Misstatements You Can Believe In

Seems to be the buzz word right now, doesn't it? Even Barack Obama, whom the press once called "Mister Articulate," seems to be misspeaking every other word.

But let's not just sit back and allow these people to get away with labelling their own lies as misstatements, while pointing accusing fingers at the lies of their opponents.

For those of you (both of you, I guess) who can't tell the difference between a Republican and a conservative Independent, here's a crash course in the difference between the truth, a misstatement and a lie.

First, the truth:

Senator Clinton's campaign publishes a flyer in California that accuses Senator Obama of wanting to raise taxes by billions (or it is trillions) of dollars. Never mind that her own husband (you remember, Monica's ex-boyfriend and cigar aficionado) passed the sinlge largest tax hike in history - Obama wants to make it look like chump change.
That, folks, is the TRUTH.

Next, a misstatement:

Senator Obama replied to Senator Clinton's charge that he wants to raise taxes. While talking about the flyer, he consistently accused her of accusing him of wanting a tax cut. He meant to say tax increase, but he said tax cut. He knew what he meant, and those few people in his audience who weren't simply drooling but were actually paying attention knew what he meant. He even caught his own misstatement and explained himself.

That's a misstatement - an occasion in which someone misspoke.

Now, a lie:

When you tell people that you weren't in Wright's congregation when he made offensive, desparaging statements, and then it turns out that you were, that's a lie. When you make up stories about ducking sniper fire and running across the tarmac to get to your vehicle, when in fact no such thing happened (but someone related a story about sniper fire that happened a month earlier), that's a lie. When you make up familiy connections to the Selma, Alabama civil rights protests in the 1960s in order to pander to the minority vote in that state, when in fact no such connection exists except in your imagination, that's a lie.

When you contend again and again that you never knew about your friends' membership in groups like the Weather Underground, or about their attempts at mass murder decades ago, and then people begine finding out the truth, that's not a misstatement. It's a lie.

Lies aren't born in a vacuum, folks. They come from somewhere. In the case of both of our Democrat hopefuls, I believe they're born of arrogance. I mean, let's face it. You have to pretty arrogant to believe that you can get away with such made-up stories, even though it's pretty plain that people will figure them out. When Obama said that ten thousand people had died in a Kansas tornado, when the real death toll was twelve, there was a reason for that. It wasn't a misstatement, folks. It was a purposeful exaggeration, delivered with the well-rehearsed intent of making things in this country look worse than they really are. His speech was about how the National Guard has been rendered completely incapable of performing its job (which I doubt) by the war in Iraq - and it's a much more dramatic statement if tornadoes, which everyone knows are George Bush's fault anyway, have been killing tens of thousands of people at a time.

Barack Obama doesn't care if you believe it. He doesn't care if it's realistic. What he cares about is that you heard him say it. He and Hillary Clinton and their robots (Richardson and Carville, for instance) are staying on message through all of these misstatements.

Too bad the misstatements themselves are the message, isn't it?