The New Truthfulness: Lie and then admit you are lying, but you’re O.K. with it.

The fallout of the blowout election is occurring all over the place in the ranks of the Republicans and their conservative followers. It is all very amusing to watch. But a couple of nuggets really hit me when I saw these.

Rush Limbaugh, Mr. “Dittohead” himself, just admitted that he is full of crap and doesn’t believe at least some of the stuff he says to literally millions of his listeners. This is what he said the other day.

The way I feel is this: I feel liberated, and I'm going to tell you as plainly as I can why. I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don't think deserve having their water carried. Now, you might say, "Well, why have you been doing it?" Because the stakes are high! Even though the Republican Party let us down, to me they represent a far better future for my beliefs and therefore the country's than the Democrat [sic] Party does and liberalism.

..snip..

I'm a radio guy! I understand what this program has become in America and I understand the leadership position it has. I was doing what I thought best, but at this point, people who don't deserve to have their water carried, or have themselves explained as they would like to say things but somehow aren't able to? I'm not under that kind of pressure.

So, here is Rush saying that he said what he needed to say because he needed to support his Republican party. No matter that he didn’t believe in what he was saying, he said it out of necessity. Hey, lying is lying; the circumstances in which the lie was told do not matter. In fact, the more serious the situation you are lying about, the more serious the lie. “White lies” that ultimately don’t do much harm are still lies. But when you are lying about the big stuff, hey, that’s some serious lying going on.

So, Rush has come out and rather admitted that he will say whatever he feels necessary in order to bolster what he believes in. Doesn’t this call into question everything that he says? Literally, everything he has ever said on the radio is now suspect.

The same goes for President Bush. Many people are now pointing out that, several days prior to the election, Bush gave both Cheney and Rumsfeld a ringing endorsement and said that both of them would be in is administration until the end. Fast forward now to one day after the incredibly devastating election. Devastating to the Republicans, anyway. Rumsfeld is gone, resigned and/or fired. When asked about it by a reporter, who pointed out the contradiction with what Bush said just days earlier, Bush replied that he responded the way he did was to deflect the question and get on to another question. Bush already knew that what he was saying wasn’t true. He said he didn’t want to get into telling the truth about Rumsfeld right before the election. End of story.

Bush apparently didn’t have any sort of problem with this. He lied when it suited him. He had already been caught out in a similar situation during the Plamegate debacle. Bush already knew that Rove and Libby were involved in leaking Valerie Plame’s name to the press when he said in a press conference that he would fire anyone in his administration who was involved. And he also knew that he wasn’t going to fire them. He said whatever he felt was expedient at the time.

Al Franken nailed it with the title of his book, “Lies And The Lying Liars That Tell Them”. These folks have now admitted that they lie whenever the need arises, and they do so without any sort of guilty conscience about it whatsoever. They see nothing wrong with this. By extension, everything that the Bush administration or Rush Limbaugh is now suspect. (As if we didn’t know that before.) Everything. Truth is secondary to supporting whatever it is you believe in, in whatever way necessary. The war in Iraq, outing Valerie Plame/Wilson as an undercover CIA agent, tax cuts for the top 1% of the country, being concerned about the devastation and anguish caused by Hurricane Katrina, everything. Every single thing that these people have ever told us is now under suspicion, by their own admission!

At least they are straightforward enough to admit it. However, I just can’t understand how they think that the country will casually accept being lied to as a matter of policy. That is what we came to expect out of the Soviet Union and Pravda. That is not what we expect out of the United States of America.