excerpts from  Why Is Hillary Never Held Accountable for Her Lies, by Victor Davis Hanson at National Review:

In fact, “truth” for a postmodernist is supposedly what those who control us say it is, largely in efforts to perpetuate their own race, class, and gender privilege. You can see how thoroughly popular culture has picked up this mostly banal relativist observation and transformed it into “the Truth”—and why today we assume that lying is simply a narrative,  not a window into one’s character.

Orwell was onto the game far earlier than the French postmodernists. He rightly saw it as a postwar pathway of the Left to assuming and keeping power: What was written on the barn wall on Monday as an absolute commandment was crossed out and replaced on Tuesday, in the fashion that the Soviet Union used to airbrush out sudden enemies of the people from all past pictorial records. Who knew what the party line would be by Wednesday? What frightened Orwell was not so much lying British industrialists or celebrities, but officers of the state who sought to dismiss the idea of the truth itself and justify the dismissal on ideological grounds.

Almost everything Hillary Clinton has said about her current scandals is a lie: No other secretary of state used a personal server; Colin Powell was certainly not her model for lawbreaking; she really did send and receive classified materials that she at the time knew were classified; she did not have lawyers examine all of her personal e-mails that she destroyed; they were not mostly about Chelsea and yoga; she did not accurately inform authorities of the actual number of her personal e-mails; there was no firewall between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation; rich individuals did meet with the secretary of state in a fashion that they would otherwise not have been able to, had they not donated vast amounts of money. And on and on. Again, all lies, but lies that in postmodern culture are merely competing progressive narratives that translate into the vulgar media as “Who is to say what pay-to-play actually is?”

Did anyone care that progressive Hillary long ago lied about her rigged $1,000 cattle-future investment beating 34 trillion to 1 odds to earn her $100,000, or her supposed foray into a combat zone in Serbia? Clinton’s lies, past and present, are fobbed off as either fantasies of right-wing conspiracists, who hope to derail her progressive agenda, or psychodramas of a struggling progressive couple trying to do good. Either that, or they are minor problems of communication, or were courageous stances taken to advance the cause of the poor, the dispossessed, and the children.

The danger to democracy is never from the bad liars who patently fabricate for self, but from the sophisticated and progressive good liars who lie that their untruth is truth because it was all made up for us.

HKO

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”  C.S. Lewis

print