Pinocchio’s Party

By Phil Erwin

It’s almost surreal: Brian Williams, erectile forever-fixture of the NBC News organization, capsule cast out into the cold. For lying.

Brian Williams – youtube

A $10-million-a-year contract cast aside, sildenafil a storied (pardon the pun) career in tatters. For telling a little lie about taking hostile fire aboard a helicopter in Iraq.

Actually, Williams’ troubles stem from telling that little lie repeatedly. On camera. And with various embellishments worked in over time, to make the result increasingly… shall we say, heroic?

And it turns out, it wasn’t just that one little story that he was embellishing. Seems he maybe had an embellishment habit.  True of most good storytellers – makes the telling more fun, and the hearing more memorable. People do it all the time.

Just not while sitting at the anchor desk on a prime-time network news broadcast.

A very good friend and superb storyteller once explained to me how he would approach handling a problem developing with a mutual acquaintance. “What I would say,” explained my friend, “is that… And then I… And so I said to this guy…” The details of the problem are not important. What is important is that I watched my compadre morph a conversation from what he would do to what he had already done. In the course of telling the tale, it went from an hypothetical exchange to a fait accompli.

Now, you might expect this behavior from a senile old coot, but my buddy was barely thirty. (Laboring under an habitually excessive load of alcohol and maybe some marijahoochie.) But once he delivered this diatribe, he remembered the story as he had ended it. His hypothetical incident was now cast in mental concrete.

Is that what happened to Williams? Did his frequent embellishments to what started out as a pretty sedate story become the story he remembered?

My guess is, Yes.

What does it matter? It’s a harmless little ego-boost. Isn’t it?

No, it is not. Not when his charter is the daily delivery of what is supposed to be the truth to a public that presumes the Truth is what they are hearing.

The man made a career out of telling you things you presume to be true, precisely because truth-telling is the business he is supposed to be in. And now we see that the Truth is something with which his acquaintance may be a bit tenuous.

Can he tell Truth from Story? We don’t know.

Can we tell when his Stories are True?

No. We cannot.

So listening to Williams speak the news becomes an exercise no different from listening to an actor create a story. Interesting. Captivating, sometimes. Relevant to the human condition, we hope. But informative?

No.

Still, it does seem like there’s a lot of lying going on these days, doesn’t it? Lots of creative story-stretching being employed to… Well, to do what? To enliven the news?

No. To “manage” the narrative. To gin up support for this issue, or drown support for that one. To peel the nation’s attention away from what’s really going on.

And to buy your future votes. With lies.

• President Obama assures the nation that he’s got ISIS under control, while his retired generals and former Secretaries of Defense all testify on the record that we have no strategy to assert such control, and that our haphazard, undisciplined, “pinprick” efforts are in fact failing.
• The President proclaims his “strategy” in Yemen a success, and mere weeks later we’re abandoning the embassy.
• The White House insists the President “can’t” meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu because they “don’t want to appear to influence the upcoming election.” Yet they send Joe Biden and John Kerry all the way to Munich to meet with Netanyahu’s opponent! Apparently, that influence is considered, well… Kosher.
• The report on Beau Bergdahl’s “unscheduled absence” from his unit in Afghanistan languishes on a general’s desk. What are the odds that’s because it puts the lie to the President’s Rose Garden praises of Bergdahl as hero, and Susan Rice’s insistence that he had served the nation “with honor and distinction”?
• Oh… And ObamaCare?   Professor Gruber? Kathleen Sibelius? You like your plan, you can keep it? To quote Billy Crystal, “Don’t get me staaaahr-ted!!”

I could go on like this forever, but you get the picture. It feels like everything you hear in the news nowadays is either an already-proven lie, or a suspected one. Even FOX, the network which prides itself on delivering a fair-and-balanced view of what’s happening, can hardly avoid being an unwilling progenitor of the untruths spouted constantly by the White House, the DNC and various Democratic mouthpieces within and without Congress. FOX reporters calls out untruth when they hear it; but they have to report it first.

Saul Alinsky

(Lest you think this is just an anti-Democrat rant – I don’t oppose all ideals of the Democrat party. What I oppose is their reliance on untruth, distortion and deceit to manage the public’s misperceptions of reality. And if you think that unfair, consider this: Saul Alinsky (whom MSNBC’s Chris Matthews called “our hero”), in his pro-Communist Rules for Radicals spent an entire chapter explaining why the desired ends always justify the means – ethics and morality be damned. To Alinsky-ites, lying is simply a useful tool.

In the film Crimson Tide, the Secretary of State waxes honest: “Look… I’m a politician. Which means, when I’m not kissin’ babies, I’m stealin’ their lollypops.”   A rather colorful way of stating what we all sense, which is: We can’t trust politicians.

But if we “know” that “all” politicians lie, why care? Does all the political prevaricating really matter? Does it matter that lying has become the fabric of our national debate?

Oh, you betcha.

The national conversation drives our political beliefs. Which determine how we vote. Which results in whatever crop of politicians we pay to lead us, or to lie to us. To think for us, decide things for us and manage our collective future.

And when that national conversation is so tainted by lies as to be a basic fiction, what good are our political beliefs? What value, our votes? We wind up with politicians who lead us in directions we wouldn’t actually choose, traveling toward a future we don’t understand, don’t like, and would never have agreed to.

Do you believe in Global Warming? Science is not about “belief.” It’s about proof.  But most Democrats “believe” that we should “kill coal” because they have been told – by politicians who know absolutely nothing about climate science – to “believe” in “Climate Change.”

Such is our Future. And with a party of Pinocchios in charge, there’s no escape.

So. If you care about your future, and that of your children, your grandchildren, your country: You’d better pick your politicians, and your party, very carefully. Which in turn means you’d better pick your sources of information carefully. Because not all news is truly “information.”

So, allow me to remind you: If you don’t watch FOX, you don’t know sh*t.   Because they’re the only national news organization dedicated to illuminating the Truth, by providing you with all sides of the issues.

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Phil Erwin is an author, IT administrator and registered Independent living in Newbury Park. He sometimes wishes he could support Democrat ideals, but he has a visceral hatred for Lies and Damn Lies, and is none too fond of Statistics. And his degree in Environmental Science makes him a better authority on Climate than Gore, Reid, Pelosi and the President combined.

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