When Ronald Reagan told a heart-breaking story that he’d seen in a Warner Brothers war movie, which had never happened in real life, as if it were true, that he’d been at the liberation of the concentration camps though he’d never left Hollywood during the World War II, and told slanderous tales of black people abusing welfare that were false, nobody wrote that he was a liar.
He was just a likeable, corny storyteller. After the facts about Iran-Contra were published by a commission report, Reagan made a public statement that said, “A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.” Yet, the L word did not appear.
The L word continued to be kept in the closet, in favour of respectful euphemism, through the war in Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Did it matter? Yes. When George W Bush ran for his second term there had been two official reports that said there were no WMDs. The Senate Intelligence Committee and the 9/11 Commission both reported that there had been no connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Yet 72 percent of Bush supporters believed Saddam had WMDs, 75 percent thought he was connected to al-Qaeda, and more than half thought the experts agreed with them.
It seems reasonable to think that the way the stories were reported allowed these delusions to persist and that, in turn, Bush got re-elected by the delusional.
All politicians lie but it’s better if not mentioned
Published
A Middleground 