WaPo: The Mendacity of Hope: What We Want to Believe About Obama

The Mendacity of Hope: What We Want to Believe About Obama
by Richard Cohen, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/31/AR2007123101662.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

John Edwards lied about the cost of his haircuts. Fred Thompson lied about lobbying for a pro-choice outfit. John McCain insists that the United States was founded as a "Christian nation." Mitt Romney concocted the story about how his father marched with Martin Luther King Jr. And Rudy Giuliani is a one-man fib machine -- everything from why he had to provide police protection for his then-mistress to the survivability rates for prostate cancer in Britain. Yet it is something Barack Obama said that bothers me most of all because Obama is a new kind of politician. He is supposed to be coolly authentic.

What concerns me is the lie or fib or misstatement -- call it what you want -- involved in Obama's assertion that more young black men are in prison than in college. It is a shocking statistic -- and it is wrong. But when The Post's lonesome but formidable truth squad, Michael Dobbs, brought this to the attention of the Obama campaign, he not only got the brushoff but the assertion was later repeated.

You can appreciate the usefulness of this false claim. It says something compelling about the plight of young, black males that is essentially true -- their condition amounts to a calamity and something has to be done. But this particular comparison is wrong, and Obama must know it by now. Ought to be true is not the same as true.

After all, it ought to be true that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It ought to be true that he had ties with Osama bin Laden. It ought to be true that aluminum tubes were intended for a nuclear weapons program, and it ought to be true, really, that none of this mattered since what mattered most of all was a larger truth: Hussein had to go and the Middle East had to be urban-renewed for the sake of democracy.

In a provocative recent essay for the New Republic's Web site, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz coined the phrase "the delusional style in American punditry." He applied it to Obama's fans in the American press. His argument is that certain journalists are so enthralled by the sheer Obama-ness of Obama that they are willing to overlook everything they know about the fundamental value of experience.

In this regard, Wilentz cites a Boston Globe editorial that used Obama's memoir, "Dreams From My Father," to extol Obama's real-life experiences. Wilentz is not persuaded. To him, the book is "not exactly a portrait of sterling honesty or authenticity."

I and others have written that Obama -- as he himself says in the introduction to this book -- invented composite characters and altered chronology. But as the Chicago Tribune also reported, some of the events Obama passionately details seem not to have happened at all. Maybe his memory played tricks on him. Mine sure does.

But I am not running for president. And if I were, I'd pay particular attention to the truth -- to the nagging facts that sometimes get in the way of a good story. After all, it is not only Iraq that has been destroyed in the past several years -- so has whatever trust the American people still had in their government. I have been at this game a long time, but for sheer manipulation of the facts, for a fudging of the truth, for the occasional bald lie, the Bush administration takes the cake. Cheney and truth cannot be found in the same sentence.

So the cavalier dismissal of Dobbs, The Post's truth-hunter, is troubling. Since he writes that the Obama campaign would not comment, it is reasonable to assume that it doesn't give a damn -- that this is a little matter and the candidate is engaged in something grand. The phony statistic is, in its way, like a composite. There's a larger truth here, get it?

No. When John McCain sticks to his insistence that the Constitution established the United States as a "Christian nation," I don't like it, but I know McCain and I know his character. He has a record in public life going back, essentially, to 1967, when he was shot down over Vietnam and repeatedly tortured by his captors. Back in 2000, I might have gotten a bit "delusional" over him, but I had my reasons.

I am a bit enamored with Obama as well. But the man's public record is thin and the glow from him is distracting and my intuition tells me that sometimes intuition is no substitute for experience. So, I'll sit back and watch some more -- and wait to see if Obama or anyone in his campaign calls back Dobbs and corrects the record. "Facts are stubborn things," John Adams once said. So, to our regret, we keep learning the hard way.

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/14096.html

Cohen gets mendacious about mendacity
Posted January 1st, 2008



It’s tempting to skip past Richard Cohen columns just as a matter of habit, but today’s op-ed is so odd, one wonders how Washington Post editors even let it run.

The piece, ostensibly, is about taking Barack Obama to task over a misleading statistic he used in a speech. But the piece starts out badly and goes downhill from there:

John Edwards lied about the cost of his haircuts. Fred Thompson lied about lobbying for a pro-choice outfit. John McCain insists that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.” Mitt Romney concocted the story about how his father marched with Martin Luther King Jr. And Rudy Giuliani is a one-man fib machine — everything from why he had to provide police protection for his then-mistress to the survivability rates for prostate cancer in Britain. Yet it is something Barack Obama said that bothers me most of all….

The irony is rich. Cohen wrote a piece about the importance of accuracy, and the first nine words — “John Edwards lied about the cost of his haircuts” — are false. If Cohen wants to raise a fuss about the cost of Edwards’ haircuts, that would merely be annoying (though it would be consistent with the Post’s disconcerting obsession with the subject). Instead, the columnist emphasizes the importance of getting the details right, while making up a “lie” that never happened.

The McCain example is also bizarre. Yes, the Arizona senator claimed we were founded as a “Christian nation,” and we were not. But that’s not an example of mendacity; it’s an example of ignorance. McCain wasn’t lying; he was just foolishly pandering to the religious right with nonsense. That’s worthy of criticism, of course, but for different reasons.

If Cohen really wanted to throw McCain into the mix, he could have at least found some actual examples of the senator’s mendacity, such as McCain’s lies about his criticism of the Rumsfeld policy, or his spectacular lies about going for a safe stroll in a Baghdad market in March.

One gets the impression that Cohen, who’s been around long enough to know better, just casually threw in some accusations of dishonesty in the hopes of achieving some kind of “balance.” Regrettably he did so a) without getting his facts straight; and b) in a column about the importance of people getting their facts straight.

It’s really not a good way to start out the new year.

And what of Obama’s “lie”?

What concerns me is the lie or fib or misstatement — call it what you want — involved in Obama’s assertion that more young black men are in prison than in college. It is a shocking statistic — and it is wrong. But when The Post’s lonesome but formidable truth squad, Michael Dobbs, brought this to the attention of the Obama campaign, he not only got the brushoff but the assertion was later repeated.

Now, if this is right, and Obama repeated a bogus statistic, he’s in the wrong, no doubt about it. There have been far more dramatic lies from presidential candidates, and this one seems largely inconsequential, but would-be presidents should strive for 100% accuracy, regardless of party.

But Cohen applies a standard here that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

When John McCain sticks to his insistence that the Constitution established the United States as a “Christian nation,” I don’t like it, but I know McCain and I know his character. He has a record in public life going back, essentially, to 1967, when he was shot down over Vietnam and repeatedly tortured by his captors. Back in 2000, I might have gotten a bit “delusional” over him, but I had my reasons.

I see. So, McCain lied, even though he didn’t, and that’s fine, because Cohen has known him for a long while. Obama cited a bogus statistic, and that’s worth an entire column, because Cohen hasn’t known him very long.

It’s going to be a long year, isn’t it.

"I know McCain and I know his character"--McCain HAS no character! He fucking sold his family's honor up the river for political advantage, and lies incessantly! I see how this is going to go. The media never got off of the Straight Talk Express, after all these years. Ugh.

man the swiftboats!