”A lie told often enough becomes truth.”
-- Nikolai Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“Everybody is ignorant. Only on different subjects.”
-- Will Rogers

When combined, those two axioms form a corrosively potent compound. Two recent postings, one by Christopher Hitchens at Slate, the other by John Hinderaker at Power Line, prompted me to give some thought to the subject of how the populace, country of your choice, is manipulated through the politically driven exploitation of their ignorance. Politicians, the media, and even those keepers of the truth, the academics, accomplish their deception by using misdirection or, when that is not sufficient for the purpose at hand, the telling of an outright falsehood. One cannot know, in any given instance, whether or not the teller of a political lie is also self-deceiving or just ignorant of the subject at hand. But that matters not. For in political theater, a player is more often booed off the stage for telling an unpleasant truth rather than for uttering sweet nonsense. So, in one sense, we shouldn’t be too hard on our political actors since we at least get to help write the script. However, this generally includes only those of us who have the resources to substantively help finance our national stage production. Or a very large megaphone.

Mr. Hitchens asks

“Do you ever wonder what is the greatest enemy of the free press? One might mention a few conspicuous foes, such as the state censor, the monopolistic proprietor, the advertiser who wants either favorable coverage or at least an absence of unfavorable coverage, and so forth. But the most insidious enemy is the cowardly journalist and editor who doesn't need to be told what to do, because he or she has already internalized the need to please—or at least not to offend—the worst tyranny of all, which is the safety-first version of public opinion.”

His chastising of the media is for their sin of omission in not publishing the Danish “Mohammed cartoons” that created one of the more sizeable brouhahas of recent vintage. In the U.S., only the Weekly Standard and Free Inquiry published the ‘toons and they are both far from being mainstream publications. Hitchens is appalled by the cowardice of the American press and I would agree that this a serious crime. However, this is not a capital offense.

What is an offense of this order is when the vast majority of the mainstream media collude to deceive both themselves and the American people about the conduct of war. That is treason. And this treason may in time be punished by death – a death incrementally self-inflicted as part of a mutual suicide pact. I make this assertion not lightly nor with reservation. And the example I am about to provide incontrovertibly demonstrates the perfidy of the “press” and those whose interests they wish to serve.

Joe in Africa, Valerie the CIA, together in Vanity

Over the course of more than three years, there were literally hundreds, if not thousands, of articles written about and video segments taped regarding the “outing” of former CIA agent Valerie Plame and her globetrotting, former-ambassador husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. The full story is complex, but the gist is that Wilson accused the Bush Administration of outing his formerly “clandestine” CIA wife as a reprisal for his having personally demonstrated the weakness of one of the Administration’s pre-Iraq war intelligence claims. In the course of so doing, he gleefully boasted that the President had lied, or was willingly deceived, about Saddam Hussein attempting to buy uranium in Africa. He also made a number of other assertions regarding the circumstances and results of his visit to Niger that, if true, would be damaging to the credibility of the President.

Wilson’s original public description of his trip, published as the New York Times opinion piece, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” appeared in July of 2003, a few months after the invasion of Iraq had failed to disclose the presence of large stockpiles of “WMDs.” Eight days later, Robert Novak published “Mission to Niger” in the Washington Post, revealing publicly for the first time that Wilson was sent on his “mission” at the suggestion of his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame. The fuse was thus lit. And by December of 2003, at the insistence of the Democrats in Congress who were echoing the explosion of media indignation and accusation, the Justice Department appointed a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. His holy mission was to investigate the travesty of Ms. Plame’s name having been revealed in contravention of her clandestine status as a secret agent. His task was to root out and expose to the world the person or persons in the Bush Administration who had been responsible for this craven breech of national security. Though he already knew who was the guilty party, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, he nevertheless pressed onward with vigor and determination while keeping the name to himself, even though there were a number of others who considered Armitage the prime suspect.

In July of 2004, a few months before the November presidential election and just a year after Mr. Wilson’s New York Times op/ed piece that marked the starting point of this rumpus, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released to the public Part I of a redacted version of their 524-page report on pre-Iraq invasion intelligence. Signed by all members of the committee of both parties, the report includes a 48-page section discussing, but not naming, the “Former Ambassador.” This report segment discusses Wilson’s activities as they relate to the Niger trip, the circumstances surrounding his being selected by the CIA in the first place for this “mission,” as well as his findings as reported in an “oral” debriefing. This report clearly and unambiguously contradicts Mr. Wilson’s verbal and published assertions that his wife Valerie was not the one who suggested that he be sent to Niger, that he found no evidence that Iraqis had attempted to purchase African uranium, and that he had been privy to and seen a forged document that was used by the Administration in its lame attempt to prove that the Iraqis had purchased uranium.

