The Speed of Lies

If you believe Philip Berg, Barack Obama is unfit to be President of the United States; his candidacy is nothing more than a dangerously specious house of cards that will almost surely collapse if allowed to continue.

According to Berg, Barack Obama harbors a secret which disqualifies him outright from running for the office of president -- and it's only a matter of time before the truth comes to light and the resulting embarrassing debacle leaves the entire Democratic Party in chaos.

See, If you believe Philip Berg, Barack Obama isn't a U.S. citizen.

Last Thursday, Berg -- a Philadelphia attorney who's something of a notorious presence within that city's legal community -- filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Eastern Pennsylvania demanding that an injunction be issued against the official nomination of Obama. The suit charges that the Illinois senator is constitutionally ineligible to become president on the grounds that he has yet to produce a valid U.S. birth certificate -- Berg claiming that the current one on file from Hawaii is a forgery, proven so by "three forensic experts" -- and that he maintains an unresolved dual-citizenship and owes allegiances to both Kenya and Indonesia, where his father was born and where he lived as a child, respectively. Berg says that he has access to copies of Obama's Jakartan school records which show the candidate registered under the surname of his mother's 2nd husband, Lolo Soetoro, and listed as an Indonesian citizen; as if to hedge his bet, he insists that even if Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate is indeed shown to be authentic, the school registry should be enough to keep the candidate out of the White House.

If these allegations sound familiar, they should; in one form or another, each of them has been bandied about the internet or bullhorned across conservative radio for months now in an ongoing effort to paint Barack Obama as "different."

Oh yeah, and they're all basically bullshit.

A couple of weeks back, the Annenberg Political Fact Check -- an organization whose credentials are pretty much bulletproof -- set out to settle once and for all the debate over Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate. The word "debate" deserves no small amount of qualification because, in reality, there never was a legitimate claim to be made that the document was phony -- simply a lot of fantastical conspiracy theorist innuendo, perpetuated and amplified at lightning speed by a million far-right dolts with computers and delusions of Sherlock Holmesian cleverness. Annenberg dispatched staffers to examine the birth certificate and ruled, to the surprise of no one with a modicum of common sense and two brain cells to rub together, that it's 100% legit: Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. As for the claim that Obama holds a dual citizenship or is in any other way beholden to a foreign country -- that was exposed as nonsense months ago.

And yet Philip Berg filed his lawsuit anyway. He filed it knowing full-well, one would have to imagine, that most of its claims are bogus -- that they already had been or easily could be debunked.

So why? What the hell would possess someone to willfully propagate claims that are tenuous at best and outright false at worst -- even going so far as to do it in court?

Because these days, when it comes to politics particularly, the truth is negotiable -- and there's value in the lie.

Whereas once there were a select few sources of information, and those sources were generally deemed credible by all but those on the furthest fringes of the public, now anyone can be his or her own news source. And while -- as sites like this one, ironically, have advanced -- the rise of citizen journalism and hyper-connectivity has been good for the ethics of media as a whole, it's also created a treacherous wasteland of journalistic mini-fiefdoms, each spouting its own version of reality and together making it impossible, at times, to tell honest, well-researched fact from made-up crap conjured out of thin air to further an agenda. Whether the message comes in the form of an e-mail forwarded to your inbox by that paranoid uncle with the survival bunker in his basement who you're always hoping skips Thanksgiving, or as a bitter flamewar on every news aggregation outlet across the blogosphere, the internet has replaced television as the most effective and least regulated tool for political propaganda in America.

Which is why, ironically, it's now become the partial responsibility of television to help keep the corruption in check. It's too bad the good folks in the TV news media are usually unwilling to do it.

Mainstream media managers, as a whole, subscribe fully to the notion that bloggers and their internet realm are of an inferior journalistic stock; they see them as pests constantly circling the carrion of stories already broken by TV, radio and print; they condescend to them, dismissively painting their ilk as pasty, overweight losers, futilely raging against the machine from the comfort of a Middle-American basement, hopped up on Red Bull and basking in the post-orgasmic bliss of an afternoon spent masturbating to Asian porn. Those who adhere to the Mega-Media ethos believe that when a blogger does break a story, the quality of that piece of information can be judged by whether or not it rises to the level of inclusion in a mainstream broadcast, newspaper or magazine. In other words, only those above the radar can make the decision as to what's worth pulling up from under the radar. The problem is, the good stuff -- the powerful investigation, the sometimes penetrating insight -- gets passed over by the larger media outlets because it's, well, boring. It doesn't make for good TV or a quick, sharp read. Meanwhile, unfortunately, the garbage -- the rumor, conjecture, and misdirection -- is often picked up and elevated to the level of "real news" simply because it's so damn juicy and such a sure-fire ratings or circulation enhancer. A crap story thrown out by a few official-sounding blogs -- like the story of Obama's "phony" birth certificate -- can suddenly be granted validation simply by virtue of the fact that the "controversy" surrounding it is being discussed on national television. The lie is amplified inside the 24/7 cable news echo-chamber and, presto, it's suddenly palatable and worthy of serious consideration by 90% of the population.

