Word: truths
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...politicians, says presidential scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson, "tell the truth selectively." Bill Clinton has been accused of telling the truth slowly. This is not the same thing as lying. It's a sin of omission, not commission. It's like the difference between lying as a legal issue and as a moral one. The definition of perjury is far narrower than what your grandfather would have considered a damned lie. The legal bar of truth is awfully low. Bill Clinton can be "legally accurate" and still be lying through his teeth. "Religion and law are fishing at the opposite ends...
...lying is an art form and a growth industry. The number of Congressmen stays the same, while the number of p.r. firms, lobbyists and pundits increases exponentially. What is the modern art of damage control, after all, but putting on a false front? What is spinning but massaging the truth? Inside the Beltway, the scandal is not the lie but the unvarnished truth. George Bush's campaign barb about Reaganism being voodoo economics raised far more hackles than his claim that Clarence Thomas was the most qualified man in America to be on the Supreme Court...
Watergate was the Waterloo of presidential truth. In 1976, 70% of Americans agreed in a national poll that the country's leaders consistently lied to them. This from a nation brought up on Parson Weems' smarmy fable about young George Washington's perfect truthfulness. Honesty has been a casualty in the eyes of Americans ever since. Today, Bok notes, the public sees a politician's clever dodge as no different from a big fat lie. We're defining deception downward...
...past few weeks, there have been a thousand sound bites from self-righteous men in button-down shirts advising some variation on "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." This is an impossible standard. No one knows the whole truth. (Omniscience is not a human attribute.) Moreover, humankind cannot bear "nothing but the truth." Meursault in Camus's The Stranger is incapable of lying and is executed for it. Prince Mishkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot is a man of perfect honesty who brings disaster to everyone he meets. And in Liar, Liar, Jim Carrey...
...reason we have etiquette books is that not only does the truth not set you free, it gets you in trouble. "Sweetbreads? I hate sweetbreads!" "That's the dumbest haircut I've ever seen." "What a suck-up you are, you little weenie." One researcher asked his test subjects: If you could have the ability to read the minds of everyone within 50 ft. of you, would you want it? No way, Jose...