by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n In the first six months of the Obama administration, we have witnessed an assault on the truth of a magnitude not seen since the Nixon Watergate years. The prevarication is ironic given the Obama campaign\u2019s accusations that the Bush years were not transparent and that Hillary Clinton, like her husband, was a chronic fabricator. Remember Obama\u2019s own assertions that he was a \u201cstudent of history\u201d and that \u201cwords mean something. You can\u2019t just make stuff up.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet Obama\u2019s war against veracity is multifaceted.<\/p>\n Trotskyization.<\/em>\u00a0Sometimes the past is simply airbrushed away. Barack Obama has a disturbing habit of contradicting his past declarations as if spoken words\u00a0did\u00a0not mean much at all. The problem is not just that once-memorable statements about everything from NAFTA to public campaign financing were contradicted by his subsequent actions. Rather, these pronouncements simply were ignored to the point of making it seem they were never really uttered at all.<\/p>\n What is stunning about Obama\u2019s hostile demagoguery about Bush\u2019s War on Terror is not that he has now contradicted himself on one or two particulars. Instead, he has reversed himself on every major issue \u2014 renditions, military tribunals, intercepts, wiretaps, Predator drone attacks, the release of interrogation photos, Iraq (and, I think, soon Guantanamo Bay) \u2014 and yet never acknowledged these reversals.<\/p>\n Are we supposed to think that Obama was never against these protocols at all? Or that he still remains opposed to them even as he keeps them in place? Meanwhile, his attorney general, Eric Holder, is as voluble on the excesses of the Bush War on Terror as he is silent about his own earlier declarations that detainees in this war were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention.<\/p>\n Politicians often go back on earlier promises, and they often exaggerate (remember Obama\u2019s \u201c10,000\u201d who died in a Kansas tornado [12 perished], or his belief that properly inflating tires saves as much energy as offshore drilling can produce?). But the extent of Obama\u2019s distortions suggests that he has complete confidence that observers in the media do not care \u2014 or at least do not care enough to inform the public.<\/p>\n The \u201cBig Lie.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Team Obama says that Judge Sotomayor misspoke when she asserted that Latinas were inherently better judges than white males. Yet the people around Obama knew before Sotomayor was nominated that she has reiterated such racialist sentiments repeatedly over many years.<\/p>\n Obama complained that his deficits were largely inherited \u2014 even though his newly projected annual deficit and aggregate increase in the national debt may well, if they are not circumvented, equal all the deficit spending compiled by all previous administrations combined.<\/p>\n The president lectures Congress on its financial excesses. He advocates \u201cpay as you go\u201d budgeting. But he remains silent about the unfunded liabilities involved in his own proposals for cap-and-trade, universal health care, and education reform, which will in aggregate require well over a trillion dollars in new spending on top of existing deficits \u2014 but without any \u201cpay as you go\u201d proposals to fund them.<\/p>\n By the same token, his promise that 95 percent of Americans will receive an Obama \u201ctax cut\u201d is impossible. Remember, almost 40 percent of households currently pay no income taxes at all \u2014 and the $1.7-trillion annual deficit will necessitate a broad array of taxes well beyond those assessed on incomes above $250,000.<\/p>\n Obama talks about cutting federal outlays by eliminating $17 billion in expenditures \u2014 one-half of one percent of a $3.4-trillion budget. Here the gap between rhetoric and reality is already so wide that it simply makes no difference whether one goes completely beyond the limits of belief. Why would a liberal \u201cbudget hawk\u201d go through the trouble of trying to cut 10 or 20 percent of the budget when he might as well celebrate a 0.5 percent cut and receive the same amount of credit or disdain? If one is going to distort, one might as well distort whole-hog.<\/p>\n Outright historical dissimulation.<\/em>\u00a0On matters of history, we now know that much of what President Obama says is either not factual or at least misleading. He predictably errs on the side of political correctness. During the campaign, there was his inaccurate account of his great-uncle\u2019s role in liberating Auschwitz. In Berlin, he asserted that the world \u2014 rather than the American and British air forces \u2014 came together to pull off the Berlin Airlift.<\/p>\n In the Cairo speech, nearly every historical allusion was nonfactual or inexact: the fraudulent claims that Muslims were responsible for European, Chinese, and Hindu discoveries; the notion that a Christian C\u00f3rdoba was an example of Islamic tolerance during the Inquisition; the politically correct canard that the Renaissance and Enlightenment were fueled by Arab learning; the idea that abolition and civil rights in the United States were accomplished without violence \u2014 as if 600,000 did not die in the Civil War, or entire swaths of Detroit, Gary, Newark, and Los Angeles did not go up in flames in the 1960s.<\/p>\n Here we see the omnipotent influence of Obama\u2019s multicultural creed: Western civilization is unexceptional in comparison with other cultures, and history must be the story of an ecumenical, global shared brotherhood.<\/p>\n The half-, and less-than-half, truth<\/em>. At other times, Obama throws out historical references that are deliberately incomplete. To placate critical hosts, he evokes the American dropping of the bomb. But he is silent about the impossible choices for the Allies \u2014 after Japanese atrocities in Manchuria, Korea, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa \u2014 facing the necessity of stopping a Japanese imperial killing machine, determined to fight to the death.<\/p>\n He lectures about equivalent culpability between Muslims and Americans without mentioning American largess to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians. He mostly ignores American military efforts to save Muslims in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Somalia \u2014 and American criticism of Russia\u2019s and China\u2019s treatment of their own persecuted Muslim minorities.<\/p>\n When Obama contextualizes the United States\u2019 treatment of Muslims, does he do so in comparison to the Chinese treatment of the Uighurs, the Russians in Chechnya and Afghanistan, or the European colonial experience in North Africa?<\/p>\n When he cites European colonialism\u2019s pernicious role in the Middle East, does he mention nearly 400 years of Ottoman Muslim colonial rule in the Arab-speaking world? Or the Muslim world\u2019s own role in sending several million sub-Saharan Africans to the Middle East as slaves? By no stretch of the imagination is purported Western bias against Islam commensurate with the Islamic threats that have been issued to Danish cartoonists, British novelists, the pope, or German opera producers.<\/p>\n Obama surely knows that a mosque is acceptable in America and Europe in a way that a church is not in most of the Gulf States, or that Muslims freely voice their beliefs in Rotterdam and Dearborn in a way Westerners dare not in Tehran, Damascus, or Riyadh.