Is Blair a Liar? Brits Don't Care

Such a tactic is beguiling because, to True Believers, the other side's triumphs are never on the up and up; they must be the result of hoodwinking the hapless electorate. The problem with this approach was pointed out to me by a political strategist last week: "Voters think all politicians are liars. So telling them that someone is a particularly effective liar doesn't work."

It especially doesn't work for the Tories because they're accusing Prime Minister Blair of duplicity on an issue about which they actually agree with him. Conservative leader Michael Howard says he would have supported the invasion of Iraq even without weapons of mass destruction — the subject of Blair's supposed dissembling. By nevertheless making the L-word the centerpiece of today's election, Howard comes off as opportunistic and unprincipled.

How can you tell if a political party is brain-dead? Easy. It spends an entire campaign denouncing the incumbent as a smarmy, good-for-nothing liar, rather than outlining its own agenda. The Republicans tried it against Bill Clinton in 1996, the Democrats tried it against George W. Bush in 2004, and now in Britain the Conservatives are trying it, with equal lack of success, against Tony Blair.

first thought: ohh crap the LA Times might be figuring it out

Second thought: Howie Dean and the DNC isn't going to listen to anything but their own ideas anyway.

Third thought: Oh no the puppy just crapped on the floor...LOL

Is the LA Times a liar? Its subscribers don't care.

DING! Post of the day. There's a columnist and local commentator in the LA area, Jill Stewart. She used to work for the LA Times and left out of disgust with their uber-liberalism and especially the way they just abdicated any serious reporting on local politics. It took Stewart (writing in the now defunct New Times) to tell us such things as how Jackie Goldberg would cry on cue at City Council meetings to get her way...and that it always worked. They preferred to just float it all away with cursory blurbs on a pink cloud of lefty spin that told you nothing, while focusing primarily on national and world news. They see themselves as a wannabe NY Times, a serious cosmopolitan publication of...(drum roll)...GREAT IMPORT! So local politics was pretty much beneath them. (As you can guess, they rarely got that right either.) Stewart was right -- if you only read the LA Times, you had absolutely NO IDEA what was going on at Temple Street, or about any other local politics, except whenever they wanted to skewer some Orange or Riverside County Republican Assemblyman or State Senator. They also gush for pages on some NPR show that nobody listens to while completely ignoring high-rated local talk radio. (Wonder why? Hmmmm...)

What's worse, being wrong or lying? When it comes to defense, it seems they are equally as bad. LA Times is very sensitive to calling people "wrong" due to all the factual errors they have reported themselves in the past few months. So they choose to just throw out "Is Blair Lying?".

LA Times feels itself as a member of the "wrong" population subgroup, so they have sympathy for those people. It enhances their esteem to distinguish their own behavior with "lying", which is intentionally deceiving.

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