When not to debate a lie

Somewhere in 1984, there’s a passage where a party loyalist is giving a speech at a rally, ranting against Eastasia, the current enemy of Oceania. Someone hands him a piece of paper, which he glances at, while continuing his diatribe without pause. A ripple of activity runs through the crowd, as they realize that the target of the speaker’s invective has switched from Eastasia to Eurasia (the message informed him of a reversal of alliances).

In The Manchurian Candidate, Senator Iselin makes repeated public statements that there are N members of the Communist party employed by the government. The value of N ranges widely and wildly from statement to statement, and even from moment to moment. When Iselin complains to his wife that the guys in the cloakroom are starting to make fun of him, she waves a newspaper in his face and berates him: “Are they asking whether there are any Communists in the government? No. They’re asking how many Communists there are!”

Now:

This weekend, while interviewing George Bush, George Stephanopolous asked him if the current strategy in Iraq was successful. In response, Bush said “Now George, our policy’s never been ‘stay the course’.” Dan Bartlett repeated the same phrase on the morning news shows.

Various reality-based blogs are responding to this frontally, with earnest lists of quotes from the last three years wherein Bush or one or another member of his administration uses the phrase “stay the course”.

This is playing into the administration’s hands.

It’s one thing for Ken Mehlman to repeatedly state that Dennis Hastert fired Mark Foley when the story broke on ABC that Foley was a sexual predator. This is not true – Foley resigned before Hastert became aware that the scandal had become public. But it’s conceivable that there could have been more than a few Americans not fully aware of that fact. TV news personalities interviewing Mehlman had simply to point this out and, when Mehlman stuck to his story (which he did), informed their viewers that he was, in fact, lying, or at any rate, repeatedly speaking an untruth after being presented with the fact of its lack of veracity. (The fact that none did is another story.)

But the fact of the administration’s “stay the course” terminology is so uncontested and objectively obvious and true that the statement of the reverse is either a joke or an insult. To respond to this statement as if there were any question as to its untruthfulness is to open a debate as to whether or not the Administration’s policy has, in fact, ever been “stay the course”.

To paraphrase Mrs. Iselin: We’re not discussing whether or not the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq was or was not an unmitigated disaster; we’re discussing whether or not it was, in fact, their strategy.