I was encouraged to set up a blogspot because my opinions had reached the point where they offended members of an email list to which I belong and which I value. The proximate causes of offense were that I take seriously the threat posed by right wing operatives, including those of the Republican party to the life of one of the candidates for the Democratic nomination for president, and that I have zero respect for the Homeland Security Act or the Patriot Act. More distal causes have to do with the fact that I feel strongly that the entire USA is in the hands of criminals, and that these criminals have taken over control of electronic voting to the point where they may now assure perpetuation of their stanglehold on Democracy.
I am not yet an Obama supporter, as the only Democratic candidate that approximates my views is Dennis Kucinich. However, I now believe it is time for a progressive third party, and I am unhappy that the Greens have not done more to produce a candidate.
I have put out a challenge to electronic correspondents which I will also post here. I seek contradiction of this statement: junior bush has never made a public statement that he didn't know to be a lie. The reason we the people cannot sense his dishonesty is that we depend on contrast in order to detect patterns. As junior bush never tells the truth, nobody is aware that he is lying.
Nobody has attempted to show this statement is wrong.
I'm Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UNC Chapel Hill. My interests are broad and my politics rather more progressive than most.
8 comments:
Where is the lie here?
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT ON HOMEOWNERSHIP
at the Department of Housing and Urban Development
Washington, D.C.
June 18, 2002, 10:30 A.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you all very much for that kind welcome. I'm here for a couple of reasons. ... I'm here to celebrate National Homeownership Month, because I believe owning a home is an essential part of economic security.
Thank you, Charlie
Good luck with this venue.
Peter
always never has a point. Bushg might not have been deliberately lying this time. He might only have been saying something abysmally stupid.
Walter,
I'm a little slow.... Which of the words I quoted are an accidental lie or simply "abysmally stupid?"
1. He's not really thanking the audience?
2. He's "here" for only one -- or more than "a couple of" reasons?
3. It's not "National Homeownership Month" -- or he's not celebrating it?
4. He does not believe that "owning a home is an essential part of economic security."?
5. One or more of the statments, while true, are stupid. PLEASE help me by showing me which sentences/clauses/phrases constitute your evidence.
Which is it?
I was thinking of "owning a home is an *essential* part of economic security.
Quite obviously, it is not *essential.* Millions of people, many with plenty of money and economic security, choose to rent for more reasons than there is space to list. But we already know the man has little command of his own language and hardly any grasp of the fact that other people even have different cultures, let alone that in international affairs it is important to understand these cultural differences.
The lie is : "I believe owning a home is an essential part of economic security." junior bush has no respect for home ownership, as is evidenced overwhelmingly by the draconian bankruptcy law, which establishes creditors as having priority over home ownership. Moreover, I am convinced that this is a conscientious lie, not an accidental one.
In view of the Center for Public Ingtegrity report that 935 lies were told by administration officials in the runup to the illegal occupation of Iraq, and that the frequency of these lies was highly correlated with political objectives, it is desperately unnerving that administration officials are now saying that the economy is strong.
You may be right, Charlie, but I think W is of the sort who is well able to believe several mutually contradictory things simultaneously. He hasn't the brain to be truly subtle. And of course, he has a house - several in fact. He can't readily conceive of people who don't have or don't want their own house, and blames poor people for being poor. I think to him this means having a house is important to economic security, because if he lost his it would mean he was in financial trouble. At the same time, he thinks that anyone who doesn't have a house doesn't really deserve one because he thinks that if they deserved one they'd have it, and damned if he is going to help any lazy undeserving people get what they should get on their own.
So I think, no, probably he has no idea he is lying. He's just too damn dumb to "get it."
Walter makes several useful points here that resonate with me. My original point about junior bush was rhetorical in an important way, so I feel it is possible to agree, and yet sustain my opinion.
One point at which we intersect is Walter's suggestion that junior may not realize in some part of his brain that he is lying, while in other parts, I would maintain that he does know it. The respective places are, roughly speaking, higher level consciousness, where he may be clueless about his dishonesty and the limbic system, where he must know there is a contradiction.
Also, the suggestion that junior feels that if people haven't got a home they don't deserve it resonates. Willard Romney is another repulsive example of a pervasive phenomenon that the more wealth a person has, the more that person will feel entitled to it, and the less satisfying it becomes.
This disjunction is, I think, closely related to another: the strict correlation between one's belief in violence as an appropriate means of conflict resolution and the extent to which one is willing to sacrifice oneself and one's own family to the effort. The only democratic candidate whose family has not participated in the military is Hillary Clinton, whose daughter is a hedge fund manager. The only republicans among the candidates and among the administration who have served or whose children have served are John McCain and Donald Rumsfeld. This disporporation is extraordinary and rarely commented on by anybody, though I did catch a comment the other day on NPR that reminded me. Notably, Willard's children have expressed disdain for military service and all five are serving in his campaign, which is perhaps the scariest thing on the current scene for me.
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