obama has written autobiographies for a reason. Hillary tells stories about herself for the same reason. Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote his Confessions for the same reason. All are prisoners of reason ---this age of reason---who seek for truth but keep coming back to the same answer, one that William Blake spelled out very clearly in his writings.

"God appears and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night
But does a Human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day."

Truth is beauty is human. To err is human. To err is beautiful. It is the flaws that make a work of art exquisite. A machine can mass produce perfection. If the story rings true---if after 12 years Hillary remembers an adrenaline surge when told that she and her daughter would be landing in a dangerous area and if that lingering emotion---for emotions last much longer than factual memories--- worked its way into her story in the only way that her rationale mind could make sense of it, that does not make her story a lie. Her story is the true story for her. It is the only one that she could tell as the woman she was at the moment she told it.

If you want to blame anyone for the "deception" blame the Brother's Grimm and Homer and Shakespeare and all the story tellers who have helped us define what a story will be. However, before they told their epics, there were anonymous tale spinners. As long as we have had language, we have used words to try to make order out of our jumbled emotions and record fleeting bits of time so that they will not be lost when we die.

...in order to con voters. Sorry, but there's no beauty in that.

It would be amazing if she even remembered landing on the ground, if they were really telling her everything this guy claims they were telling her with her daughter on the plane with her . That is the key difference. Moms think and act differently when their babies are around.

I hate to sound like a cliche, but this is sexism once again.

PLEASE stop trying to romanticize the lie. Oh, and it most certainly is NOT sexism.

She knew exactly what the situation was before she flew in, and she knew she would be safe. This has been established many times over during the past week.

They lied to her before they landed to make sure that she would get inside "just in case", but they also scared her to death.

This is how a therapist would explain her distorted memory of events. Only people suffering from willfully delusional "Hillary is a bitch" thinking would come up with a conspiracy theory that she would create an elaborate lie about something like this that she would know would be easy to disprove if she knew that she was lying. The only reason to tell the story is if she believed it true.

You contort yourself in ways that are beyond absurd.

And no, that's NOT the only reason to tell that story. The reason she told that story--and the NAFTA story, and the Irish peace accords story--was to embellish her foreign policy resume. Or are you going to write those off to some sort of traumatic "suggested memory," too?

In fact I posted about those very things yesterday.

I said I could only guess why someone would have such a vivid memory of something if it didn't happen -- especially when these things can be checked -- unless it happened or she actually believed it had happened and would include fear boosted by having her 16 year old daughter with her in that dangerous place manifesting itself in a nightmare so real that it rooted itself as an actual memory.

Wait 'til these judgmental fools find out the greater magnitude of things that Obama has lied about, but by then it will be too late if he's already president.

Thank You and Solidarnosc!

Here is an interesting study. They put a group of men together and saw who became the natural leader.Then, they tested them to see who was the best liar. Invariably, the man with the best lying skills was elected to be the leader of the group.

When the put a group of women together, they would not pick the best liar to lead the group. It shows a fundamental difference in what men and women look for in leadership.

Obama is a consummate writer and storyteller---in other words, he is a liar, because that is all writers are. Being a liar is not bad. Liars can bluff in political negotiations. They can act strong and calm in conflict. They can compartmentalize.

Reagan's only qualification for president was his ability as an actor--that is another form of lying.

As with her advice, I can see what you mean and it's really quite amusing... but I can't see myself doing it...

And I still think there are at least grades of lies, the little lies of fantasy or storytelling, which do no harm, and the bigger lies like the ones GW Bush told that got us into war and left a lot of blood and dead bodies -- as well as screaming economical problems -- in its wake... and for what?

Anyway, it 5:00 AM here on the East Coast and I haven't been to bed yet.

Wonderful meeting you and reading your very interesting philosophy on the fact of lying.

~*:hi:*~

That would be art.

She wrote the true version of the story in her autobiography--that would be truth.

Since she used the story in order to bolster her credentials to be commander in chief and presented it as true, that would be a lie.

She lied. Several tmes. In a clumsy effort to bolster her "international resume."

Yuck.

It's an intentional misrepresentation when asking for votes and political support. In a representative democracy (i.e. republic), I'd call that a "misdemeanor" (as in "high crimes and misdemeanors") since it undermines the People's right to self-governance.

I cannot view it otherwise as I call for the impeachment and eventual imprisonment of members of the Cheney/Bush regime. The "standard" MUST be applied to all public statements and representations by elected officials AND candidates for high elective office. I'm hard-nosed on that ... it's a matter of principle.

as having promised anything in the area of NAFTA, social and economic programs that he will get passed, and the BIG DIFF WITH HILLARY ON IRAQ - the certainty of out in 16 months - is just a best case scenario and not to be taken as a promise?

She's like a little kid dressing up in the grown-up clothes.

and it denigrates the service of Americans who have actually put their lives on the line.

Hillary has been trying to position herself (along with John McCain)as the candidate with experience. Since she is lacking in that department, she fabricates.

And I can't BELIEVE anybody here is defending what she did. It's disgusting.

