And We Mean to Oblige

Vassar Bushmills, Exec Director 

           With the publication of this article we announce the launching of a new website GREATAMERICANZEROES.com that will host a Gallery of public lies and liars from around the country. Details of our Gallery and how you can participate can be found by visiting our site at GREATAMERICANZEROES.com. Our station chief in Virginia, St George Frederick will manage the operation, although you will see reports and analyses from Bernie Chumm, Natasha Ivanova, dozens of others and myself.

           What follows are the standards we use in hanging individuals and groups in our Galleries and posting their sins in our Lie-brary.
           As we’ve stated time and again no society can endure when lying becomes acceptable in the normal course of human conduct. Erode the foundation of truth and you erode everything you stand on. In time, everything of importance to the individual, the family, the House and the community simply rots away.
           The ordinary citizen, the common man especially, can ill afford to get caught up in the regularness of lying. It must be kept away from his front door…with a gun, if necessary…or his House dissolves.
           Mark Twain once said “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” With the help of Thomas Aquinas in analyzing the lie, and Dante Alighieri in properly placing the lie, we’ll use Twain’s guidelines.

           When a person says something that is untrue it is because that person is 1) misinformed, 2) stupid, 3) lying, or of late, 4) delusional*.
           *This last defense is a qualified defense, as some have suggested we include it in our Galleries as a special category of lying all by itself since the kinds of delusion most often found in the political spheres are self-inflicted, born of arrogance (a kind of lie itself), vanity, really rotten parenting (usually only one…guess which one?) resulting in a kind of paranoia much like some of the Sonnenkinder of the 60’s, who neglected to space out their trips to the Peyote cache between their trips with the LSD. Like the difference between an alcoholic and one who drinks too much, it is difficult to discern without professional help which is which simply by watching them air their shortcomings in public. We know one can’t help it while the other can, but we’re never sure.
            But a case can be made for the type, as there are some notable applicants, such as Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and possibly even Barack O’Bama. It’s hard to conclude how much of the swill they spew they actually believe. I recall in the 1960s when Jonathan Winters checked himself into a clinic for a few weeks of therapy and rehab. Upon leaving, a newsman asked why he had gone there. Winters aid, “Because I started believing my own stuff.” (See my note below.)  

           There is an old common sense adage that you should never blame on conspiracy what you can blame on stupidity. The lie is the last, not the first culprit we should seek out, even when ranking political officials are involved. Most politicians, though not all, can be presumed not to be stupid, and none have any real excuse for being misinformed…still, they are usually less smart and twice as uninformed as they appear to be. State service seems to encourage a kind of stupidity unknown in the private sector..unless your uncle owns the company,
           Fairness therefore requires that when a public person is caught in a misstatement of fact, he/she be given a chance to apologize or recant (revise and amend).
           But just once. Two strikes and they’re out.
           Then they’ll be brought in here and hung.

           For our purposes at GreatAmericanZeroes.com, a lie is a knowing misstatement of fact, with the intent to decieve, (if only to oneself) after the other defenses have been dismissed. A liar is one who utters, broadcasts, or purveys a lie (the bald faced lie) or proclaims as fact a thing he does not know to be true, or knows he cannot prove to be true (the damned lie.) This can include hearsay, opinions, and facts-still-in-debate, as most commonly found in scientific arguments.

          We consider most of these lies to be moral lies and worthy of being hung in our main Lewinsky Gallery and its several wings.

