"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

President Liar

Victor Davis Hanson has a piece up that includes this paragraph:

We are at a point now where no one can verify anything from the president’s past, given that his own memoir was largely mythographic — details about his family, friends, and girlfriends made up to enhance his preferred narrative of racial oppression. If a writer will fudge on the very details of his own dying mother’s seeking to obtain health care, then he will fudge on almost anything. And if the Birthers were unhinged for suggesting that Obama was born in Kenya, what are we to make of Obama himself allowing just that untruth to appear on his literary agent’s biography of him for over a decade?

Just last week, Mark Steyn had a similar piece:

Courtesy of David Maraniss’s new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama’s identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram’pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack’s “memoir” who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama’s autobiography as “a symbol of young blackness” was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people’s valiant struggle against colonialism met his actual demise when he “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes.”

This has been a fairly big story in the blogosphere, but doesn't seem to have made much of a dent in the broader culture.   Shouldn't it be the biggest story in the world, bigger even than Fast and Furious (which isn't big enough) or Solyndra (ditto), that the President of the United States is a demonstrated liar?   Instead of being big news, we're reduced to what amount in the grand historical scheme to right-wing cranks (sorry, Victor and Mark, but that's how the MSM views you) making fun of the President's prevarications.

Miming VDH's formula (if Obama will lie about his mother, what won't he lie about), let me put it this way:   if the President is a liar, why should we trust anything in our government?   Why isn't that moving the polls more?

Is there really 40% of America out there who will vote for a Democrat over any Republican -- even a fairly moderate man of lifelong, demonstrated probity like Mitt Romney -- even if the Democrat is a proven liar?

I guess so.

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