**usual disclaimer that I'm not an Obama supporter :eyes:

I'm guessing you have no military experience. For Hillary to compare her experience on a little photo op to that of real combat veterans is disgusting. It also keenly illustrates how out-of-touch she is with the lives of the people she claims to want to represent.

that that's her actual memory. That's how she remembers it. That's what happened.

Care to try another type of spin? Sorry she shot down the one you liked. If she'd have gone with your angle, she wouldn't look so damn stupid.

She's a polititian lying on her resume to the public.

The servicemen who secured the area didn't find it entertaining.
But glad that you did.

Clinton Bosnia Pilot Speaks Out
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4D9AqAwcF_0

Rezko about a letter he wrote (his explanation was convoluted). His autobiography has inaccuracies, which I have shown are artistic license, but some will try to call them lies inserted to enhance his career. And he had to consider them as he wrote them. They were not extemporaneous.

Obama lied in Iowa when Bob Novak lied and claimed that Hillary had dirt on Obama (she never had any or used any) and Obama called out Hillary in public as a dirty trickster and cost her votes in Iowa which can not stand a dirty trickster.

In a battle of tit for tat, Obama is the one who will suffer most. That is what the RNC is hoping for. Do you really want this to go on for a few more days until FOX pulls out the video or the reporters notes that show Wright saying something inflammatory on a day with Obama was definitely in Church and then your candidate has to deliver yet another speech to save his campaign?

Just do not go there. Let this whole thing drop before the fire burns up everyone.

made the comments that they were showing on the news over and over and then he later stated in the speech that he had heard some comments but not the ones that the media is spinning, so white and blacks hate each other and divide so we lose? I know the media has said he lied but from the everything that I have seen so far, he didn't lie about the situation? .

I hate it myself when someone tells me to look up something or provide a link but from what I have seen, there has been no lie there. If you do have it so I could look into this, I would appreciate a link. I am a Kucinich supporter, so I like truth and would like to know it here.

Thanks in advance.

on every single count. I am not going to post rebuttals to all that you state, but if you wish me too, I will be happy to do it. This lying has got to stop. Attack Senator Obama on his ideas, on his policies, but do not attack a 72 year old human being who has done absolutely nothing to warrant your rage. It is because of the media and people like you, who are distorting a man's life and work that he is getting death threats. If anything should happen to this man, you will share the responsibility. Death by Media by Hillary Supporters, and all the others who have engaged in this degradation of a human being.

minister. Rev. Wright is a good man. Obama made a calculated decision to claim that he was in church but never paid any attention. If people want to believe that it is their business, but it shows some selective gullibility.

Oh, and btw, the effort to deflect question---about Obama's behavior in throwing his minister aside at the first sign if conflict and his dissemblin---by leaping to the defense of his minister even though no one has uttered a word of criticism about his minister---that is a typical Obama camp ploy. I want everyone here to note it.

If you ask questions about ethics, Obama people will try to change the subject and pretend that they have been attacked on some issue of politics.

Obama is not left wing. He is a moderate. I am much more left wing that he is. I would never have given up Rev. Wright just because the press disapproved.

WHY are Hillary supporters trying to justify this?

But the Bosnia story is indisputably a LIE. She shouldn't have done it; the kicker is that she didn't NEED to make the embellishment. And it boggles the mind that anybody here would try to excuse it.

They send the first lady (and their only child!) anywhere that's too dangerous for the president to go? Are you fucking kidding me? Do you not see how absurd that is? (That more generalized comment is, to me, even more offensive than the Bosnia story).

Bringing up lies about WMDs when we are talking about inaccuracies in a reminiscence about landing in Bosnia is like bringing up slavery when talking about high school detention. The two former is not an apt comparison for the latter.

I've been a paid writer most of my professional life. :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Oh, man. That's the best laugh I've had all week.

YOU are the one who originally mentioned them in the same breath (you seem to have forgotten that); however, your original comparison was logically flawed. THAT is what I was pointing out.

You seem to think that because the magnitude of the Bosnia lie was less than the WMD lies, that somehow excuses Hillary's fabrication and makes it "art." You are wrong.

Re-read, please. Re-read.

The infamous document that Jeb Bush signed "Project for a New American Century"

We have this plan which Pat Buchanan wrote for Dick Nixon which he lied about to Congress in which he outlined the dirty tricks which I describe below and which Karl Rove is currently using to divide and conquer Dems.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/stories/buchananmemo.htm

We have this "race memo" from the Obama camp.... full of distortions. Oh my. I thought that these distortions came from the MSM. I never really looked at this memo before. I had only heard about it. I'm gonna analyze this in a separate reply at bottom.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/12/read-obama-campaign-memo-_n_81220.html

I've stated in multiple posts on this thread why this was a calculated fabrication. You can try all day long (and all night long) to romanticize it, but you will not succeed. This is not some novel you're attempting to deconstruct; this is politics at is most Machiavellian.

or anything to prove that you know what you are talking about. You are going to have to do better than that, Shakespeare. You talk about logic, but you have not offered a logical explanation for your deduction. I have presented a number of possible scenarios. It is your turn. Show me your writing skills.

