The last few days, it seems that all I've been reading in the news are lies and more lies. Damnable lies. Whoppers and howlers. These aren't just embellishments and false colorings. They are premeditated, barefaced and brazen falsehoods.
Take David Broder last week. Broder dismissed Plamegate as a "tempest in a teapot" but then contended that Newsweek and other publications owe Karl Rove an apology (apparently the teapot boiled over enough to burn Karl). Broder asseverated, as if it were true, that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had exonerated Rove because "In fact, the prosecutor concluded that there was no crime; hence, no indictment." But Broder--who is nobody's fool--knows perfectly well that Fitzgerald concluded no such thing. Fitzgerald did not give Rove a clean bill of health after Rove's five grand jury appearances and his lawyer's last-minute email admissions. Unless and until Fitzgerald issues a report, about all we can reasonably infer is that the prosecutor didn't think he had sufficient evidence to prove in a court of law Rove's criminal intent. "Whitewash" would be the most generous description of Broder's hit-and-run piece.
And then there was Dick Cheney on "Meet the Press," somehow keeping a straight face as he contended that he "never linked Iraq to 9/11" while also misstating the findings of the Duelfer Report. He MUST have been crossing his fingers as he said about the Iraq War: "It was the right thing to do and if we had it to do over again, we'd do exactly the same thing." Oh yes, the war is going rather well, too. Clearly, this guy thinks the American public is not just gullible but also really stupid, and he can hoodwink us time and again and again.
But we've come to expect the Pinocchioization of politics, so Cheney's lies, monstrous as they are, don't seem to faze us much any more. Business as usual. (Yet why aren't the big box churches denouncing such cultural corrosion?)
I dare say we expect more from Condoleezza Rice. She has never been a professional politician. Her credibility, even as a member of the Bush administration, originally hails from her previous life as a scholar. Scholars are supposed to speak the truth, without compromise. Even if one believes that the truth is relative, constructed, malleable, perspectival, or performative, a scholar is dutibound to say so. Scholars cannot be liars.
Yes, we've become accustomed to seeing Condoleezza Rice staying "on message" and steadfastly adhering to the company line. But heretofore it didn't seem quite like lying because, we surmised, SHE probably held in reserve some academic national security theory into which she could shoehorn the inconvenient details of Bush policy and rationalize it all as somehow legitimate. But apparently the Iraq War debacle has turned her into a figure of desperation. Her interview yesterday on Fox News, in which she tried to blame George Tenet for all the intelligence deception while she continued nonetheless to suggest that there WERE credible ties going on between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, was downright Nixonian, a masterpiece in shifty-eyed doublespeak.
They did it to Colin Powell. They made a liar out of him, culminating in his famous United Nations speech. At least he has the dignity not to show his face in public much anymore.
Now they've done it to Condoleezza Rice. And she's done it to herself. By lending her academic authority to the Bush administration's fiasco in Iraq, providing cover and credibility, she has sold her soul to the Devil of Mendacity. She can never go back to academe. She can never be a scholar again.
So it's painful to read that the names Condoleezza Rice and Bill Clinton have been circulated as rumored candidates for Harvard University's presidency. Two liars. True, their lies are incommensurable: war versus sex. But Harvard's prestige would plummet if the governing Corporation chose either of these public liars. Harvard needs to adhere to the highest standards of academic integrity, not just fundraising. They need a truth-teller. Dissemblers, triangulators, propagandists, and spinmeisters need not apply, or even be considered.