It would be one thing if mainstream media outlets faced this kind of bullshit head-on and said, "No, this story isn't true, and if you believe it you're a lunatic." But it's better for ratings and revenue to instead ask, "A lot of folks are saying (insert spurious assertion here), but is it true?" (For the record, nobody does this vaguely referenced end-run on responsibility better than Fox News; see "Terrorist Fist Jab.") It goes without saying that this is how political propaganda is perpetuated; by reporting the rumor as its own story -- without sharply and decisively denouncing it -- you're validating it, giving new life to it, and ensuring that enough people will believe it that the very future of the country could wind up eventually hinging on it.

Ask yourself this: How many people still believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim?

Or this: How many people still believe that Iraq was connected to 9/11?

Very few within the mainstream media came right out and unequivocally shot down these ludicrous rumors before they could take root within the consciousness of the masses -- or at the very least, the minds of those who wanted nothing more than to have their preconceived biases confirmed.

There are thousands of Americans who will still claim that they "don't trust" Obama -- and yet they'll base this lack of trust on their willingness to trust an e-mail that got forwarded to them by a friend of a friend of a friend of some guy somewhere.

It's the responsibility of respectable news media everywhere to bring truth to propaganda and refute the fiction proffered for the sole purpose of sowing discord and confusing the electorate. It's incumbent upon the mainstream media, particularly if they value their stature as strongly as they claim, to shine a bright light on the lies, rather than fueling the fire by debating the merits of a story that they know perfectly well has no merits.

Should you believe Philip Berg?

It's a question that doesn't need to be asked, because it's already been answered.

Follow Chez Pazienza on Twitter: www.twitter.com/chezpazienza

Comments

[Ankhst]

I've spent a little time pondering legal abuses, and I think I may have a solution -- put disbarment on the table. Now, before you call this a veiled plot to end lawsuits filed by "the little guy", I believe the decision on what constitutes grounds for disbarment need be rigorous and presided over by a multi-member panel (at least 3). The point is, there are several cases where it is quite clear that the plaintiffs' counsel are filing a lawsuit not because they believe they should (or even *can*) win, but for another purpose:
obstruction, retribution, good old-fashioned billable hours, etc. I believe that if the most egregious of these could potentially be forced to change careers, we should very quickly see a lot fewer of these
politicall­y-motivate­d, truly frivolous lawsuits..­. and the "ambulance chaser" crowd might think a little harder before jumping on each and every opportunity to drag some new "victim" into court, when that might not even be the best way to deal with whatever befell them.

That's just my opinion. I don't have enmity for all lawyers (nor even a majority), just some of them.

[Herrington]

There is a parallel deriving in criminal law to what you suggest. It is called malicious prosecution. It is a civil liability incurred when a person is knowingly falsely prosecuted for a crime.

For most people, the cost and liability of bringing a frivilous suit is deterent enough. The problem is that big money backers can relieve the impeditments for a willing stooge. It is yet another example of how political outcomes are skewed in favor of the wealthy. So my remedy would be to attach punitive damages to a failed frivilous lawsuit in the same way that joint and several liability attaches the assets of all the parties associated with a polluter. In that way, the liabilities incurred would be based on the size of the bank accounts backing the suit and would expose big money to the same risk/reward math that regular citizens must work with.

[Ankhst]

Good point, and I agree. My proposed solution would not address the use of "disposable" lawyers by the sufficiently wealthy; your suggestion is a good one -- and even better, there's existing precedent that only need be applied to other areas of law, so potentially, it wouldn't
even be that hard to implement, because it would not need to be created from scratch.

Naturally, the lobby against that application would be formidable, but that's precisely the kind of thing that motivated masses (e.g. the promise of the Obama Revolution, if it materializes) can accomplish.

[december30]

Unbelievable!!

[bdaved]

I have to paraphrase because I don't remember the exact translation, but Adolph Hitler said something like-- in making war, and writing history, it is not the truth that matters, but victory. (I do remember the next part, "Have no pity.") Many of the same people who criticized what they saw as the moral relativism of President Clinton and his supporters are willing to accept actions that are just downright sinful-- if the political outcome suits them.

[Herrington]

Excellent rant Pazienza. The profit motive corrupts, plain and simple. When even scientific investigation is conducted with a profit motive, e.g. to prove a product effective, the results are suspect. Pretty much universally the discovery of a profit motive underlying someone's position impeaches their thinking. The same needs to be applied to the MSM or any source of information.

The question is why it isn't. The Morrow's and Cronkite's are long gone and news, once a public service operation, now operates for profit just like your game show. And the result is that truth is now a brand name, like laundry detergent. Some prefer Fox truth, others CBS truth, and still others Olbermann truth.

What has always astonished me is that the purveyors of "truth" do not seem to recognize the utter maladaptive nature of it and have happily peddled it to a nation which now uses it to justify their own destruction. My "news" to the news media is that when we are all finally broke, so to will you be. So grow up and stand up MSM, or die.

[cobobs]

We are in serious danger.

[MajorKong]

"A lie makes it halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on" - Ben Franklin