In my book, being a refugee does not count as a "foreign policy skill". Running through bullets does not count either. It is an entertaining story that you use to keep the press and your donors from falling asleep, like a story about the fish that got away. People who have running through sniper fire envy are pretty strange. And don't even get me started on the sniper fire gap.

Which tells me you don't know what YOU are talking about.

I don't have to do better than anything--the consensus is that she lied. All evidence points to a lie. My logic is quite sound; you prattle on about Rousseau.

Perhaps you should be reading Machiavelli instead; that will get you much closer to the "truth."

You've only offered a number of other possible scenarios because your original was soundly refuted. I do believe you've run out of options.

And drop the condescension--I don't have to "do better," and I don't have to prove anything to you about my writing skills.

Beyond embarrassing!

we mock each other's humanity. In 2000, the press under the direction of Karl Rove and the RNC attempted to make Al Gore too self conscious to share his human side with the American public by holding him up to ridicule every time he attempted to share his human side by engaging in the past time of sharing stories---anecdotes crafted to capture the listeners attention. This is how we communicate our emotions to others. Trust me on this. I am a writer. I know the art. So is Obama. That is how he is able to reach out to so many people when he speaks.

By dissecting Gore's every story, the press made him feel threatened. He was no longer comfortable sharing stories. But candidates must do this or they look wooden. So, he slipped in the polls.

Now the press---and for some reason that only they know, people who claim to be Democrats---are doing the same thing to Hillary. They want to keep her from showing her human face, probably because when she does, as in New Hampshire, it helps her. So, they mock her and attack her when she tells an animated story. Now, she feels vulnerable for letting herself get out of control. She will have to hide behind a shell. Yesterday a bunch of MSNBC pundits were joking that she needed to act more human in order to get people to forget about this but the grand joke is that as long as they keep talking about this, she will never be comfortable showing her human side to voters, because no one wants to show their human side and have it slapped down.

If people at DU feel comfortable slapping down Hillary Clinton's human side for political gain, then I have to wonder if you really have any idea what people like Gandhi and MLK Jr and Cesare Chavez were teaching. The first order of business is to recognize that humanity is important. Humanity is beautiful.

As for Hillary the "liar" she told us that it takes a village to raise a child, she told us that there is a right wing conspiracy, she told us that we need universal health care over a decade before anyone else would broach the subject. That is a lot of truth from a liar.

What I see when I look around DU right now is a lot of people who have put their own humanity on hold for the sake of short term political expediency. They figure "Hey, after it is all over we will kiss and make up, and Hillary will be a Democrat again." Sure she will. But every time we compromise on our own humanity, even if it is only for a few months, we make it a little bit easier for Big Brother to corrupt us on down the line.

:thumbsup:

We're electing the President of the United States and integrity matters!

So does judgment. When Hillary started her run, she HAD TO KNOW that integrity was of VITAL IMPORTANCE after the embarrassing lies by her husband during his Presidency. So WHAT DOES SHE DO? She goes in front of tv cameras and tells WAR STORIES to make everybody admire her her courage. Bad judgment and low integrity mixed into one startling gaffe.

His forte is his speaking ability. JFK was an author and a great speaker. So was FDR. Jimmy Carter was an inspiring speaker. So was Bill Clinton.

You guys do not get it. Hillary is not good enough at spinning tales. Another MSNBC pundit hit the nail on the head when he said if she was a smooth talker she would have found a way to worm out of this one with words. Obama could have wiggled out of it. So could Reagan. So could Bill.

What you are really attacking Hillary for---and what they went after Gore for---is that they do not have the verbal dexterity to talk their way around any story. They are mostly reserved people who do not show emotion in public. However, people want to communicate. They want to show their human side. There is a tremendous need to connect. So, they let down their defenses. They reach out---and that snake in the grass Karl Rove slaps them down, because he knows that is the way to hurt them most.

Your defense of Hillary's lies is downright silly.

Speaking ability and integrity are two different things.

Making up fake war stories does indeed show me the human side.

A human flaw called dishonesty.

The way HIllary is being hounded for "lying" about Bosnis is SO reminiscent of the way Gore was hounded about wrong "facts" about the costs of his MIL's medication etc. -- While his critics completely missed his larger point-- the outrageous cost of health care, for example. In that case, Bushie Boy benefitted, because nobody in the press bothered to deconstruct the lies he told. And see where that double standard has taken us as a nation! Bush and Cheney are still telling huge lies with impunity.

I think HIllary's comments--whether to construct a story or because that's actually the way she remembers it--fall in the same category. Why should Democrats, especially, beat themselves up over this point which hardly matters in the larger narrative, while others's statements are given the bernefit of the doubt? It's a double standard, at minimum.

I'm afraid your fine points will just be trampled on here. But, I congratulate you for your reasoning and perspective. Very nice.

She didn't admit she was exaggerating to impress, or that she was trying to entertain.

No, she said that that was how she remembered it.

If she'd tried the OP's angle, she wouldn't be a laughingstock for trying to defend her statements.

