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General News    H3'ed 8/16/22

Tomgram: Kelly Denton-Borhaug, Living on a Planet of Lies

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Tom Engelhardt
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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Ripley's Believe It or Not has nothing on our moment and it hardly matters where you start! Take, for instance, our last president's complaint about the U.S. military, according to a new book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. While in office, he was, it seems, embittered that "his" generals weren't as loyal as Adolf Hitler's had been. And not just them either. As he said to his chief of staff John Kelly ("preceding the question with an obscenity"), "Why can't you be like the German generals?" Why indeed?

For the president who, according to the Washington Post, made 30,573 false or misleading claims while in the White House, reality has always been a branch of fiction. Whether you're talking about elections (fraudulent!) or an unprecedented FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago estate ("They even broke into my safe!"), you can count on one thing: he'll invariably stretch fact to the edge of fiction, if not far beyond. After all, our world turns out to be eternally up for grabs, a story ready to be made up on the spot.

And he's anything but alone. From Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene to Arizona Senate nominee Blake Masters to Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, these days the Trumpublican party couldn't be a wilder compendium of ever more bizarre and violent fiction. In fact (if you'll excuse the use of that phrase), we increasingly live in a world where fiction is the new fact. And all too many people, not just Alex Jones, have long been glorying in that reality. (Remember as well that if you reject any of those fictions, as Liz Cheney has, you better have enough money to hire some full-time security for yourself.)

And don't just blame Donald Trump either! As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank pointed out recently, he didn't create our present world. He was just "a brilliant opportunist; he saw the direction the Republican Party was taking and the appetites it was stoking. The onetime pro-choice advocate of universal health care reinvented himself to give Republicans what they wanted."

In this context, let TomDispatch regular Kelly Denton-Borhaug, author of And Then Your Soul is Gone: Moral Injury and U.S. War-Culture, explore how lies and disinformation triumphed in our all-American world and what to make of it. Tom

Is Moral Clarity Possible in Donald Trump's America?
On Truth-telling, Confession and First-Class Lies

By

Recent episodes of purposeful and accidental truth-telling brought to my mind the latest verbal lapse by George W. Bush, the president who hustled this country into war in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks. He clearly hadn't planned to make a public confession about his own warmongering in Iraq when he gave a speech in Texas this spring. Still, asked to decry Russian president Vladimir Putin's unjustified invasion of Ukraine, Bush inadvertently and all too truthfully placed his own presidential war-making in exactly the same boat. The words spilled out of his mouth as he described "the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified invasion of Iraq " I mean of Ukraine."

Initially, he seemed shocked that he had blurted that out and tried to back off his slip by shrugging and muttering, "Iraq, too," as if it were a joke. Some in his audience even laughed. But his initial attempt to sideline his comment only deepened the hole he was in. Then he tried another ploy. He suggested that his slip could be forgiven or excused because of his age, 75, and that his invasion and the destruction of Iraq could now be forgiven because of his cognitive decline. All in all, it was a first-class mess.

An Earlier Pathetic Attempt at Comedy

I remember another of Bush's attempted jokes that got an immediate laugh from his audience, but soon fell seriously flat. It was in 2004. The Iraq War was underway and the president was at the yearly dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association, a black-tie event attended by both journalists and politicians.

After various comedy sketches, then-President Bush rose to present a short meant-to-be humorous slideshow featuring himself supposedly looking for the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Remember that, in the lead-up to war there, Americans were hammered with fearful and deceptive political messaging, emphasizing that only an invasion could stop that country's ruler, Saddam Hussein, from having WMD. (None were ever found, of course.) At that dinner, Bush showed photos of himself supposedly searching for those devastating weapons in the Oval Office beneath a cushion on the couch and under the desk. "No weapons under there! Maybe they're here!" said the smiling president repeatedly in a sing-song voice, as if engaged in a child's game. Horrifyingly enough, many in that audience of journalists did indeed laugh.

I was offended then, just as I was by Bush's recent slip and his sorry attempts to minimize and excuse his responsibility for the blood on his hands, the massive death toll from his invasion, and so much additional destruction and suffering. According to The Costs of War project, more than 207,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in that nightmare, while the number who died from the indirect violence of that war was far higher, given the damage done to the Iraqi health care system and the rest of that devastated country's infrastructure. More than 20 years later, people are still dying needlessly. And I also mourn the more than 7,000 U.S. servicemembers who died in the post-9/11 war zones Bush created, as well as the many more who were wounded.

I can't help but wonder if George Bush doesn't feel at least a little of this himself. Otherwise, why would he have made such a slip? Or maybe it wasn't a slip at all, but an inadvertent confession.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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