<\/p>\n Here we see the classic notion of the \u201cnoble lie,\u201d or the assumption that facts are to be cited or ignored in accordance with the intended aim: Interfaith reconciliation means downplaying Muslim excesses, or treating Islamic felonies as equivalent with Western misdemeanors.<\/p>\n Why has President Obama developed a general disregard for the truth, in a manner far beyond typical politicians who run one way and govern another, or hide failures and broadcast successes?<\/p>\n First, he has confidence that the media will not be censorious and will simply accept his fiction as fact. A satirist, after all, could not make up anything to match the obsequious journalists who bow to their president, proclaim him a god, and receive sexual-like tingles up their appendages.<\/p>\n Second, Obama is a postmodernist. He believes that all truth is relative, and that assertions gain or lose credibility depending on the race, class, and gender of the speaker. In Obama\u2019s case, his misleading narrative is intended for higher purposes. Thus it is truthful in a way that accurate facts offered by someone of a different, more privileged class and race might not be.<\/p>\n Third, Obama talks more than almost any prior president, weighing in on issues from Stephen Colbert\u2019s haircut, to Sean Hannity\u2019s hostility, to the need to wash our hands. In Obama\u2019s way of thinking, his receptive youthful audiences are proof of his righteousness and wisdom \u2014 and empower him to pontificate on matters he knows nothing about.<\/p>\n Finally, our president is a product of a multicultural education: Facts either cannot be ascertained or do not matter, given that the overriding concern is to promote an equality of result among various contending groups. That is best done by inflating the aspirations of those without power, and deflating the \u201cdominant narratives\u201d of those with it.<\/p>\n The problem in the next four years will be not just that the president of the United States serially does not tell the truth. Instead, the real crisis in our brave new relativist world will be that those who demonstrate that he is untruthful will themselves be accused of lying.<\/p>\n \u00a92009 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" President Obama’s war on the truth. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online In the first six months of the Obama administration, we have witnessed an assault on the truth of a magnitude not seen since the Nixon Watergate years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[715],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-GL","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1295,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-derangement-syndrome\/","url_meta":{"origin":2651,"position":0},"title":"Obama Derangement Syndrome?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 29, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media I\u2019d say if you live in the United States of America and you vote for George Bush, you\u2019ve lost your mind. \u2014 John Edwards When does the legitimate \u201cI oppose Obama\u201d descend into the illegitimate \u201cI hate Obama\u201d? It is popular now to suggest\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10089,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-is-americas-version-of-stanley-baldwin\/","url_meta":{"origin":2651,"position":1},"title":"Obama Is America\u2019s Version of Stanley Baldwin","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 13, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review Both leaders put their successors in a dangerous geopolitical position. Last year, President Obama assured the world that \u201cwe are living in the most peaceful, prosperous, and progressive era in human history,\u201d and that \u201cthe world has never been less violent.\u201d Translated, those statements\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "George W. Bush"","block_context":{"text":"George W. Bush","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/george-w-bush\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8598,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-tougher-on-congress-than-on-khamenei-read-more-at-httpwww-nationalreview-comarticle422339obamas-unpresidential-iran-speechtargetauthortid900280\/","url_meta":{"origin":2651,"position":2},"title":"Obama: Tougher on Congress than on Khamenei","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 11, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Obama's Unpresidential Iran Speech:\u00a0The speech was mean-spirited and dishonest \u2500 and may have been counterproductive. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online President Obama\u2019s speech last week advocating congressional approval of the Iran deal was mostly made-up history mixed with invective. Indeed, he talked far more roughly about his\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Iran"","block_context":{"text":"Iran","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/iran\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"(Pool Image\/Getty)","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/pic_giant_010615_SM_Barack-Obama-G-500x292.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2709,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ministers-of-truth\/","url_meta":{"origin":2651,"position":3},"title":"Ministers of Truth","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 27, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner True, the far Left, in the manner of the far Right's hatred of Bush's Iraq War and his support for Israel, has begun to murmur disappointment with Obama. But it is quite astounding that the mainstream liberal media \u2014 NY Times, Washington Post, NPR,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "May 2009"","block_context":{"text":"May 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/may-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3256,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-obama-enigma\/","url_meta":{"origin":2651,"position":4},"title":"The Obama Enigma","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 28, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Lame-duck Republican President Bush's dismal poll ratings have descended to those of Harry Truman's when he left office. The Democratic majority in Congress will probably widen after the election. Republican nominee John McCain has not run a dynamic campaign. Gen. Colin Powell, George\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2008"","block_context":{"text":"October 2008","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2008\/october-2008\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2684,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/americas-first-postmodern-presidency\/","url_meta":{"origin":2651,"position":5},"title":"America’s First Postmodern Presidency","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 5, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Postmodern Truth One of the chief tenets of postmodernism is relativism \u2014 the notion that neither morality nor wisdom is absolute and definable, but instead simply predicated on what those with power and advantage say they are. In response, the postmodernist sees \u201ccompeting truths\u201d\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "June 2009"","block_context":{"text":"June 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/june-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2651"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2651"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2653,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2651\/revisions\/2653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}