Posted by
VBushmills on Thursday, May 14, 2009 11:48:13 AM
As Moses Sands often said (he's been quoted almost as much as Aquinas on this subject), when someone says something that is palpably, provably false, it could be due to one of three reasons. Lying is only one.
In the Prom-Date-From-Hell's defense, she may not ever have understood what she was seeing and hearing at those CIA briefings (Stupidity), or as is the case even with me that one Sunday a year when my minister has to preach on stewardship, she simply was bored to tears (Incompetence), and found herself drifting off into daydreams about landing a 2-pound rainbow on a Royal Coachman with a 1-pound tippet. This sort of incompetence is malfeasance as she has betrayed both her constituents and her party, and is abetted by a kind of narcissism where one does spend a lot of time preening in front of an imaginary mirror, when the mind i not otherwise occupied with anything interesting. Simply put, she'd rather have been somewhere else.
It's not for me to say which of the three is the actual case. I just don't think we should go around damning the poor lady for being a liar, when she could be very, very much worse.
Bernard Chumm