          There are also lesser lies and liars that are worthy of hanging, so we have a secondary Gallery that is still several cuts above a misdemeanor, but not worthy of a 1^st Class hanging. These include the flip-flop, the broken campaign promise, many forms of open mic (press conference) lies, as well as the ubiquitous congressional hearing lie. These have become like a pox, they are so prevalent, and are therefore worthy of hanging, even though almost everyone knows they are lies the moment they are uttered. Also included are the lies of omission and some forms of statistical lies, and even some flagrant gratuitous lies (usually exempt from a gallery hanging) if they reveal a pernicious pattern.
         Recalling an old George Carlin comedy bit about how many sins the Catholic Church imputed to one liaison in an alley to “feel up” Wanda…one for thinking about it, another for wanting to, still another for planning it, etc, etc. “Seven sins in one feel!” we give notice that there can be many lies and liars associated with one simple misstatement of fact…just so you’ll know our Galleries were are geometric in design. We cut ourselves a wide berth, for the seriousness of the lie at GreatAmericanZeroes.com is its impact on society and the American House. We leave the liar’s soul to God.
       Finally, there are lies for which we believe have no place in our gallery, such as many gratuitous lies (e.g. burning churches in Arkansas, had it stood alone), and the CYA.  In fact, we even believe many types of perjury, usually being CYA’s of one sort or another, do not belong in our Galleries at all, and prefer not to place Clinton’s Paula Jones lie under oath in the Gallery, nor Scooter’s lie under the most uncertain of legal standards. John Dean went to jail for lying, and Gordon Liddy went to jail for refusing to.    
      This is because we believe, unlike modern laws to the contrary, that citizens have an inalienable right to lie to police and investigators…unless under oath…and will remain steadfast in this belief until Congress is also required to speak to the public on the same terms it requires the public to speak before it.
      Also included in non-hanging lies are the flattery and self-preservation lie. “Honey, do I look fat in this dress?” invokes both. But in the interests of full disclosure, here at the Sands Institute we all use aliases to protect our names, faces due to our (unrelated but serious) work overseas and elsewhere.
     Lastly, there is the Viral Lie, which, along with the lie we tell ourselves in the mirror each day, perhaps the darkest of lies. We cannot include this lie since by definition, as it is a lie known only to one other person, and to God. (Like Original Sin, we consider this to be Original Lie, begetting all the others, and will include a brief essay on the subject in due course.)

     First, we have to get the rules straight about lying, since for some years now the political world has been awash with all sorts of people calling errors in fact and opinions lies while at the same time referring to theories and speculations about fact as unshakable truths. Like a disease, this has progressed to such an extent that we are now bombarded with individuals being called liars for things they never said, and for committing crimes for which there are no known legal offenses
     It seems these new definitions of lying are not put forward to highlight the evils of the lie, but rather to make it so any utterance can be classified as one if the situation calls for it. Obviously there are some people who take benefit in this new reality, and, personally, I smell a hint of sulfur, for (recalling the old saw that the devil’s greatest victory over man was to make us believe he didn’t exist) it seems evil takes the high ground away from good people when we stop believing everything that is so is so.
     Remarkably, these usually come from the same people, even more remarkably, in our more educated communities. Only two generations ago one would have found this curious. But it has become manifest much like the high incidence of hemophilia and other genetic disorders associated with in-breeding in royal Europe before World War I. When a society finds its so-called betters in such lamentable condition, a conflagration of vast proportions cannot be far behind. As this disease seems hell-bent on infecting the broader population, we believe it is time to sound the alarm.  
     A lie is a specific act. In some people it has even become a state of being. When people can get away with chronic lying they can become infectious like any other disease, for they relay to a broader audience that this sort of conduct is not only acceptable, it pays off.
    A lie does not rest on the truth or untruth of the fact. That 2 + 2 = 5 is a not a lie, it is only wrong. You could also be stupid or under 4 years of age. Or you could just have had a slip of the tongue, as with O’Bama’s 57 states.
    I know you can think of all sorts of lies out there that seem to stand alone. This is not so, as each, even the more complex lies found imbedded in the many scieintific debates, have a flashpoint, where a proposition or opinion had been converted to “fact”. That act of lying is usually political, not scientific, and we hope to create on GreatAmericanZeroes.com, a down-loadable program a person can use to trace a truth, fact or opinion from its point of origin as it’s is dragged through the public mud puddle.
    A lie rests in the intent of the person who utters it. A lie is of the heart and mind, (mens rea) and these are often things that are difficult for another to discern. Humility requires that we be very careful when trying to look inside another man’s heart, for it would be a lie to say we know another’s heart when we cannot possibly know any such a thing. In fact, this is one of the most common lies abroad these days, and easiest to prove and we are without mercy in exposing it. You can see that if we were too casual in this, we would cancel out any credibility we might wish to gain.

