Holy Joe, Rudy, and Rush know you don't have to pay a price for public lying. But truth-telling can kill you -- ask Greg Craig

When it comes to manipulating a terror-prone public with lies and obfuscations, Rudy gives Rush a run for his money.

by Ken

We say we want pols who "say what they mean and mean what they say," but we really don't, do we? Americans want lies. They demand lies. They want lies that will make them feel better than reality. Ironically, the lies they like best are usually ones that you'd think would make them feel worse, feeding on their deep-set terrors, rage, and hatred. But it turns out that, if you stoke those internal demons right, many Americans enjoy suffering from them -- and it takes their minds off the absence of any good news to offer them from reality. (Is it any wonder they've developed such contempt for reality?)

At the same time, we easily forget why public figures tend to be so guarded about saying what they mean and meaning what they say. It has a way of biting you in the butt.

Case in point: In yesterday's Washington Post our pal Al Kamen was reflecting on the unceremonious departure of White House Counsel Greg Craig, and recalled a detail he had previously reported:

Too much passion


White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, commenting Friday on the long-expected resignation of White House Counsel Greg Craig, told reporters that Craig never wanted to be an administration lawyer.

"Greg is, as you know, somebody who served in a previous administration in foreign policy. That's his passion," Gibbs said. He called Craig a "reluctant acceptor" of the counsel position.

So why didn't he land a foreign policy job? we wondered. And why can't he get one now?

Oh, yeah. Forgot about this item we wrote just after the election, the one about Craig's March 2008 hit memo on Clinton, his law school classmate and longtime pal.

After a passing shot at Clinton's "failed effort" on health insurance, Craig, a senior State Department staffer during her husband's presidency, argued that her "claims of foreign policy experience are exaggerated." He then delivers a claim-by-claim rebuttal, from her helping to broker the peace in Northern Ireland -- "gross exaggeration" -- to helping open Kosovo's borders, to urging President Bill Clinton to intervene in Rwanda, and so on, including that sniper-fire thing in Bosnia.

In contrast, Obama, Craig wrote, "does not use false charges and exaggerated claims to play politics with national security." Whew. Brutal.

Once Clinton was named secretary of state, a foreign policy job for Craig was not gonna happen. And you can bet she hasn't forgotten.

Which should be an object lesson in just how careful you have have to be if you want to make your way through the corridors of power. Look, anyone who signs on to a presidential campaign knows he/she is rolling the dice. If your candidate wins, and the People Who Matter see you as having made an important contribution, your résumé should find its way into the elite pile for People to Be Taken Care Of. It goes without saying that if you bet on a losing candidate, you're up Doody Creek, and you're going to have to be a master of fancy footwork or plain old-fashioned groveling and butt-kissing.

According to those traditional terms, Greg Craig was just playing the game. No one is suggesting that anything he wrote in the fateful memo was untrue, and if it was, well, impolitic, he had every reason to think his was a winning gamble when, first, his candidate bested Senator Clinton for the Democratic nomination and, then, won the election. That, surely, should have been his cue to put those final polishing touches on the réseumé, and maybe craft a covering letter that made prominent mention of that memo of his that did such damage to the rival candidate's claims of foreign-policy expertise.

Wouldn't you just like to see videotape of the first moment that player Craig learned that for real the president-elect was considering Senator Clinton as his secretary of state? I think we can understand it totally from her standpoint too. If you had someone who did to you what Greg Craig did to her, and you then found yourself in a position to influence his hirability, would you have any impulse to let bygones be bygones? No, I didn't think so. Of course the president appoints scads of people to foreign-policy-related jobs that aren't in the State Dept. and aren't within the chain of command of the secretary of state. It's for considerations like this that "over my dead body" and other similar expressions of discouragement were crafted.

I haven't noticed any rush by the White House to find another spot for our Greg. If he wants another government job, it's looking as if he's going to have to wait for most of not all of the people in the present administration to move on to other opportunities, and then find a presidential candidate to back, and hope his good service in a winning campaign effort is recognized with a nice offer. (Probably not White House counsel.) If he hedges his bets a little more next time around, I think we would all understand.

ANNALS OF THE RIGHT-WING PROPAGANDA MACHINE

Usually when public figures publicly pull their punches, or just plain lie, it's not their fellow pols they have in mind; they're pitchin propaganda to the proles. And when they do it skillfully, it isn't always easy to debunk the fiction.

Yesterday Howie and I were e-chatting about which of us might venture to say something about the latest bogus wingnut issue: the totally manufactured threat to national security posed by (a) relocating Guantanamo detainees to U.S. prisons and (b) actually trying such of them as are to be tried in U.S. courts. The first part is so pathetically stupid that even some of the nuttiest of the wingnuts are refusing to go along. As Sam Stein reported yesterday on Huffpost:

[O]n Sunday, a group of highly respected conservative figures lent their support to the transfer, calling it necessary to "preserve national security" while simultaneously avoiding "sweeping and radical departures from an American constitutional tradition."

