OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Liberals, for whom the ends always justify the means, have an odd relationship with the truth.
Al Franken illustrated this point perfectly in his 2003 book, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.” Written when he was a professional comedian, Mr. Franken targeted conservatives for their “documentable lies.” Funny thing is, the book (researched by 14 Harvard graduate students) was itself full of lies.
Reviewer Mary Lynn F. Jones of the The Hill wrote then: “Franken’s tendency to mix fact with fiction also left me wondering sometimes what was true and what wasn’t.”
Of course, there’s no need to mention Bill Clinton’s troubled relationship with the truth (he actually argued that the “sex” he had with that White House intern half his age wasn’t “sexual relations,” and questioned what the meaning of the word “is” is).
But there’s reason to mention Brian Williams, the one-time anchor of the Nightly News on NBC (whose sister station is rabidly anti-conservative and anti-Republican). Over the years, Mr. Williams became a celebrity, starring in cameos on “30 Rock” and becoming a regular on the late-night funny shows — home court of the liberal.
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Mr. Williams has some sort of pathological need to embiggen himself. It wasn’t enough that 9 million people watched him nightly, or that he made $10 million a year, he needed to be more — a war hero, it turns out. So he made up stories — lied — about what he had done as a “journalist.” While a slew of liberal mouthpieces sought to help him out (what he did really wasn’t that bad, they argued), he was ridden out of town on a rail.
But not so at all for another lying “journalist” — Jon Stewart. The same week Mr. Williams was imploding, Mr. Stewart announced he’d be leaving his fake news program, “The Daily Show.” The nation’s liberal media swooned — what on Earth would America do without Mr. Stewart’s incisive insight, his witty sarcasm, his truer-than-true take on the news, they moaned.
Mr. Stewart is a special kind of “journalist.” He covers the “news,” but he isn’t bound by any journalistic ethics (that annoying demand to cite sources, be unbiased, balance reports, etc.). He said on the air what the liberal media pundits say to each other at all those snooty Manhattan cocktail parties.
And yes, the Comedy Central funnyman was one of the MSM “journalists” who tried to downplay the Williams scandal. “Being caught is punishment enough,” he said last week with an uncharacteristically straight face.
Mr. Stewart then launched into a gag bit (maybe) on how un-credible the news media is — after all, they misled America about WMDs in Iraq by not vetting claims by the George W. Bush administration, he said, so this is par for the course. The studio audience laughed and laughed.
But in the end, Brian Williams doesn’t matter, Jon Stewart doesn’t matter. They aren’t elected, their lies have no effect. But Hillary Rodham Clinton wants to be president, and she’s a liar: She said she faced sniper fire when she once flew into Bosnia, but she didn’t. She said the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked in protest of an anti-Muslim video on YouTube — a flat-out, bald-faced lie.
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Now she wants to be president.
Yet even she’s just a wannabe, a former who now makes a living giving speeches — and inflating her resume.
But there is one big liar Americans should be furious at, and that’s the president of the United States. According to his top aide, David Axelrod, Candidate Obama lied to the American people in 2008 about his stance on gay marriage.
“Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church,” Mr. Axelrod writes in his new book, so Mr. Obama “modified” his stance, saying he believed marriage should be between a man and a woman.
After one campaign event, the former aide wrote, Mr. Obama came off the stage and told him, “I’m just not very good at” a metaphor involving bovine waste.
But that’s not true: He’s great at it. He got elected twice by lying, by saying the politically expedient thing to whatever group he was addressing.
Odd that we heard so much about the lies told by a news anchor — but so little about the lie told by the president. Yet for the liberal liars and the liberal lies they tell — liberally — the ends always justify the means. And the mainstream media couldn’t care less. Nor, for that matter, could fake news maestro Jon Stewart.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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