      Our purpose at GreatAmericanZeroes.com is to identify and hang the liar and deal with the lie as we can, for a liar can come out upon the public stage and make a perfectly honest statement. This does not make him less a liar, but it does sully the truth he is trying to put forward.
     It is he who needs to be defeated and run off the stage. There will always be facts and rumors of facts. Let honest men debate the probabilities of truth. We wish to send a message at GreatAmericanZeroes.com to whoever might send, or bring a liar out onto a public stage to help sell their truth; this does that truth no good. This is the greatest disservice we can do to any truth for it is tarred by the messenger. Hang the liar and the lies tend to take care of themselves. But the truth always comes away limping.
     For example, global warming: While we have access to a lot of scientific information about climate change, and the probabilities of each side’s positions are fairly easy to quantify in terms of probabilities (90%, 45% etc), we are not in a position to say any of those positions are lies, i.e. have been falsified, for that is beyond skill of any but the most qualified of peers. Raw data is always subject to peer review.
    We leave that debate to the scientists’ who almost never say a thing is wrong unless it is unqualifiedly wrong, and who, as a matter of their science and their nature, ask far more questions than they resolve. Scientists are required by their professional creeds to present their cases always couched in the language of speculation, such as “the facts suggest”, “possible links”, etc. A “maybe” is not a lie, and although one may find from time to time some data that has been jimmied, it is almost never the scientist who carried the crowbar.
    Our targets are the political secondary and tertiary sources that take these speculations and report them as fact, often after re-working them. Our target is also the media and others who purvey that lie. Consider the UN report on second hand smoke. You know the old axiom that a lie repeated often enough takes on the trappings of truth. The second hand smoke lie has resulted in thousands of local anti-smoking ordinances which, notwithstanding the lie now being laid bare, will never be repealed…for they have achieved their political objective. Before we’re finished we plan to hang every liar involved in that hoax.
    Today, global warming, in all its manifestations also has passed the fail-safe point of recall, for it has become a common terminology even in advertising. We see it everywhere even though the terminology represents a giant lie when considered in any depth. (Somewhere in our stack of essays I have an old one about what happens to a civilization when science is subordinated to the political process and science is made to call Science a liar. We’ll try to have that up soon. I think I also have one that alleges advertising to be the greatest of all threats to the First Amendment. I’ll try to dig that out too.)
    In any case, any restatement or interpretations by secondary sources (whose opinions are never allowed into evidence in court anyway) are not just lies. They are damned lies, and worthy of being hung in our gallery. This is the stuff dossiers are made of. Just look at what the Huxley’s did with Darwin.
    Almost everything is subject to debate, especially science. Few things are 100%, but almost always something less. Beyond a mathematic certainty or physical law, such as the “leg bone connected to the thigh bone”, or your birth date, 1492, 1066 and all that, “facts” are measured in terms of probabilities, from 99% to 1%. Only math and physical laws are 100%. That a bullet found in a dead man’s heart killed him (“COD” if you watch CSI) is 99.99% probable. He still could have had heart attack before the bullet ever hit him, so doctors’ ethics require them to state the bullet killed him “within a medical certainty”, which is actually a statement of professional humility that he can’t know everything. (Ethics is kinda nice, huh? Interesting, lawyers helped impose this rule on doctors, yet are probably its greatest offenders.)
    At the other end of probability would be that the pyramids were built by space men, which is less than 1% probable, or, highly improbable. This is the realm of Flat-Earthers and Holocaust-deniers, a type of un-religion religion, and the realm of most conspiracy theorists, whose fancies unlike true religions, can and have been dis-proven over and over again.
    True religious beliefs (including secular religions such as Darwinism and Environmentalism) are things which generally can neither be proved nor disproved, and we will not be wasting time posting names or pictures of religionists, secular or transcendental, unless they otherwise engage in a public lie. That God is great, good, alive and well, dead, or goes by another name “Allah” or “Iehovah” is not a lie. That Jesus lived and walked, died on the Cross, or was just a figment of ten or so known martyrs’ imagination is not a lie, or that He ran off to raise a family on the Cote d’Azur with Mary Magdalene…although it seems some of the “facts” used to establish these conclusions may very well be. That polar bears, snail darters, and cats are more likeable or more important than humans is not a lie. That the polar ice cap will melt within ten months or ten years, or a hundred years if we don’t something now…is.
    People associate high levels of probability with “fact”, while the lowest levels earn the title of non-fact, or untruth, or as they say in the Valley, “Duhh!”  It’s the mid-levels of probability, called plausibility, where most fractious debates over facts take place, and where people lacking discernment or good sense can be convinced to try to turn a 45% probability into a fact, and thence, a lie. At some point a fact-in-debate simple degrades into a lie if pushed too enthusiastically. We can’t say where, but common sense usually dictates where “me iudice” (in my opinion) should be a part of the argument. It is probably the most important three words in American political language, especially, yet is almost unheard in the halls of Congress. It is impossible to yell, scream or incite, when using the term. Who would buy a bumper stick that said. “Bush lied!...in my opinon.”?
     Since we believe public derision works, it’s the squeaky wheels who deny this term, and the shrill and inane, we will be targeting here.
     In the end, never forget, that almost everything, including the original builders of the pyramids, either is 100% fact or 100% un-fact, just like the weather forecast that calls for 60% chances for rain. It either rained or it didn’t. There was no lie involved when it didn’t and everyone involved seems to understand, so probabilities are not really hard to grasp, at least for the common man. Maybe even dailyKos readers can grasp it. We can only hope.
    Our mission once again, is to remove the secondary and tertiary lies from these debates for they are, as often as not, put forward by people with hidden agendas, from drug companies who sponsor medical studies to organic nut cases who want us all to go back to fertilizing with our own shite and living in sod huts, while never having completely worked through whether they will be living in that sod hut too, or inside the gates of that shining city on the hill where all the political elites will be staying once their Brave New World kicks in. Stick a flashlight in some peoples’ faces and the first thing they lose sight of is any understanding of human nature. (I blame the spared rod.)
     Science (the Method), Law (the Rules of Evidence), and Ethics (Reason and Logic…also called common sense in Tennessee) all have strict rules of determining facts. They are all based on observable truths. A criminal conviction requires ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ but a civil case is determined by a preponderance of the evidence. Peer approval is required in the scientific community. Even argument and debate has its rules.
    Our society exists on all sorts of laws of physics and mechanics. Every time you turn the ignition in your car you are invoking thousands of them. When an airliner takes off, a million or more such laws of physics are proved and reproved. These laws are so rigid that we can feel safe enough to pay $24,000 for a four door version of those laws and put our kids in them for a weekend at the beach.
     Our standard at GreatAmericanZeroes.com is the preponderance of evidence, and we will hang any person whose mis-use of the language appears to put forward a hidden political agenda. This arises from my favorite over-statement of liberalism by Mary McGrory, in the 1970s, when she stated (I paraphrase) that modern liberalism stood for the proposition that all human behavior should be subject to the political process. Science subject to the political process means we will see a day when we can no longer safely drive across a bridge for fear it may fall down, let alone feel any security about our next plane ride. This is why, in the last days of the USSR, AIDS was primarily the result of dirty needles…in hospitals and clinics! I can say without any doubt that this is how liberty dies, the dream and hope of liberty meekly going elsewhere. When the light of common sense is driven under a bushel, freedom is not far behind, to stay another 200 years before re-emerging.
     We here at the Sands Institute were sort of hoping we could push Evil back into the dark for another 200 years…but it could be the other way around. At least you know the size of the struggle. It’s them or us.
      It’s the laws of argument and debate that are falling apart, and we believe they should be reestablished, and since it’s politics and politicians that have caused this breakdown, we believe the people should reestablish those rules…by yanking the chains of the politicians.

