Bush's big lies

[babylonsister]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-brooks5-2009mar05,0,2289353.column


Bush's big lies
Behind the sordid memos that purported to give legal justification for the war on terror.
Rosa Brooks
March 5, 2009

snip//

But all this raises the question: How did such dangerously bad legal memos ever get taken seriously in the first place?

One answer is suggested by the so-called Big Lie theory of political propaganda, articulated most infamously by Adolf Hitler. Ordinary people "more readily fall victim to the big lie than the small lie," wrote Hitler, "since they themselves often tell small lies ... but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

In other words: Paradoxically, the more outrageous the claim, the more apt we are to assume there must be some truth to it. Just as some banks and insurance companies are apparently "too big to fail," some claims from those with political power seem to strike us as "too big to disbelieve." "That seems so outrageous it must be right," we tell ourselves. "The important people keep saying it -- they must know something I don't know."

That's the only explanation I can come up with for why the 2001-2002 memos stood as Bush administration doctrine for as long as they did. (The Big Lie theory also helps explain why other manifestly false Bush administration claims prevailed in the face of the evidence: Recall, for instance, how we were assured that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that the war would be a cakewalk?)

Big lies prevail because we can't bring ourselves to believe that our leaders could be so dishonest or deluded. And big lies can do terrible damage, of course. The Bush administration's big legal lies paved the way for some of the most shameful episodes in our history, including the official authorization of torture.

In the end, thankfully, all big lies collapse under their own weight. We're in a new era: The early memos produced by the office have been repudiated, and the Bush administration was sent packing with rock-bottom public approval ratings.

But don't think we're out of the woods. As Hitler demonstrated, some small part of the most "impudent lies" will always remain and stick. Big lies leave little lies in their wake, changing the political discourse in enduring, difficult-to-detect ways.

And that's the challenge we now face: tracing the barely visible effects of the Bush administration's now-repudiated big lies -- through our legal system, our constitutional system, our foreign policy -- and undoing all the damage.

It will take a generation.

[Demeter]

1. It's Not Like these Memos Saw the Light of Day

There were rumors, gossip, and lots of insults to "conspiracy nuts". But no public disclosure of these secret plans to subvert the Constitution were ever made. One had to infer by the public actions that did happen: the lies, the wars, the Patriot Acts, the voting machines, etc...the budgets, the off-budgets, Blackwater and KBR/Halliburton, man-safes, office fires and on-site shredders, and the like. Free-speech gulag zones, Potempkin audiences, plastic turkeys and secret missions, disappearing cash.