Posted on 06/24/2002 12:38:39 PM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
* The legacy of the 90's is the legacy of the Little Lie. That is a lie which was told to help the teller, but was defended on the grounds that it HAD to be told to serve or protect a greater good.
* Before Bob Shrum or Lanny Davis hit the speed dialer to call me, I am not blaming this on Bill Clinton. He didn't invent the Little Lie, although his "It depends on what your definition of 'is' is" will certainly be used, for the next two million years, to define it.
* We did it to Clinton. They did it to Newt.
* The blizzard of ethics complaints lodged by one side against the other's leader were largely based upon the Little Lie. A relatively small indiscretion was seized upon as the worst outrage since Watergate. Indeed, we spun the press furiously to get them to append the word "-gate" to each scandal thus giving it appropriate mass.
* Big Time Political Operatives on both sides of the ledger were part of it. We routinely hired very smart researchers to look at every vote of an incumbent; find a minor section of a major piece of legislation for which he or she had voted; and then ran television ads which made it sound like that vote was likely to cause the end of civilization.
* The Little Lie told, not because we might have received a win bonus, because it was important to elect our candidate for the benefit of the voters.
* Almost every sitting member of the House and the Senate has been the (perhaps) reluctant beneficiary of that kind of campaigning.
* So, we should not be shocked when we learn that corporate executives have been engaging in the Little Lie. The Little Lie might have moved revenues to one quarter while booking the related expenses in another. A small bookkeeping maneuver, once accomplished became easier. And once revenues declined became more necessary.
* It enriched them personally. But they were employing tens of thousands of people, allowing hundreds of thousands more to successfully invest in their stock, and successfully providing a product or service to the marketplace.
* This past Saturday there were two more stories that made one's shoulders sag, and one's head shake sadly.
* The first had this headline in the Washington Post atop a story by David S. Hilzenrath: "Former Rite Aid Officials Indicted; U.S. Says Executives Inflated Profits, Diverted Funds." It is the now oft-told story: inflating the company's earnings, destroying evidence subpoenaed by the government, tampering with a witness and secretly moving company funds to private business.
* The second was a story about the president of Amtrak, David Gunn, threatening to shut down the national railway system by midweek if they don't get a $200 million loan guarantee. In testimony before a Senate committee, again according to the Post, Gunn "said Amtrak lost $200 million more than previously believed in fiscal 2001 - $1.19 billion instead of $990 million."
* How can the president of Amtrak - and its board - miss by more than TWENTY PERCENT in knowing how much it lost? Choose your feasance: Non- (They were too dumb to know what was going on) Mis- (they chose not to know what was going on) or Mal- (they knew, but chose not to disclose). In any event, Gunn should be gone.
* Last week, this reached tabloid temperature in a story about drug maker Imclone. Imclone's stock collapsed after the Food and Drug Administration refused to approve an anti-cancer drug.
* The mother-of-all-media Martha Stewart, dumped her stock in that company just before the FDA ruling became public and is now up to her gardening bandana in a scandal based upon her having received insider information.
* Whether or not Ms. Stewart was given an illegal tip-off to bail out, her broker at Merrill Lynch has been placed on administrative leave not, presumably, for forgetting to make the next pot of coffee in the brokerage break room.
* The good news in all this is: The corporate Little Lies are being uncovered. And the political Little Lies are being ignored.
* On the Secret Decoder Ring page today the difference between mis- mal- and non-feasance, and the usual stuff:
Richard A. Galen
Please explain why ignoring political Little Lies is a good thing.
We did it to Clinton. They did it to Newt.
I believe current consensus is that Newt did nothing wrong. I believe an apology was even issued to him (page E57 in the NYT no doubt). Is the current consensus that Clinton did nothing wrong? Are we dealing with moral equivalence here? Trying to be even-handed is a trap. The left-wing extremists are never even-handed or fair. But Conservatives try so hard to be "fair" that they often slip into formulations that unfairly besmirch the reputations of good Conservatives.
One of my instructors,many years ago said,"Truth is;lies are not".Any time a person tells a lie,he invents or obscures reality.Consequently any actions taken predicated on an unreality will not result resolution.
The Catholic Church currently is in big trouble because of dishonesty.They are trying to deal with a "condition" that the "politically correct" are determined to define by ignoring biological,physiolgical realities and jumping on an emotional bandwagon.
As a Catholic,I believe a just and merciful God created everything with order and purpose and our job is to discover Truth,which is God. The world will never be anything but chaotic until we discern that even little lies are hurtful as we seek,the Way,the Truth and the Life.
To you,I would just say you are exactly right.The reality is there is an order to things and the mistakes or misinterpretations of many people are not the "moral equivalents" of frequent,flagrant liars.So while all lies are a break from reality, there is no question that within the category of "lies"great care must be taken,first not to misunderstand or misportray statements as "lies".And second to deal with the numbers,subjects,and the degrees of deviations from reality.
Unfortunately it takes a well educated citizenry to act on this.But it behooves all conservatives to recognize that they would be better served by ascertaining that the "Newt" did tell a lie,and then if he did,point out the vast difference between a homeless person asking for money for a sandwich and buying wine with it and the con artist bilking someone out of their life savings by selling them land in the middle of the Gobi desert. Conservatives need to be interested in being "fair" and accepting the "enemies" moral equivalents,is not "fair" to anyone.
Clinton:Waco. Janet Reno "took responsibility" for it, but kept her job. Actual responsibility: the president.GINGRICHFilegate. Craig Livingstone was (gasp!) fired for abusively "searching" information on Republican former political appointees. Nixon operative Chuck Colson went to the big house for one count of that; nobody was prosecuted for 900 counts under Clinton. Apparently Livingstone was fired, but nobody was assigned responsibility for hiring him--or, conversely, for firing him. Actual responsibiliy: the president.
Travelgate. The FBI abused to provide political cover for the legal but arbitrary and nepotistic replacement of long-term (near retirement age) travel office staff.
Coffeegate. Amazing goings-on in the WH, with drug dealers and agents of foreign powers passing out political donations for access and face time with the PotUS. Direct presidential supervision of "independent expenditure issue advocacy" campaign spending.
And on and on . . . you can never remember all of them at the same time, their name seemingly is legion.
GOPAC. Used tax-deductible contributions to fund the propagation of a (gasp) history course having political ramifications. Somehow this is more scandalous than the fact that legions of full-time professors are teaching courses with political ramifications at tax funded state universities nationwide.To call those scales balanced is to strain at a gnat after swallowing an entire herd of camels.
I do believe that there was an official IRS ruling exonerating Gingrich (long after the damage was done).
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