Tag Archives: lies

Institutions and Values Part III: Lies and Damn Lies

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | AUG 7, 2018

Within the currency of American values, none has been devalued more than honesty. It’s become okay to lie, especially within one of America’s great institutions, our political process.

A lie, according to Merriam Webster, is to “make an untrue statement with the intent to deceive.”

A scholarly analysis of lying produced at Michigan State University cited this definition:

“Simply and broadly lying occurs when a communicator seeks knowingly and intentionally to mislead others….” and another conclusion: “Thus it is not sufficient that something is false for it to be a lie; it is the intent that distinguishes the lie.”

But in politics, as in life today, lying is becoming commonplace.

Continue reading →

Résumé

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

The Darling-of-the-Left du jour (how many French words can I pile up at the top of this column?) is a Democratic State Senator from Texas named Wendy Davis. You may remember that she burst onto the national scene by staging a filibuster in the waning moments of a special Texas legislative session this past summer.

It helped that she was a blonde and attractive woman. It helped that she is a Democrat in a very Red state. And it was crucial to the narrative that her filibuster was an attempt to stop the State Senate from voting on a law seen as pro-life. Continue reading →

Romney Will Win

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

As we have discussed before, someone – and I tried to find the source of the quote, but couldn’t – said that “four years ago Barack Obama was on a crusade; this year he’s in a campaign.”

Obama won the crusade, but Mitt Romney will win this campaign.

I know…I know. The polls are close. The national polls are tied; the state polls tilt toward Barack Obama. Continue reading →

State of the Union: Truth or Dare?

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

In the 1981 classic movie, Absence of Malice, lead character Michael Gallagher tells reporter Meghan Carter that everything she wrote about him was accurate, but none of it was true.

I thought of that line as I watched the State of the Union speech January 24. Everything the President said that night was accurate, but much of it wasn’t true.

That conundrum is among the principle reasons why governing has become so difficult and why Washington is so dysfunctional.

In order for opposing sides to negotiate their way to consensus, they must first agree on their facts. They can have differing opinions on the meaning and import of those facts, but they have to get their facts straight first. Every parent knows you can’t resolve a dispute between two children until you know how it started and who id what to whom. You’ve heard it many times at the outset of political deliberation: Let’s first determine on what we can agree before addressing that on which we differ. Continue reading →