I'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT spirituality and politics lately, about how our basic values affect our political behavior, and the kinds of rhetoric we use.
Watching the conventions, I was struck by the quite different attitudes the two parties seem to have toward lying.
We're all aware that both Democrats and Republicans lie, as do you and I. A human being who has never misled another human being is almost certainly mentally deficient.
But there are different kinds of lying, and different reasons for lying. It's easy to point to Clinton's dishonesty, for example, about sex in the White House—a straight-forward attempt to avoid scandal about a personal matter.
More recently the Bush administration has perfected a very particular style of programatic deception: a sort of governance by dishonesty, as a matter of policy.
One hallmark of the technique is to avoid, insofar as possible, any statements that are literally untrue—to put the deception into the subtext or between the lines.
So, for example, we never heard the Bush administration claim, in leading up to the war, that Saddam Hussein planned the 9/11 attacks, but in speech after speech, 9/11 or Al-Qaeda would be mentioned just a breath away from Saddam or Iraq.
The result, to this day, is that a great number of Americans still believe a lie that George Bush never "literally" told.
One of the signs that a McCain presidency would merely be a continuation of the Bush regime is that the McCain candidacy has already adopted the "lie between the lines" strategy.
The McCain people have put out ads portraying Obama as "The One", a messianic figure who can divide the red sea and call down plagues from the heavens.
The subtext, of course, is that Obama thinks of himself this way. Everybody who sees the ads gets this, but the ad never actually says it, and consequently the McCain people don't have to defend it.
It they had simply come out and said, literally, that Obama thinks he's divinely ordained to be our next president, it would sound silly, and would be easy for the Obama campaign to refute. By putting the claim in the subtext, they lie without lying, continuing the pattern of the last eight years.
They even include a quote from Obama in the ad. He began a stump speech at some point by telling the crowd, his tongue firmly in his cheek:
I am going to try to be so persuasive in the 20 minutes or so that I speak, that by the time this is over, a light will shine down, from somewhere, it will light upon you, you will experience an epiphany, and you will say to yourself, "I have to vote for Barack."
The ad shows him saying this, but omits everything he said before "a light will shine down..."
This gives the impression that he was completely serious, and that he said something quite different from what he actually said.
It's a lie, but once again, the lie is the impression it leaves, rather than anything the McCain campaign actually put into words.
The Republican party has become masters at this technique. And McCain, himself, is unfortunately following in Bush's footsteps.
During his convention speech, McCain said,
I'm not running for president because I think I'm blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need.
Notice, first, the charge in the subtext. The meaning is perfectly clear, but he hasn't even mentioned Obama's name.
Barack, of course, has never claimed any such thing. If McCain had openly charged that Obama had messianic delusions, McCain, and the charges, would have looked ridiculous. The lie is much more effective between the lines.
But also notice a curious characteristic of the Bush-Cheney approach to public dishonesty: always accuse your opponents of doing exactly what you yourself are trying to do.
McCain goes on to reference his own story, by saying that his country saved him.
But what is that story? It's the story his whole campaign is built upon: the story of the kind of man he is and why we should vote for him.
It's the story of a soldier, taken prisoner by the enemies of America, who refused release—who chose torture and confinement and lack of medical treatment in order to give his country a propaganda advantage—who sacrificed himself to save us.
There's a great deal more, of course—a framing of the whole thing as a kind of salvation experience, a conflation of the ideas of God and Country until they can hardly be told apart: all buried in the subtext, and aimed at the religious right which he so recently condemned.
And he presents the story with such an air of humility that we hardly notice what he's actually claiming.
But the fundamental story, the one that's aimed at everyone, is McCain as the one who willingly sacrificed himself for us all, and whom we should therefore accept as our leader. The one who will save us from the our current corrupt state.
I'm not objecting—in this post, anyway—to McCain representing himself as a Christ-figure.
But I do find it interesting that it's exactly the same charge he so dishonestly chooses to aim at Barack Obama.
