by Caroline Glick
Thursday the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger published a column called "Obama and the L-word." In it he described with disgust and dismay the way the Obama administration has been playing fast and loose with the term "liar" to describe Mitt Romney since Romney trounced Obama in last week's presidential debate.
Henninger noted that the
use of the term, cheapens and coarsens the political discourse in the US
in a manner that is unprecedented in US politics. He also noted ,
rightly that this is not part of the American political tradition. It is
of a piece with the propaganda of totalitarian regimes.
As he explained:
The Obama campaign's resurrection of "liar" as a political tool is odious because it has such a repellent pedigree. It dates to the sleazy world of fascist and totalitarian propaganda in the 1930s. It was part of the milieu of stooges, show trials and dupes. These were people willing to say anything to defeat their opposition. Denouncing people as liars was at the center of it. The idea was never to elevate political debate but to debauch it.
The purpose of calling someone a liar then was not merely to refute their ideas or arguments. It was to nullify them, to eliminate them from participation in politics. That's what is so unsettling about a David Axelrod or David Plouffe following accusations of dishonesty and lies with "whether that person should sit in the Oval Office." And that is followed by President Obama himself feeding the new line in stump speeches without himself ever using the L-word.
This Obama campaign is saying, "We don't want to compete with Mitt Romney. We want to obliterate him."
Henninger
ended his column by wondering how the Obama campaign' post-presidential
debate employment of this tactic against Romney would impact Biden's
debate performance.
And last night we got the answer.
Throughout the debate, Biden treated Rep. Paul Ryan with contempt. He
never responded to any of Ryan's reasoned, substantive criticisms of
Obama's policies. He simply called him a liar, repeatedly. With no
justification. He sneered. He guffawed. And he maligned Ryan for 90
minutes.
I watched the debate
on Fox News. I suppose the commentators hadn't read Henninger's article.
They were all expressing shock at Biden's nastiness. They didn't seem
to recognize that it is part of the Obama campaign's strategy.
Another
aspect of this that both Henninger and the Fox commentators were too
gentle to mention outright - although Henninger nearly did is that the
politics of personal destruction is based on projection. The side doing
it is accusing their opponents of doing precisely what they are doing.
In last night's debate, Biden lied, flat out lied, repeatedly. He lied
about what the military thinks of the sequestration policy of gutting
military budgets. He lied about what the intelligence community said
about the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi. He lied about how
Medicare is impacted by Obamacare.
And that's just off the top of my head.
A
word about those lies. At least in the case of the Benghazi lie,
Biden's actions show how lies are part and parcel of how the Obama
administration does its business on a daily basis.
The only
basis for the claim that US intelligence said the attack wasn't a terror
attack but was a response to that stupid, irrelevant anti-Islam film on
YouTube was a statement by James Clapper, Obama's appointed Director of
National Intelligence.
It must be said, Clapper is not a credible source.
Clapper has abused his office repeatedly to politicize intelligence and facts in order to serve the appeasement-of-Islamic-
This came across most brazenly
during the uprising against longtime US ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. On
Feb 10, 2011, the day before the Obama administration forced Hosni
Mubarak to resign from the Egyptian presidency, Clapper appeared before
the House Select Committee on Intelligence and told the Congressmen that
the Muslim Brotherhood is a "largely secular movement."
In
his words, "The term 'Muslim Brotherhood' is an umbrella term for a
variety of movements. In the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group,
largely secular which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaida as a
perversion of Islam. They have pursued social ends, betterment of the
political order in Egypt, etc."
This was a
complete lie and anyone with even a modicum of awareness about the
Brotherhood - even without the benefit of classified information - knows
that it is a lie. He should have been fired for saying such nonsense
because it isn't just wrong, it is dangerous, as we see today with the
Muslim Brotherhood in charge in Egypt.
But this
is par for the course for Obama appointees. And it shows the depths to
which its officials will sink in order to push the President's agenda.
Lies are not a simply campaigning tactic or strategy. They are the heart of how this administration does business.
Steven
Hayes on Fox made the important point that in the space of just a
couple of minutes Biden said US intelligence misled the administration
on Libya and could be totally trusted to get Iran's nuclear capabilities
just right.
Do you feel safe with that assessment?
I
was dismayed that Ryan didn't just come out and attack Biden for doing
what he was doing. But he was in a tight spot. Martha Raddatz, the
moderator was there playing interference for Biden the whole time. Every
time Ryan started making a point, she'd interrupt him and change the
subject.
Aside from that I felt the age
disparity worked in Biden's favor because Ryan was clearly trying to be
deferential to his elder who clearly did not deserve any deference from
him. Ryan was playing by the old rule book, treating his opponent with
respect. Biden was playing by the Obama rulebook and treated his
opponent with contempt as a means of destroying him personally.
Commentators all say that Ryan held his own. And that's true and good for him, as far as that goes. But that isn't the point.
The
point is that Romney has been warned, by Biden and the campaign. He
needs to stay on offense. And that doesn't just mean to defend his
positions or call Obama on the failure of his policies. It means to
confront Obama on what he is doing in his campaign and refuse to pretend
that this is business as usual.
The ugliness
we saw last night is just a foretaste of what will come in the next
three week and Romney better be ready. Because if he isn't, the ugliness
he will need to deal with in the next three weeks will be nothing in
comparison to the ugliness that will become America in a second Obama
administration.
Caroline Glick
Source: http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2012/10/biden-obama-and-the-politics-o.php
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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