. . . just to portray her as a liar in the campaign against her.

But, in my life experience, folks relate experiences in the past -- like her own -- in a jumble. Hers was a less than artful response, in my view, more than it was an attempt to eclipse her more careful accounting that she provided in her book.

there would be gunfire. That would have frightened her, with her daughter in the plane. Her adrenalin would have been sky high---something that would rarely happen for cool, calm Hillary. When they landed, she would have been relieved to get across the tarmac unscathed. In the immediate aftermath, she would remember the detail clearly. Memories would be laid down in her brain.

However, over time memories decay. What lasts longest are smells and emotions. So, even though she wrote on thing, 12 years later looking back, when she accessed the memory files in her brain, the animal mind which exists to warn us of danger would say "Bosnia---adrenalin surge don't go back!"

Her rational mind now would have to make sense of that panic feeling that is still as fresh in her memory now as it was then. She would not recall the circumstance. The rational mind would not accept that a warning of gunfire that proved false would have caused so much fear though of course at the time it did. Her rational mind would have remembered pictures of gunfire in Bosnia or maybe a mental image she had of imagining her daughter Chelsea running across a field being shot at and this was the meaning she ascribed to her panic memory.

This is how people get confused about their PTSD memories. They recall the fear but they do not always remember what sparked it.

So, she told the story that made the most sense to real. It felt real.

I do not see why this is so hard to understand.

She's claimed to have a very clear memory of the event--and there is (as we now know) a LOT of footage of the trip to either verify or refute her story. Having BEEN shot at before, I will tell you flatly that it's something you don't forget. If you haven't been shot at, that memory simply isn't there.

She. Lied.

And what makes it so bad is that it was a calculated lie; she created the story to try to make herself sound heroic in order to bolster her claims of foreign policy experience. It's a pattern she's shown with other things, too--the Irish peace accords and NAFTA, for example. What she's doing is just hideously wrong, and she's hurting her own campaign. This is entirely self-inflicted.

And I require no instruction from you.

Is that an art?

I defend Dems when they are unfairly attacked, no matter where the attacks come from.

:dem:

but the point is, I suppose, taken. Is it overly Barthesian to wonder about claims about "the essence of all stories"?

I suppose there is something grand, intentionally or not, about beginning a post by paraphrasing a line from "Ode on a Grecian Urn" that radically untethers it from its moorings and, in that untethering, disfiguring Keats. That grandeur is matched, though, by appropriating "Auguries of Innocence," which concerns, at its most literal level, judgment and error, while misspelling "Barthes." On some level, it does indeed remind the reader of Rousseau's Confessions, which, despite its ostensible drive toward confessionality, utterly fails at the constative level to complete its performative function.

was deliberate. The real truth is that we find what is beautiful to be true. We ascribe intelligence to beautiful men and women. We think that a shiny looking vessel must be more clean---even though a culture might show it it covered in germs. We think that symmetry must be true and patterns, because these could not be random, though these could just as easily be random as an irregular sequence. However, people around DU are acting as if they believe that Truth is Beauty--when modern science tells us that we do not even know what the truth is most of the time. Think about it for a while.

Blake's meaning in those lines--and in all his work---is crystal clear. He was essentially a Christian Kabbalist, writing about the fallacy of dualism and the beauty of nondualism---which is his world, the world of the Romantics has a human face as opposed to the inhuman coldly abstract face of "truth" devoid of humanity or reason such as that which he would ascribe to Newton. His work also comes closer to that of Lao Tsu than most western authors.

Rousseau's Confessions achieve a lot. They are a milestone in the modern urge towards self confession in which the hero author attempts to define himself in his own terms as opposed to a framework laid down by scripture or some other authority. "I y'am what I y'am" as Popeye would say. I haven't read this work in 25 years so I am just recalling a general impression. However, the book had a very "modern" feel, the way that a lot of the American Revolutionary Patriots' writings have a modern feel. They too were casting off old definitions of meaning and creating new ones, an undertaking which always gives freshness to writing. Thomas Paine, in particular, despite his quaint style, resonates with truth, because he started from scratch. You see the same in Milton, I guess because of the effect of the social revolution in England in the 17th century.

was a simple synecdoche of the drive toward disfiguration that characterizes, on the one hand, Sen Clinton's dissembling "confession" and, on the other, a post that pretends to be about "truth" and relies, like Rousseau's story about the stolen pink ribbon in Confessions--a story he has to confess twice--on exculpating guilt through substitution. The structure, as someone far smarter than I once wrote, "is self-perpetuating, en abime, as is implied in its description as exposure of the desire to expose, for each new stage in the unveiling duggests a deeper shame, a greater impossibility to reveal, and a greater satisfaction in outwitting this impossibility."

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.

The nameless is the mother of ten thousand things."


There is no truth. And yet, at the same time, Buddha gave us Four Noble Truths. All modern self help systems include some variation of these.

"The Four Noble Truths

1. Life means suffering.

2. The origin of suffering is attachment.

3. The cessation of suffering is attainable.

4. The path to the cessation of suffering is the Eightfold Path."

The way in which these "truths" differ from older western notions of "truth"---these are actions, not nouns. They are a practice, a way of living. When we give up the notion of an absolute truth, a big Nobadaddy in the sky who watches down over us with a face full of fury and when we accept that we make our own true every moment of every day, every action influencing the truth like a rate of decay problem in chemistry or an acceleration problem in calculus, then we become truly aware of the moment, then we are able to be truly alive, truly ourselves---which is all the reality we will ever know.

That is the modern truth. This is how modern art can liberate and how it can co-exit with the working class revolution. And this is why the spirit of individual expression and self validation and autobiography is so important to the art of the revolution not just of the body but of the mind.

I do not read much literaty criticism. Mostly, I write. Thanks for the Foucault suggestion. I will look for a copy of The Archeology of Knowledge since it seems to be about this topic. The quote you mentioned seems to reference this work about 19th century novelists.

http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft9k4009nr&chunk.id=ch6&toc.depth=100&toc.id=ch6&brand=eschol

I am not sure that it has a lot of bearing on a discussion of autobiographical story telling. One of the reasons I prefer to read what writers and artists have to say about art is I think they understand what motivates people to spend years of their lives hunched over a keyboard or glued to a canvas breathing stinky paint fumes.

Wallace Stevens probably knew more and knew it before any of the renowned literary critics of the late 20th century, and he said it so clearly, as only a poet can.

Sorry. Care to translate that into clear English?

:headbang:
rocknation

This is a fascinating study of how researchers were able to convince people through the power of suggestion that certain things that never happened to them did indeed happen. The implication here is that if someone or group of people were to have asked Hillary "Tell us about the time you flew into Bosnina. Wasn't it dangerous? Wasn't there gunfire?" this could gave implanted a false memory associated with the episode since it would have seemed plausible given her other memories of the events.

http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/loftus.mem.html

Lame, lame. It's a calculated lie. No amount of talk about art or science can mask that.

And it was captured, in detail, on film. As I said upthread, if you've ever been shot at--and I have (caught in the crossfire of a gang shooting in Santa Rosa, CA two years ago)--you don't forget it. And you DON'T create a memory like that if it never happened.

It just boggles the mind that you're still making excuses for the fabrication. She created the lie for a specific reason--to try to bolster her foreign policy creds (and it's in that specific context that she REPEATED the lie). It backfired horribly, as it should have.

Hillary was told she was landing with her daughter in an area of active fighting. She was terrified until they were on the tarmac and had not been shot at for at least a minute or two.

You try to figure out how long those minutes seemed to a civilian. I realize that it is hard to put yourself in the shoes of someone you need to villainize for political reasons, but forget for a moment that you have decided to strip this woman of her humanity and think about how you would have felt.

Maybe only people who are writers are capable of imagining what other people go through at moments like that. I find that difficult to believe. I have known lots of empathetic people in my life who did not write. I think most of the people here who are doing the "Gore is a liar" act about this stupid story are cringing inside or else they are confirmed Hillary haters.

One easily disproved by the film footage. One that was repeated in specific context to bolster her creds.

Stop, for just a moment, and think about the sheer absurdity of what she's said. Do you honestly think they would fly the first lady and the Clinton's ONLY daughter into such a dangerous situation? NO.

I have not "stripped this woman of her humanity." I'm horrified and offended by the deliberate theft of valor. There is no excuse, no rationalization for what she did.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/02/16/false.memory.ap/index.html

HRC told a lie to deceive her voters. They should be more annoyed than us really HRC wasn't speking to her opponents voters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRYh3Ae-DoQ">HERE IS AN EXCERPT ON HIS MOHTER

one that is more active in adults more associated with emotion and more prone to give false memories that feel true. This is credited with the very high rate of unreliable poor testimony that witnesses give in court.

http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php?p=211



I think that first point is very important. A lot of lay people are throwing around statements about how the human mind should be like a camera, recording events as a series of photons. However, we all know that witness testimony is unreliable and that DNA evidence is freeing many defendant who were convicted based upon the testimony of well intentioned witnesses who thought that they were telling the truth but who formed opinions based upon incomplete evidence, filled in the gaps and once they had extrapolated these new memories were etched in stone. Or, their old memories did not match the details of the case which the police told them must be true, so they decided that their first impressions must have been wrong and their memories "corrected" themselves.

And these cases are about important matters----testimony in a court of law. No one pays much attention to their recollections of other events.

Memory is like water. It is fluid. In all of us. Anyone who claims to have perfect recall is a liar.

But accepting that all of our memories are skewed by the tendency to narrative packaging, the character of packaging still reveals the intent or weaknesses of the individual mind. Where fact may be compared to memory, judgments as to character may be made, and here common sense and science are on equal footing. Science says that memory is faulty and selective; common sense says you can learn a lot about a person from how they describe themselves. Self aggrandizement is a juvenile trait related to ego inflation, and in a healthy psyche limited to the years of 4 - 12 or so.

It is not hard to see all the influences leading to the issue at hand, and that is the gist of the problem - they are all very human, but they are also very unpresidential.

