.
11/19/13, "Obama’s Noble Lies," "Stop worrying whether the president’s statements conform to ossified standards of truth." By Victor Davis Hanson
"What
is the common denominator of the Obama administration’s serial scandals
— the Justice Department’s spying on AP, the IRS targeting of
conservative groups, the NSA surveillance, the lies about Benghazi and the ACA
— and much of the White House damage-control rhetoric? In a word: the
advancement of postmodern notions of justice at the expense of
traditional truth.
By the 1980s, in law schools, university social-science departments,
and the humanities in general, the old relativist idea of Plato’s noble
lies was given a new French facelift. Traditional morality and ethics
were dismissed as arbitrary constructs, predicated on privileged notions
of race, class, and gender. The new moral architecture did not rely on
archaic abidance by the niceties of “truth,” which simply reinforced
traditional oppressive hierarchies.
Instead, social justice by definition transcended the sham of
traditional ideas of truth and falsity. The true became the advocacy of
fairness, while the real lie was the reactionary adherence to a set of
oppressive norms. All this was faculty-lounge fluff, but soon it
filtered out into the larger culture.
In this regard, it was understandable that the New York Times
characterized the president’s not telling the truth on over 20
occasions as cases of “misspeaking.” Translated, that means he lied but
his lies were really true: Misspeaking means that Obama was not
sensitive enough to those of us still mired in calcified definitions of
true and false. The privileged still cross t’s and dot i’s; their victims have no such luxury....
Those who object that the issue is health care, and not lies, fail to
see that the two were always inseparable. Obama knowingly and serially
said something that he knew was not true because he did not wish to take
the trouble to explain to the American people that, yes, several
million people with individual plans would lose their existing health
insurance — and many of them would have to change doctors and pay more
in premiums — but they would in the long term, and in theory, be better
off, and in fact, in the short term, would serve the public good by
subsidizing the care of the less well-off. But the president knew that
many Americans would see that as a socialist stretch. He lacked the
confidence that he could sell that argument politically, and so he chose
not to try. Why play the reactionaries’ game?
In the postmodern world of the New York Times and Barack
Obama, again, “truth” is a relative concept. For reactionaries stuck in
ossified notions of absolute truth, perhaps indeed Obama did “misspeak.”
But for progressives of our brave new world, Obama was all along
speaking truth to power merely by using linguistic gymnastics to advance
a larger good — the idea that the privileged who had managed to acquire
good health insurance should at last pay more in order to cover those
who in the past undeservedly had been deprived of commensurate coverage.
If ACA navigators on occasion have urged poor applicants to fudge on
their eligibility, what is the big deal? Are those really lies — given
that the system that reduced some Americans to poverty and the status of
the uninsured is one big lie to begin with? When “regulations” are
enforced about voter IDs, Obamaphones, or eligibility for disability
insurance and food stamps, poor people suffer; when they are ignored,
the real truth emerges and a higher justice is served.
Of course, the apparently clueless who had bought certain types of
insurance did not realize that they had “subpar” or “junk” plans issued
by “bad-apple insurers.” Again, how could the president be accused of
lying when he was helping the uninformed to be released from their
“crap” coverage in order to purchase the superior Obamacare product? As
Obama put it, “So the majority of folks will end up being better off, of
course, because the website’s not workin’ right, they don’t necessarily
know it.”
When U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice lied five times on national
television about the Benghazi deaths, followed by Hillary Clinton over
the coffins of the dead men and yet again by Barack Obama at the United
Nations, they were not really telling untruths. Rather, Rice was merely
blaming the reactionary bigot Nakoula Basseley Nakoula for his
unenlightened views on Islam, which had earned understandable outrage.
Can anyone deny that Nakoula was insensitive?
What difference did it make who actually shot and killed four
Americans and why, when the U.S. government so clearly and forcefully
had come down on the right side in condemning and then jailing an
Islamophobe? If Nakoula did not incite this particular riot in Libya,
his venomous video surely could have, and, in fact, it might have
elsewhere. What difference did the trivial circumstances of the Benghazi
violence make in the larger pursuit of religious tolerance?
What really was the problem with the IRS tax-exempt division?
Sticklers for detail might object that perhaps Lois Lerner & Co.
improperly denied tax-exempt status to perceived reactionary groups. But
is anyone denying that the tea-party affiliates were reactionary, or
that they needed to be advised that they could not simply voice their
odious views at government expense?
Right and wrong, like truth and lies, are calcified concepts in
service to a rigged world of discrimination. If those who enjoy
privilege are upset that a mild regulation was bypassed, well, too bad:
It was worth it to prevent the Tea Party from derailing the reelection
efforts of a progressive president. And if the IRS overpaid $132 billion
in earned-income tax credits to those with low incomes, again, why the
outrage? These are details that pale in comparison to the larger picture
of social justice: Did or did not the poor at last receive some help
from the government? Were or were not reactionary groups prevented from
promulgating their untruths about a progressive president?"...via Free Rep.
.
.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment