The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [79]
This was too much for people to handle. After Carter, with his dreary, not-always-convincing attempts at honesty, America decided that even if it knew its president was a fraud, it could live with him, so long as he was a skilled fraud. To the rescue came Ronald Reagan, whose virtue was that he told lies that were enjoyable, uplifting. Reagan was the first president who was rewarded at the polls for the quality of his fictions. He shared this trait with Bill Clinton, a bullshitter of Shakespearean dimensions who carried America all the way through the nineties with an orgiastic smile on his face. We knew Clinton was a liar and a pussy-killer, but we didn’t mind. Two-hundred-fifty-odd years after “I cannot tell a lie,” Clinton’s reign defined presidential truth as a statement that was legally defensible in theory and also vetted by the best and most expensive lawyers on the planet, i.e., “I did not have sex with that woman.”
So America went from being a place where the president set the standard for truth and forthrightness to being a place where the president was expected to lie always, and at all times. But the one thing throughout this period that Americans could always depend on, even after Nixon and the collapse of public faith in the president’s morals, was that the lies the American president told would always be the very best lies that science, computerized research, and Washington’s most devious spooks could produce. Our president may lie, but he will lie effectively and spectacularly, with all the epic stagecraft and lighting and special effects available to the White House publicity apparatus. He is never a hack, never a half-assed, off-the-cuff, squirming, my-dog-ate-my-homework sort of liar. Or at least he wasn’t until George W. Bush came around.
“They hate our freedoms” was possibly the dumbest, most insulting piece of bullshit ever to escape the lips of an American president. As an explanation for the appalling tragedy of 9/11, which was the culmination of decades of escalating tension between the Arab world and the West, it was insufficient even as a calculated effort to snow an uneducated public—it was too stupid even to hold up as that. And yet when he said it, Bush was not savaged by the mainstream media for blowing off the biggest security question of our time. The Washington press corps did not line up to pelt him with mushy pineapples for insulting their intelligence. Instead, he was cheered as a hero by members of both parties and virtually all the country’s commercial media, which engaged in a kind of frantic race to see who could more enthusiastically compare Bush’s speechmaking to that of Winston Churchill. Worse still, the mainstream media followed Bush’s lead by coming up with its own, more verbose, versions of Bush’s analysis.
“THEY HATE OUR FREEDOMS” was only one of a number of preposterous lies mainstream society was expected to embrace after 9/11. The Iraq invasion and the reasons for it were only the most obvious. By 2003 or 2004 any American with even half a brain could only assess the performance of his government via a careful weighing of its various lies and contradictions. An educated person understood that the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) business was a canard and that there had to be some other reason for the invasion of Iraq; indeed, even in the weeks before the war began, commentators across the country were already judging (and in some cases supporting) the