;(

I'm not an Obama supporter, and I'm outraged by the lie. And that's exactly what it was--a deliberate, calculated LIE.

Boggles the mind that anybody continues to excuse this. Sad, really.

I have been reviewing the "evidence in the case"( :rofl: as if the country did not have pressing problems like the war and economy that I could better spend my time writing about) and I was watching Togo's account on the YouTube video up above and I realized something.

The military and the SS did everything they could to scare Hillary half to death before they landed. They had her and her daughter in body armor. They told her and her daughter that they were landing in a war zone and that they would have to duck and run for cover the minute they hit the ground (presumably because the plane could be struck by mortar fire and they would be targeted by snipers).

Now, why am I putting her daughter in bold? Because Hillary was not on this trip alone. She had her baby with her. And no one is taking into account how a mother feels when her underage darling is about to come under mortar and sniper fire.

Hillary would have gone into mom mode. If she even remembered getting out of that plane it would have been a miracle. It would have taken several minutes for the fact that no one was shooting anyone to kick in. Her blood stream would still be full of adrenalin. In the plane she had probably been praying and making deals with God. On the ground she was probably thanking God for saving her little girl.

Now, she knows that she can not talk about this or the press (and probably the Obama camp) will start attacking her as an unfit mother. They have no shame. But I am a mother. And I know what I would have been thinking about the whole time that was happening. And I will bet that any mother here knows, too.

says their not committed to any candidate. Is yours lying or art?

And check out my last journal "The News Media v. Obama III"

oh wait I saw them, and found them quite lacking.

Because the narrative form exists, we may speak and write as we like, expressing humanity, creating reality as we go. Fine. Just don't let your narrative be spoiled by fact-based video or you may be considered an unelectable liar. "Grasp of reality" is a trait valued among most people.

http://www.woodstockjournal.com/elections.html

Read and saved. It was a bit before my time - I recall being slapped by my grandfather for calling Nixon a bum during Watergate, and that my family didn't care for McGovern because he swore, but little else.

The review of "dirty tricks" is invaluable. Clearly similar manipulations are afoot these days, and likely history will regard the Bosnian story as fluff if it regards it at all. None of which changes my view of the primary results...but it is good to have an idea of what is to come after.

...to excuse and justify an outrageous lie. <shaking head> You deserve better than Hillary Clinton.

http://www.woodstockjournal.com/elections.html



CREEP alumnus, Roger Stone is actively and openly working for the RNC in this years election. As KO just revealed tonight, Karl Rove has just been outed officially in Texas as working for the McCain campaign.

http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:vZ4NzVuD3zI14M:

I have to thank the poster above who was going on about being so sure that he/she had proof that Hillary intended to lie. I looked up some "proof" of other lies and happened upon the Obama "Race Memo" and discovered some real whoppers here.

There are three lies contained within this memo, all of which would have been obvious to anyone who reads Media Matters or any other reputable media watchdog site. Presumably the major political campaigns do not get their news reporting straight from CNN without double checking it for accuracy. That would be irresponsible in a would be president.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/12/read-obama-campaign-memo-_n_81220.html





Oh no they didn't! As Media Matters kept documenting during the media frenzy , the NYTs and other news sites kept altering Hillary's words which all know now were about how JFK (Obama) could not pass the civil rights legislation that LBJ (Hillary) could. No one was comparing anyone to MLK Jr.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200801120003

Her speech was posted in YouTube in a butchered form almost immediately by someone who tried to use it for race baiting purposes. However, Media Matters was on the case immediately, too, which meant that the correct story was always in the public realm for a fully staffed and informed presidential campaign to access. By attempting to exploit to altered story, the Obama camp was participating in a lie in order to create the impression that Hillary had showed disrespect MLK Jr in order to anger Black voters. Is the Obama camp going to claim that they made a simple mistake? How come they get to make mistakes and Hillary can only tell lies?

Uh Oh! Here is another debunked claim! The Mark Penn said "cocaine" distortion fabricated by Chris Matthews.



I am familiar with this one from my Media Atrocities journals. But here is Media Matters on this one, just to show that the Obama camp knew full well that this was bullshit.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200712170004



Tweety said things like "Do things go better with coke?" during that show and asked his guests repeatedly if Obama sold and shared drugs. After this show, he and Schuster and several other MSNBC pundits created a lie that Penn came on the show and introduced the topic of Cocaine. Now it looks like Axelrod came on the show and conspired with Tweety to set Penn up. Someone want to prove to me that it isn't so?



But Clinton never said Obama's campaign was a fairy tale. He said his statement of his record on the war was one.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200801120001



Fortunately, Obama disavowed this memo. I hope that this was a case of a Rove 1972 style dirty trick that was nipped in the bud. Because it would be terrible to think that the Obama campaign gives its staff members the impression that tactics like this are acceptable.

However, if we are to claim "Rove 1972 style dirty trick" then we must admit that this whole primary is likely riddled with dirty tricks and that nothing that we see or hear from the corporate media---including stories about Hillary being a mentally unstable liar---is what it seems.

