Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire

I read two columns in the past week which touched on a point I've wanted to blog about. That is the current tendency to brand our opponents as liars, or evil incarnate.

It is no longer possible to simply disagree with our opponents, we must castigate and destroy them. The MoveOn.org ad slandering Gen. Petraeus is perhaps the pinnacle of this phenomenon. Or maybe that was Hillary calling Dick Cheney "Darth Vader".

Bush lied to get us into Iraq. He wasn't merely wrong about WMD, he made it all up. Gen. Petraeus knows Iraq is hopeless; he's just shilling for Bush, the way Colin Powell did.

Whatever happened to the idea that "reasonable people of goodwill may differ". I think it is our current brand of hyper-partisan, win at all costs politics. If you can't use reasoned argument to defeat someone, attack his motives, his background, his family. Call him names, call him a liar. The Clintons named this "the politics of personal destruction". They coined the phrase in self-defense; they became its best practitioners.

Kathleen Parker and Suzanne Fields both wrote columns on this point. Read them in full if you can. Here are a couple key points, first from Parker:

"Politics is ever the enemy of judgment, and perspective gets lost in the hysteria that inevitably builds when large numbers of politicians and media gather too tightly in a room. The whir of cameras and the flash of bulbs alter the human ecosystem somehow and interfere with the brain's circuitry, it would seem."

Fields was even more direct:

"There is no greater lie than to falsely accuse a person of being a liar. The slander by MoveOn.org, the smearing machine of the Democratic lunatic left, rises to the highest office of the land, falsely accusing the president of lying about weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which was not a lie but a mistake based on the intelligence gathered by several nations of the coalition. A mistake is not a lie; an accusation of mistake has no power to destroy a reputation.
Lying in politics is not new, but what is new is the thundering silence from critics of policy who know better and who say nothing. In time truth generally wills out, but when media is instantaneously ubiquitous, a lie, in the words of a senator of the previous century, runs halfway around the world before truth can get its boots on. A lie distracts debate, inhibits rational discussion, curtails the free expression of ideas and reduces honest differences of opinion to vicious tirades. And it lives forever in the infinity of the Internet, even after exposed as a lie."

On the blogs, Fields last point is very evident. George W. Bush is not just a bad President who bungled Iraq, he is the worst, criminal, lying President in American history. People like me who supported him in any way are fools, morons, or worse.

I wonder what it will take to restore a modicum of civility and honor to politics?