VDH: The fundamental dishonesty of Barack Obama

Victor Davis Hanson: Just Make Stuff Up

In his four months in office our new president has demonstrated an alienation from truth that goes far beyond the common strategic lie for political purposes. Like a political Linnaeus, Victor Davis Hanson has closely examined the universe of Obama's lies, giving it order and opening it up to analysis.

First, what Hanson calls Trotskyization, but Orwellian, a la "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia," works, too. Obama has a way of doing a 180 on issues and never acknowledging the reversal. Just one of Hanson's examples:

What is stunning about Obama’s hostile demagoguery about Bush’s War on Terror is not that he has now contradicted himself on one or two particulars. Instead, he has reversed himself on every major issue — renditions, military tribunals, intercepts, wiretaps, Predator drone attacks, the release of interrogation photos, Iraq (and, I think, soon Guantanamo Bay) — and yet never acknowledged these reversals.

Next, The Big Lie." Finesse isn't always necessary; Obama doesn't shrink from telling obvious, verifiable lies. He did this during the campaign, repeating lies about his opponent's policies long after the truth was clear. Again, just one of VDH's examples:

The president lectures Congress on its financial excesses. He advocates “pay as you go” budgeting. But he remains silent about the unfunded liabilities involved in his own proposals for cap-and-trade, universal health care, and education reform, which will in aggregate require well over a trillion dollars in new spending on top of existing deficits — but without any “pay as you go” proposals to fund them.

"Outright historical dissimulation": Obama constantly lies about history.

On matters of history, we now know that much of what President Obama says is either not factual or at least misleading. He predictably errs on the side of political correctness. During the campaign, there was his inaccurate account of his great-uncle’s role in liberating Auschwitz. In Berlin, he asserted that the world — rather than the American and British air forces — came together to pull off the Berlin Airlift.

In the Cairo speech, nearly every historical allusion was nonfactual or inexact: the fraudulent claims that Muslims were responsible for European, Chinese, and Hindu discoveries; the notion that a Christian Córdoba was an example of Islamic tolerance during the Inquisition; the politically correct canard that the Renaissance and Enlightenment were fueled by Arab learning; the idea that abolition and civil rights in the United States were accomplished without violence — as if 600,000 did not die in the Civil War, or entire swaths of Detroit, Gary, Newark, and Los Angeles did not go up in flames in the 1960s.

Here we see the omnipotent influence of Obama’s multicultural creed: Western civilization is unexceptional in comparison with other cultures, and history must be the story of an ecumenical, global shared brotherhood.

The half-, and less-than-half, truth. This often includes Obama's trademark moral equivalence technique, so misleading and effective when he's abroad and trying to suck up to foreign leaders by denigrating his own country.

He lectures about equivalent culpability between Muslims and Americans without mentioning American largess to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians. He mostly ignores American military efforts to save Muslims in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Somalia — and American criticism of Russia’s and China’s treatment of their own persecuted Muslim minorities.

[. . .]

Obama surely knows that a mosque is acceptable in America and Europe in a way that a church is not in most of the Gulf States, or that Muslims freely voice their beliefs in Rotterdam and Dearborn in a way Westerners dare not in Tehran, Damascus, or Riyadh.

Then we have the "noble lie,"

or the assumption that facts are to be cited or ignored in accordance with the intended aim: Interfaith reconciliation means downplaying Muslim excesses, or treating Islamic felonies as equivalent with Western misdemeanors.

Hanson ultimately examines the reasons for this ingrained dishonesty: moral relativism, ego, the lapdog media, and the multi-culti environment from which Obama emerged.

Hanson ends with this prediction:

The problem in the next four years will be not just that the president of the United States serially does not tell the truth. Instead, the real crisis in our brave new relativist world will be that those who demonstrate that he is untruthful will themselves be accused of lying.

But we crossed that line a long time ago.

Please read the whole thing.

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