Hi, Mr./Ms Taylor--

I wanted to thank you first for your recent excellent work on exposing the full catastrophe of the MSM's "coverage" of this campaign. And I arrived too late to recommend it, but I can at least second all your remarks, and encourage you



I felt from the first time I heard the "lying about Bosnia" charge that Sen. Clinton's account of her landing in Bosnia was at most a too-brightly colored memory, a false memory, rather than a lie. It would have been stupid to lie, and neither she nor her husband are stupid. They are both too intelligent to lie, and probably too ethical and moral as well. Some of the work you've done here seems to suggest that someone might have doctored the sound out of a purported tape of the landing. I would find it far more believable that the MSM doctored tape than that Sen. Clinton lied.

But there are those on this board and in this thread who absolutely refuse to consider either an honest report of a false memory or even the possibility that there might have been some truth to her account. And I have been suspecting for some weeks that this board hosts some spooks (CIA plants) or some dirty tricksters, or both. This thread, and several others on DU, reads just as though the anti-Clinton contributors were following Karl Rove's script. To wit: there is just one possible explanation for the apparent discrepancy between the (apparent) fact, and Sen. Clinton's account of it, and that explanation is that SHE LIED, and she did it to DECEIVE stupid people into believing some nonsense or another. This is all simple-minded in the extreme, but either lots of people believe it, or some people are professionally interested in insisting it is the only believable explanation.

Thank you again, and keep up the good work!

Put down that bong and step out of the echo chamber for a few minutes. Take a walk, shoot some hoops, do a little gardening, whatever. I'm the last person who would defend the character of the CIA but if you really believe that they'd bother to troll some internet forum you need to gain some perspective.

Or maybe I'm a CIA troll trying to divert you from your suspicions by ridiculing them. Of course if you thought that then your paranoia would only increase, drawing you into a hall of mirrors where nothing is as it seems, friends are foes, the truth is a lie, night is day, Obama is a former POW, brainwashed in captivity and waiting to attain power before being activated by his Communist handlers (Oh wait...).

Look, I'm sorry to be a smartass and I have no illusions about the ability of government to abuse the people it governs. But paranoid babble makes us look ridiculous and harms our credibility and our cause.

"Paranoid babble makes us look riciculous and harms our credibility and our cause."

This is what the smart-as-whips left wing commentators argue when we suggest that we really ought to find out what actually happened on 9/11/01.

So, I'm wondering whether you would accept that the NYTimes, Time, the broadcast networks, and other major "news" outlets could have been infiltrated by psy-op warriors. I think I have been reading their "journalism" most of my adult life. And we all know that the blogsphere is increasingly the news and opinion source of choice for half the population. As for infiltrators from the ranks of Rovians, I would think that would be ... well, obvious. Do you think that all right-wing zealots froth at the mouth enough to give their identities away at first glance? Do you think they would scruple to pretend to be us so as to guide our opinions, or undermine our confidence, or distract us from the most important work before us? Do you think they are nice guys and gals?

Actually, I was thinking that it would be, or should be, obvious, that the blogs and boards are infiltrated by alert opinion shapers from the other side. The Republican affection for dirty tricks is well documented. This does increase one's paranoia, but it also increases one's powers of discrimination among opinions, and opinion mongers. Sifting the wheat from the chaff on the internet is not work for children, unless they're very clever ones.

Bullshit is more like it.

I have a link here so you can watch it. This time really watch it. What is missing? The sound. The only sound you hear is one word. Otherwise CBS has edited out the sound. Why? Would we have heard gunfire or mortar rockets in the distance? Might sounds like these have caused someone to worry?

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/bbc-reports-on-hillary-clintons-bosnia-claims/1234772335

Also note that the video is heavily edited. We do not see Hillary disembarking from the plane. If she was going to show panic/cringing/running it would be in those first few moments, until she realized that the security detail on board the plane was wrong, everything was fine.

Originally, CBS could have edited the film the way they did---no sound and choppy editing without the usual obligatory scene of the VIP disembarking from the plane, standing aloft and waving at the crowd (the absence of this cliche moment is striking)---for political reasons to give America the impression that everything was A-OK in Bosnia.

Now, Viacon-CBS does Bush's bidding so that they will not have to sell any of their media holdings.

Someone should ask to see the raw footage.

Someone should ask why there is no other video of the scene (from Europe) and why no one in the press has looked for other journalists accounts or even military records of the events that days. For instance, the military press should have been on hand.

After viewing the footage, I have to say that it does not rule out the presence of gunfire in the vicinity, the sound of which would have been alarming and does not rule out the possibility that Hillary actually showed fear when disembarking.

Above you're trying to make the case that this was all a false memory, and now you're claiming it could be true, but just not on the video. If it's a false memory, when did it get implanted? Apparently since she wrote her autobiography, since she gives a quite different account there. And if it's true, why didn't she give the explanation you just proposed when the issue first came up instead of saying that she "misspoke"? You've got your reasoning so tied up on knots that you're contradicting yourself at every turn. Happens when you try to spin a pack of lies.

as always!

