To Obama and the NY Times his lies aren't lies but long awaited advancement of social justice-Hanson

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11/19/13, "Obama’s Noble Lies," "Stop worrying whether the president’s statements conform to ossified standards of truth." By  Victor Davis Hanson

"What is the common denominator of the Obama administration’s serial scandals — the Justice Department’s spying on AP, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, the NSA surveillance, the lies about Benghazi and the ACA — and much of the White House damage-control rhetoric? In a word: the advancement of postmodern notions of justice at the expense of traditional truth.

By the 1980s, in law schools, university social-science departments, and the humanities in general, the old relativist idea of Plato’s noble lies was given a new French facelift. Traditional morality and ethics were dismissed as arbitrary constructs, predicated on privileged notions of race, class, and gender. The new moral architecture did not rely on archaic abidance by the niceties of “truth,” which simply reinforced traditional oppressive hierarchies.

Instead, social justice by definition transcended the sham of traditional ideas of truth and falsity. The true became the advocacy of fairness, while the real lie was the reactionary adherence to a set of oppressive norms. All this was faculty-lounge fluff, but soon it filtered out into the larger culture.

In this regard, it was understandable that the New York Times characterized the president’s not telling the truth on over 20 occasions as cases of “misspeaking.” Translated, that means he lied but his lies were really true: Misspeaking means that Obama was not sensitive enough to those of us still mired in calcified definitions of true and false. The privileged still cross t’s and dot i’s; their victims have no such luxury....

Those who object that the issue is health care, and not lies, fail to see that the two were always inseparable. Obama knowingly and serially said something that he knew was not true because he did not wish to take the trouble to explain to the American people that, yes, several million people with individual plans would lose their existing health insurance — and many of them would have to change doctors and pay more in premiums — but they would in the long term, and in theory, be better off, and in fact, in the short term, would serve the public good by subsidizing the care of the less well-off. But the president knew that many Americans would see that as a socialist stretch. He lacked the confidence that he could sell that argument politically, and so he chose not to try. Why play the reactionaries’ game?

In the postmodern world of the New York Times and Barack Obama, again, “truth” is a relative concept. For reactionaries stuck in ossified notions of absolute truth, perhaps indeed Obama did “misspeak.” But for progressives of our brave new world, Obama was all along speaking truth to power merely by using linguistic gymnastics to advance a larger good — the idea that the privileged who had managed to acquire good health insurance should at last pay more in order to cover those who in the past undeservedly had been deprived of commensurate coverage.

If ACA navigators on occasion have urged poor applicants to fudge on their eligibility, what is the big deal? Are those really lies — given that the system that reduced some Americans to poverty and the status of the uninsured is one big lie to begin with? When “regulations” are enforced about voter IDs, Obamaphones, or eligibility for disability insurance and food stamps, poor people suffer; when they are ignored, the real truth emerges and a higher justice is served.

Of course, the apparently clueless who had bought certain types of insurance did not realize that they had “subpar” or “junk” plans issued by “bad-apple insurers.” Again, how could the president be accused of lying when he was helping the uninformed to be released from their “crap” coverage in order to purchase the superior Obamacare product? As Obama put it, “So the majority of folks will end up being better off, of course, because the website’s not workin’ right, they don’t necessarily know it.”

When U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice lied five times on national television about the Benghazi deaths, followed by Hillary Clinton over the coffins of the dead men and yet again by Barack Obama at the United Nations, they were not really telling untruths. Rather, Rice was merely blaming the reactionary bigot Nakoula Basseley Nakoula for his unenlightened views on Islam, which had earned understandable outrage. Can anyone deny that Nakoula was insensitive?

What difference did it make who actually shot and killed four Americans and why, when the U.S. government so clearly and forcefully had come down on the right side in condemning and then jailing an Islamophobe? If Nakoula did not incite this particular riot in Libya, his venomous video surely could have, and, in fact, it might have elsewhere. What difference did the trivial circumstances of the Benghazi violence make in the larger pursuit of religious tolerance?

What really was the problem with the IRS tax-exempt division? Sticklers for detail might object that perhaps Lois Lerner & Co. improperly denied tax-exempt status to perceived reactionary groups. But is anyone denying that the tea-party affiliates were reactionary, or that they needed to be advised that they could not simply voice their odious views at government expense?

Right and wrong, like truth and lies, are calcified concepts in service to a rigged world of discrimination. If those who enjoy privilege are upset that a mild regulation was bypassed, well, too bad: It was worth it to prevent the Tea Party from derailing the reelection efforts of a progressive president. And if the IRS overpaid $132 billion in earned-income tax credits to those with low incomes, again, why the outrage? These are details that pale in comparison to the larger picture of social justice: Did or did not the poor at last receive some help from the government? Were or were not reactionary groups prevented from promulgating their untruths about a progressive president?"...via Free Rep.


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