For the next two-plus years, the media, much of the time including “fair and balanced” FOX, behaved, wrote, reported, interviewed and idolized the Wilsons as though the Senate report did not exist. That it had never been written or had, at least, said nothing regarding Ambassador Wilson and his comely wife Valerie. The Wilsons had even posed for two-page-spread photo that headed a January 2004 Vanity Fair article titled “Double Exposure” and told the sordid tale of Ms. Plame’s outing by the Bush Administration. The photograph shows, in a silly feint at concealment, Ms. Plame wearing sunglasses and head scarf while she sits with her husband in a stationary, top-down convertible. What a farce. The mainstream media made celebrities of the couple while never once mentioning the Senate report that convicted Joe Wilson of being a confirmed and inveterate liar. And though Bush was repeatedly excoriated and denigrated by Wilson and the “press” for having “lied,” and as a result “people died,” the President not once got up and took Wilson to task for what I would describe as his treason. Why not?

You tell me. How does all this happen by “accident” or “oversight” or whatever? How does the great majority of the media apparatus just blithely overlook the section of an official Senate report that explicitly contradicts their popular story line? And it goes on like this for over two more years? Who’s kidding whom? Part of the answer is the fact that probably very few of the general public actually ever read the Senate report. So how would they know? One also wonders how many in the media read it. But they have no excuse for not reading it. If they didn’t, they’re stupid. And if they did, they are nothing but liars.

The failure of the mainstream media to publish the Mohammed cartoons seems of little consequence when compared to this kind of continuing and deliberate deception by the media and their politician cohorts. The Democrats in Congress, who would obviously be knowledgeable of the Senate report’s contents, or should have been, went blithely on hammering the President and the Administration for the foul deed of “outing” this patriotic but now functionally hobbled “clandestine” CIA agent. Meanwhile, a vengeance seeking special prosecutor pursues what he already knows are the phantoms of leakers past. It is nearly impossible to exaggerate the degree of deception and misdirection that comprised this farce. It was all a lie. And everyone associated with the story’s creation and sustenance knew, or should have known, it was a lie. A lie with an embedded grain of truth that was incessantly repeated. A lie that was outed in July of 2004. But by then repetition had made it true. And continued repetition kept it true.

Ignorance as the absence of superfluous knowledge

In commenting on Susan Jacoby’s Washington Post article “The Dumbing of America,” John Hinderaker expresses his less than flattering sentiments while asking “Are Americans Stupid?”

“It's not much of an article, really; more like a rant you might find on a mediocre blog. Jacoby bemoans the rise of video and takes a ritual pass at Bush bashing, but her heart doesn't seem to be in it. Even Democrats don't seriously believe that the President has made Americans stupid.”

Mr. Hinderaker goes on to illustrate the sophomoric nature of Ms. Jacoby’s thesis by means of an exegesis of one of the statistics cited in the Post article: that close to twenty percent of the respondents to a 2007 General Social Survey, carried out by the National Science Foundation, think that the sun revolves around the earth. He feels that such misconceptions have little practical impact upon society since they do not impinge upon the daily concerns of the common man’s quotidian life. In support of this assertion, Hinderaker quotes at length from the Sherlock Holmes adventure A Study in Scarlet, wherein the famous literary detective dismisses as of no importance to himself whether the earth revolves about the sun or whether it’s the other way round:

"What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently: “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

Ms. Jacoby may denounce

“…the attitudes of Americans as "anti-rational," but Holmes, probably the most rational figure in literature, found that the workings of the solar system made little difference to him. No doubt a certain percentage of Americans share his perspective.”

says the attorney, Mr. Hinderaker.

Now, I’m not an attorney. So I suppose that’s why I’m ignorant regarding the use of literary characters as witnesses in support of one’s argument. Interesting though. But if there are enough people who believe that the sun revolves about the earth, or that it’s flat, or that the videos of the Apollo moon landings were studio productions, or whatever other wacky notions they may harbor, I suppose you can get them to believe almost anything. In many an instance, rather easily it seems.