Actually Lying

"As I worked closely with President Bush, I would come to believe that sometimes he convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment. It is not unlike a witness in court who does not want to implicate himself in wrongdoing, but is also concerned about perjuring himself. So he says, 'I do not recall.' The witness knows no one can get into his head and prove it is not true, so this seems like a much safer course than actually lying. Bush, similarly, has a way of falling back on the hazy memory defense to protect himself from potential political embarrassment. Bush rationalizes it as being acceptable because he is not stating unequivocally anything that could be proven false. If something later is uncovered to show what he knew, then he can deny lying in his own mind."

Scott McClellan. What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deceit

Umm... since when is pretending not to remember something to get out of saying it not "actually lying?" The idea that a falsehood is only "actually lying" if it can be proven without resorting to a psychic or a polygraph is a new one to me. But perhaps this is what lead the administration into trouble. If, even now, McClellan can't bring himself to characterize making ANY statement one knows to be false an "actual lie," it's easy to see how he went along to get along at the time.

Rerun

Haven't we seen this story before?

If this is the same kid who made a break for it last year, he must really be desperate, after being placed on a year's probation - last July. To risk time in juvenile detention rather than wait another sixty days seems pretty hard up to get to Texas. Either that, or perhaps more likely, he discounted the idea that he'd be caught or that his grandfather would send him back.

Now Playing

Not being that much of a movie buff, I wasn't planning to go out and see "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." But, this being the United States, and the movie being positioned as the Big Spring Blockbuster™, you'd have to live under a very large rock to keep it from seeping into your consciousness. And so, I came to learn that this time around, the Evil Enemy™ are the Communists.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Russian Communists are upset about the way Communists are portrayed, calling the movie "crude anti-Soviet propaganda" and calling for the film to be banned in Russia. In a similar vein, the government of Myanmar wasn't very happy about the latest "Rambo" movie. (Burmese dissidents, apparently, were.)

I guess this is a side effect of the fact that Hollywood pretty much rules the worldwide movie industry. American movies that vilify this government or that movement are slammed by aggrieved parties. But you almost never hear anything about foreign movies that cast the United States as the faceless and cartoonish villains. Gary Busey and Billy Zane took a little heat for playing evil Americans in "Kurtlar vadisi - Irak" (Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, in English), but it's unlikely that very many Americans have heard of the film. (And then, it seems mainly because Gary Busey [who plays a particularly nasty Jewish-American doctor] is well-known enough that the criticism of him got around.) It's interesting that "Bigotry" is listed as a Plot Keyword in the movie's IMDB listing - along with other winners such as "Racial Prejudice," "Ignorance," "Lies," "Anti Americanism," "Racist" and "Anti-Semitism" but these are all likely placed there by aggrieved viewers, rather than being an official government stance. The movie doesn't have an American rating (according to IMDB), so it apparently was never released in the United States, although the BBC said that a US release was planned.

There have to be more foreign movies out there that deal with the United States. Maybe we'd understand a little more about how the rest of the world understands us if we were exposed to them every so often.

It Sucks MORE To Be ME

Okay, quiz time. Multiple choice:

1 Which group faces more hurdles and discrimination in life, and a more marked reduction in "life chances?"
2. Which group has been so oppressed, so put down and so excluded from the Halls of Power (TM) that they are singularly deserving of having one of their number hold the Presidency of the United States of America?
3. A member of which group cannot be elected to the White House, because America "isn't ready?"

Possible answers:
A. African Americans
B. Women

Something tells me it's time to start betting on President McCain. It's been said that the Republicans have been assembling thousands of pages of dirt on whomever the Democratic nominee turns out to be (smart money is still on Obama). As near as I can see, it would be a complete waste of time. At the rate things are going, no matter what happens, it seems that a pretty sizable chunk of the supporters of the losing candidate are going to feel victimized by people who didn't vote for the "right" candidate. All the Republicans are going to have to do is continue the conflict between African-Americans and women over who's been victimized more over the years, and Senator Obama (yes, I'm calling the election for him - it's not like I'm going out on a limb here) will go from being a symbol of American strides against racism to a symbol of an entrenched and intractable sexism. Couple that with a revival of the "Southern Strategy," and chalk up another President in the "R" column. And you know that the Republicans will revive the Southern Strategy - although it might wind up being re-branded as the Appalachian Strategy, given the primary results from West Virginia and Kentucky. If there is any chance of it making the difference between winning and losing a state, they'd be idiots not to. Being a good sport is laudable, but playing to win is smarter.

So, McCain wins in November, and the Clinton and Obama die-hards start pointing fingers, and "the Man" (whomever that is) wins in the way that the Man always does - by playing his enemies off against one another. And African-Americans and Women continue to squabble over the right to regard themselves as the bigger victim. Not only is the fight over who's been victimized more unwinnable, it's pointless and toxic. It's also predicated on the bizarre assumption that other a victory for one group is a win for EVERYONE, while a victory for the other group is simply oppressive business as usual. It's past time it ended.

Obnoxious Pander of the Week

"It shows naivety and inexperience and lack of judgment to say he wants to sit down across the table from an individual (President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) who leads a country (Iran) that says that Israel is a stinking corpse."
Senator John McCain (R - Arizona) "Obama, McCain trade blows after Bush's 'appeasement' remarks"

The idea that sitting down and negotiating with hostile nations is somehow a bad idea on its face is utterly moronic. My impression of Senator McCain is that he's smarter than that - especially since the only alternative is doing nothing until the feces hit the fan, and then going to war. The idea, advanced by President Bush (although not him alone) that negotiating with hostile governments adds an unacceptable degree of legitimacy to their interests takes subjective moral judgment to the last place it has any business being - international politics. McCain has always come off as being more pragmatic than that, and as too much of a straight talker to indulge in the pretense that American political moralizing tends to entail.