WHY PUBLICLY HANG A LIAR:    
       If you knowingly state an untruth once, and are not openly called on it, it is mathematically probable you will try it again, in a similar circumstance. Parents know this about their children, friends know this about other friends.
       I use the word openly here as many politicians tell lies to others who know it’s a lie, (the wink and a nod) but if no one openly calls it out as a lie, it is passed as truth, or at least as normal. (Senate rules actually prohibit one senator from calling another out on a lie, which is probably the only reason Harry Reid isn’t flipping burgers in Henderson.) This is how the public becomes duped, or worse, begins to treat lying with a certain amount of normality.
       Why being called out on a lie is important is that it is sort of like a slap across the face. It stings…almost as harshly as the one across the bottom you mother gave you…or should have. Once having been caught in a lie, the probability is not high that that person will try it again.
      When a person does reach out and lie more than twice he will no longer be believed, at least in the real world. Television talking heads are exceptions to this, as for many, being wrong over and over again seems to be their chief qualification for being there in the first place. True, being wrong is not the same as lie, but the same rules apply if you’re about to take a person’s advice on a stock tip.
     How many times would a friend lie to you before he would no longer be your friend? My guess is twice. The same goes for a wayward husband. You only get to kneel at the foot of the cross once.
     In the real world, requiring that truth be kept around us is a survival mechanism. Once a friend or family member lies twice you no longer can afford to rely on them…for anything…and it sometimes takes years for any trust to be restored.
     We believe lies and liars should be outed. We believe that a public made aware of lies as lies, and not something benign and less dangerous, will become annoyed, and less inclined to support a sitting official in the future. After all, citizens hate having their noses rubbed in their own mistakes in judgment.
      We also know that persons in both the public and private sectors spotlight hate having their foibles made public and will move mountains to prevent those things from happening.
      We believe that a public posting of an official’s sins provides a powerful incentive for officials to walk a more straight and narrow path…with the truth at least.

