Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Shorter NYTimes: Christie Is A Lying Blowhard

Governor Christie makes his case.

The Times ran a profile of Christie's "accuracy".  Turns out he really doesn't have much of it.

He speaks off the cuff and without facts to back him up.  He browbeats his opponents verbally with invective rather than engaging their points or simply makes up fact and data to support his position.

If he was a student of mine, he would be failing.  Since he's a Republican politician, he's a media darling.

I guess we can applaud the Times for finally pulling back the curtain on this freakshow, but the word missing from their coverage is "lying".  I realize that Richard Perez-Pena probably went to a very good school and needs to show he can use more nuanced language, but maybe he should just come right out and say that Christie is lying.

Of course, it could be that Christie is just a bullshit artist.  A Bullshit Artist is different from a Liar or a Truthteller.  Liars and Truthteller have a relationship to the truth.  Liars knowingly violate the truth; truthtellers are knowingly loyal to it.  Bullshit artists simply don't care what the truth is.  The reason I know this is because a philosophy professor at some university in New Jersey wrote a book about it.

Whatever the reason, the more I think about it, the more I think this goes back to Reagan.  We tend to lionize what a nice man Reagan was.  But he could be an aggressive prick, too.


And the GOP loved him for THAT more than his "nice" qualities.  They loved the way he spoke about hippies  and "welfare queens" and all those "different" people.

Reagan was not a nuanced man, but today's GOP is like watching Reagan without nuance or self control.

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