In a joint statement prepared by the Constitution Project, David Keene, founder of American Conservative Union, Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, and former representative and presidential candidate Bob Barr say moving suspected terrorists to the Thomson, Illinois prison facility, "makes good sense." Taxpayers, they note, have already invested $145 million in the facility, which has been "little used." And the surrounding community, they add, could benefit from increased employment once the prison becomes filled.

"The scaremongering about these issues should stop," they add, noting that there is "absolutely no reason to fear that prisoners will escape or be released into their communities."

To believe otherwise, you have to be arguing that American prisons are incapable of securing prisoners, which is an especially loony argument to come from the right-wing loonies, because prisons are the American institution they believe most fervently in. In economic terms, prison-building is about as close as Republicans have come to a jobs policy since the Great Depression.

But more important, to argue that there's a security risk in moving detainees to U.S. prisons, you are now officially declaring yourself nuttier than Grover Norquist. Until now surely our Grover would have stood as the closest a human mind has ever approached scientifically absolute nuttiness.

And yet, as Sam also reported, leading GOP Senate candidate Rep. Mark Kirk has already positioned himself at the front of the line of scumbag nutjobs seeking to terrify voters for electoral advantage, declaring, ""As home to America's tallest building, we should not invite Al Qaeda to make Illinois its number one target." At some point, are we going to have to have a Butterfly-Net Brigade to get these people off the streets and into the institutional care they need?

It's been fascinating watching the model of the New Conservatism emerge on its four-legged base of insanity, stupidity, dishonesty, and criminal predation. In each domain it's been like watching gifted athletes pass memorable milestones on their way to breaking existing records. On the path to utter insanity, the "Just Say No" Republicans have now left Grover Norquist in the dust.

The issue of proper trials, as with the DoJ's announced intention to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others, is trickier. The argument against is just as bogus, but committed and brazen liars -- you know, people devoid of the tiniest shred of ethics or indeed any kind of principles, like Holy Joe Lieberman, Rudy Giuliani, and Rush Limbaugh -- know they can have a field day hoodwinking Americans who are too lazy to use their brains, or feel that it's an infringement on their rights even to ask them to.

Due process of law is of course supposed to be one of the unshakable pillars on which the American republic is built. But of course Rudy's and Holy Joe's boundless hatred of everything America stands for makes it easy for them to make a mockery of our most basic principles. It could be that they're angry because they thought in eight years the Bush regime had once and for all dismantled the concept of American justice, one of the things about our system that used to be the envy of the world. Of course it's meaningless to people whose preference is to transform America into a jackbooted ultra-right-wing dictatorship.

But these issues are much easier to obfuscate, involving as they do many principles, like "justice" and "due process," that are too abstract for processing by, say, the average Fox viewer. I don't imagine that Joe and Rudy and Rush are telling them that the real obstacles to civilian trials for the Guantanamo detainees is the rampant lawlessness of our government in its grotesquely incompetent investigation of the suspects. The real challenge is going to be scraping together enough evidence that can pass the basic tests of legality and fairness that the Roberts Court hasn't had enough time to strip away.

No, the Far Right propagandists aren't likely to dwell on that. (Actually, Rudy does raise the issue, but he manages to make it sound like due process is an evil terrorist plot. That's pretty inventive, but I have a feeling it may be too subtle for the target audience. So maybe I was wrong, and Rudy isn't as skilled at this as Rush.) They prefer to play on the psychotic delusions of crap-brained entertainments like 24, which similarly trades on the stupidity and gullibility of its viewers to fob off its lies. Whether they do it for ratings or votes, what the propagandists of the Far Right have incommon is that they're past masters at using terror to scare the bejezus out of their sheeplike countrymen. When it suits their purposes, the devils of the Far Right like to portray liberals as weak-kneed nervous nellies. In fact, nobody is more cringingly gutless than the red-blooded, fag-hating, macho-in-their-own-minds white males who are the standard targets of the Far Right demagogues. These people love to be scared out of their panties.

If you'd like some more reasoned discussion of the detainee-trial issue, our friends at Think Progress have done a bang-up job in a post piquantly titled "Faith in Our Justice System" in today's edition of The Progress Report. If you're not signed up to receive The Progress Report daily, it's one of the smarter and more useful things you can find in your e-mailbox, and it's a snap to sign up for.

With regard to the patented Fox process of manipulating its gullible viewers, by the way, Noah has a post coming up tomorrow I think you'll really enjoy.

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