 Modern Lying:
      Most people do all sorts of things when caught in a lie. We refer to this process as “going to your closet” where they can reflect. (I can remember every lie I ever told, and so can most of you.) They may consider the wrongness of it, but they certainly consider the embarrassment of being caught. They usually come away reformed in some way.
       But have you noticed how many people aren’t shamed any longer? For reasons only a long psychological study could spell out, they see lying as an indispensable means to an end. So when they go back to their closet, they only looks for ways to do it better next time. “Not getting caught” has become the extent of their moral code. It is the only star in the heavens they steer by. This too is a troubling sign for a culture.
      And finally, we now have upon us a demographic that is just plain scary because of its size and which once belonged to only the most spoiled of the rich little Fauntleroys and Heathers. This attitude has spread as American affluence has spread, but also into the lowest of economic and educational classes, about which Gibbon commented over 100 years ago about events occurring almost 2000 years ago (that’s for those of you who read).
      With this group, lying isn’t lying. If a person wants something to be a fact, it is. Nothing else is required, just want-to. The self-revealed truth.When confronted with the real facts, they have all sorts of defense mechanisms to deny it, such as shouting down, or turning inward in ways I can’t really describe since I can’t do it, blocking out things totally they don’t want to hear. Remember Miracle Max in Princess Bride? “I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you.” (That’s for those of you who don’t read.).
      Bernard Chumm has shown us that this is a pathology of unknown dimension among a large demographic. They stand outside what we normally refer to as the serial or congenital liar. How do we know this? The untruths themselves describe the difference to some degree, for there is a big difference between churches burning in Arkansas, or being named after Sir Edmund, or inventing the internet, all of which one writer said was an attempt to make ourselves a part of history…and a deeper insistence within our souls that anything we want to be true, e.g. a fact, a law, in fact is.…depending on what your definition of “is” is, of course. It’s a kind of t**t fit. Such a person has the ability to re-orient the entire universe to fit this one single “fact”. Single-word associations often say a lot, as I can recall one of the nicest old hippies I’d ever known who immediately flips into an angry, angry woman with the mention of one word, “establishment”. She told me her most favorite memories was when she was 17, in the 1960s, hanging out in her garage her with her soon-to-be-dropped-out pals, talking politics…and putting away a bottle of Scotch at each session. Try saying “Bush” or “Cheney” or “global disaster” on college campuses today, and you get the same thing.
     This is why most conspiracy bloggers will never earn a gallery slot on GreatAmericanZheroes.com, although Moulitsas’ name has already been submitted. Departing a little from Reagan’s ‘trust but verify’ slogan, we feel just a little sorry for them.
     Call it what you may, narcissism, self-delusion, one giant teat-fit, but for every Rush baby there are 1,000 of these Children of Deconstruction (Hell-Baby was already taken), and the real scary thing is they may be a major voting demographic in the next election.
      If they are not nipped in the bud by 2010, you can kiss the Constitution good-bye. And while you may find them inane and childish, they feed off the politicians who find lying to be very useful cannon fodder, so they cannot be dismissed as inconsequential. This is why we are here.
       The only way we feel we can silence this brood, and sort of wash their mouths out soap, and sort of lay a rolled-up newspaper across their noses (metaphors my partners have chosen) is to get rid of the politicians who purvey to them.

      The Constitution doesn’t favor retro-active laws, and neither do we generally, but we feel it necessary to go back a few years and out some of those who have been false prophets in the past. Accordingly, we will begin to post some of recent history’s most notable lies and liars straightaway. Your offerings of names and events are requested.
      But for future acts, we believe a line needs to be drawn in the sand. So, as of today, 1 August, 2008, we’re granting a sort of amnesty for many past lies by politicians.

        Then, borrowing from Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce…

        From where the sun now stands, you lie, you’re out….

        …and we will move heaven and earth to see that you stay that way.