Thanks!!:kick:

The questions I want answered are:
1) Did she seriously oppose NAFTA

and

2) Did she agree with Bill when he signed the 1996 telecommunications act

There is a difference between truth and fiction. No pretty words will ever change that. Period. The only question is whether your back hurts from all the twisting yourself into a knot to defend the indefensible.

of the truth of that moment of time and place. Sinbad's version is a fiction. He says it was not scary, but he had to felt some fear when they told them that they were having to change their landing because of gunfire on the runway. Men just repress that emotion. Or maybe he got excited instead of scared

Everyone dissembles in order to tell a narrative, because the story is an attempt to impose order on jumbled emotions.

Nothing is ever simple when it comes to human emotions. We are always feeling at least a dozen things at once. Anyone who denies this is lying to themselves. Hillary was describing an event that was emotionally charged for a civilian.

Just when I think you can't contort yourself any further.... :rofl:

Hillary has proven herself ruthless in her ambition, shameless in her lies. Anybody making excuses for her might as well make excuses for George W. Bush, who is similarly shameless in lying.

Watch this video which isn't boring and shows Hillary repeatedly telling and embellishing the Tuzla whopper. Watch the refutaions, the film of the event. Watch her shameless, conscienceless sloughing off of having been caught in another lie:

http://www.veracifier.com/episode/TPM_20080327


This person is capable of doing whatever she wants just as Shrub is. She is not fighting dirty to become President in order to help US. God help us.

McCamy Taylor has done good journalism for DU for several years, she demonstrated against the inaugeration of George Bush in 2001 and she attended the peace protest in New Orleans in 2005, just weeks before the great storm that flooded the city. She is a committed liberal and a person of high integrity. It saddens me to see fellow DU'ers call her a liar. If she says she is not partisan in the primary campaign, she should be taken at her word.

To accuse of her being a Hillary supporter when she says she is not a Hillary supporter over and over is to call her a liar.

The rules specifically say you can't call a jerk a jerk, but that is just an example. It is the spirit of the rules that we should honor.

We should not direct insults at one another. Why not raise the level of discourse? That is what McCamy Taylor has been trying to do for a long time. When she has allowed her tone to grow sarcastic, it is always in response to some particularly snide comment by a critic.

If you have been reading this journal for awhile, you will have seen quite a few favorable comments about Obama and some very mild criticism. The same with Hillary Clinton. That does not sound like a committed advocate to me.

The smartest thing that Obama supporters could do is to read your posts. They need to wrap their minds around the things you are trying so valiantly to say. The more they tie themselves up with their mono-political rantings, they less useful they are to his success. Many of those who don't favor Obama as the candidate could help them, but I see that you are about the only one still posting here who has a point to make that is not in line with the faithful. They ignore and defame dissent at their own peril.

Wonderful post. You show much integrity and grit to keep trying to post real truth here where it take a back seat to dogma.

"Opposition is true friendship" Willian Blake

Remember how he was ripped to shreds for supposedly "inventing the internet"? And discovering the mess at Love Canal?

Dems laughed at him then the same as they're laughing at HRC now -- and we're only hurting ourselves in the process, every time we buy the media's distortions.

When Clinton said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" he had a very clear definition of what "sexual relations" meant. Ken Starr, from his interviews with Tripp who had talked with Monica knew what "sexual relations" meant for Bill Clinton. This is the meaning of the phrase "perjury trap." It is the equivalent of asking a Spanish speaking defendant a question in English which he can not possibly understand then charging him with perjury when he answers it incorrectly.

Bill Clinton's legal team was able to use this defense successfully to avoid criminal prosecution for perjury. Starr knew that Clinton was answering the question about "sex" truthfully insofar as Clinton understood the meaning of the word "sex".

At the time, many ardent Clinton bashers posted in the internet that no one in America could possibly claim to believe that oral sex was not "sexual relations". Few would stand up to admit that they shared this belief. Being a family physician, I was well aware of the fact that many people shared Clinton's belief and that you have to question people specifically about each sex act---oral sex, anal sex, mutual masturbation---because to a lot of Americans, "sex" or "sexual relations" means only heterosexual penile-vaginal intercourse--the kind that can result in pregnancy aka "going all the way."
In particular, many believe that anything less than this is not "cheating" or "losing one's virginity."

The controversy was burst wide open when JAMA the Journal of the AMA published a survey of college students asking them if oral sex constituted sexual relations.

http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/281/3/275



This confirmed what every health professional already knew. What I found fascinating about the study was that the scientific validation of what over half of the American public believed provided a green light for people to come forward and say "Yeah, I believe just what Clinton believes!"

Before the JAMA study, they had been shamed by the vocal denunciations of the Clinton's critics who called them liars, fornicators, hicks and every other vile name in the book. No one wanted to be associated with someone who was receiving a public tarring.

But, once there was "scientific proof" that they had a consensus opinion behind them, then people were not afraid to step forward.

So, what does this say about the nature of the truth? It says that it is highly subjective. And that people with an agenda can present their case so loudly and so angrily that even a dissenting majority will be afraid to disagree. The nation saw this with the Joe McCarthy hearings.