Danation: Does Truth Even Matter Anymore?
Caricature by DonkeyHotey via flickr.com.
Yeah, yeah. Obama won last night’s debate. Everyone says so. In fact, he killed it. The same CBS poll on the “who won the debate?” question that gave Romney a 23-point advantage after the first debate — and thus started the ball rolling among pundits that Romney had knocked it out of the park — had Obama winning last night’s debate by 30 points. Romney tried to come off looking calm, cool, and presidential. Instead, he looked meek and reminded me a bit of Sarah Palin, rattling off facts like an encyclopedia without knowing much about the meaning behind those facts.
But I’m not here to gloat over an Obama victory. I’m here to talk about Romney. Because while he got crushed last night, what few things he did say were cause for deep concern. I mean, agreeing to a 2014 withdrawal in Afghanistan? Romney has spent the entire campaign hammering Obama for setting a timetable for withdrawal from the country. His criticism has multiple parts, including that we should be listening to generals, not setting arbitrary timetables, and that it doesn’t make sense to tell the terrorists when we’re leaving the country — pretty much the same reasons the Bush administration gave for why we can never, ever leave Iraq under any circumstances whatsoever.
And yet, last night, Romney threw out everything he had been saying about the withdrawal from Afghanistan and agreed that we should be out by 2014. What. The. Fuck?
This was not the only example of Romney rewriting his entire campaign history, not to mention the out-and-out lies, which have become de rigueur on the Romney-Ryan ticket. Romney said Obama was silent during the Arab Spring. This is, of course, patently ridiculous to anyone with even a half-decent memory, who will recall Obama speaking out in favor of the protestors in Tahrir Square and in several other democratic movements in the Middle East. (That he didn’t go to bat for every democratic movement in the area, especially in allied countries such as Bahrain, is a worthy criticism, but it’s not the point Romney tried to make.) Even Obama’s best one liner of the night came off a Romney half-truth. When Romney remarked that under Obama, the U.S. Navy had fewer ships than at any time since 1916, Obama replied that the army also had fewer horses and bayonets. Ho ho! But lost in that line is the fact that the navy has increased the amount of ships in its fleets under Obama. In fact, under George W. Bush, the navy had fewer ships than at any time since the 19th century.
If Romney wins this election — and that is a very real possibility, though certain still much less than 50/50 — the pundits are going to make a big deal about money and how it affects modern presidential campaigns. They’ll talk about Citizens United and Super-PACs, Sheldon Adelson and Crossroads GPS. What they won’t spend a lot of time talking about is this: Despite modern technology allowing journalists to fact check politicians practically in real time, it is possible to be elected president of the United States based on a campaign almost entirely consisting of bullshit. And that will affect future presidential campaigns even more than the oceans of cash that will flow into them. Even the perverting effect of unlimited corporate dollars flooding political campaigns will be nothing compared to the knowledge that one may be elected president by promising to cut taxes by one-fifth on everyone will increasing military spending by $2 trillion over ten years and not increasing the debt by a penny. It is wrong, it is stupid, but if Romney wins, it will be the future.
He said that the President was quiet during the Iranian Green Revolution. Not the Arab Spring in general (without seeing a quote from the debate, it is possible I missed an offhanded comment.)
In the prelude to the Arab Spring, when Iranian students were standing up to the Mullahs, Obama’s response was, among other things:
“It is not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling – the US president, meddling in Iranian elections”
After that, he waited days to toughen his stance, as the Basij and other security forces murdered students in the streets, arrested and tortured protestors, etc.
That’s what he was referring to as “silence.” You may not agree with this summary, but papers at the time called it muted and delayed, and the Iranian people were holding up signs asking us why we wouldn’t stand with them.
You’d be absolutely right if Romney accused him of silence during the Arab Spring as a whole.
On another topic entirely: it was an assessment of conditions on the ground in Iraq that that led Obama to seek a Status of Forces Agreement in Iraq. Despite his campaign promises, he tried to keep 3000-4000 US troops on the ground in Iraq. While it’s politically unpopular for either candidate to admit it, *both* will seek to keep forces on the ground in Afghanistan past the withdrawal deadline, if everything is falling to pieces and we need to buy time for our allies, or to ensure safety during the drawdown, or perhaps even if someone in the CIA leaks crap indicating that the sky will fall and al Qaeda will establish an emirate in Pashtunistan. Obama’s actions definitely lend support to this theory, after all, he sought to keep troops in Iraq, but was rebuffed by the Iraqi government.
Finally, yes “But lost in that line is the fact that the navy has increased the amount of ships in its fleets under Obama. In fact, under George W. Bush, the navy had fewer ships than at any time since the 19th century.” You are right. It was a half truth. No questioning that. But to be clear, the reason the navy has been quickly adding ships even under the Obama administration is because the last Quadrennial Defense Review (under Bush) led to a policy of increasing the fleet size in the navy. A couple years ago, the Navy was ordered — by President Obama — to slow that growth and scale down their goals.
Could it be that America politics has always been saturated with blatant lies and flip flops but that because of technology we’re more aware of it now and more able to expose it?
I don’t know. Just wondering.
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