Lies, lies and more lies

In the lead-up to the election, I wrote about Obama’s lies — these are lies that are exposed by hard contemporaneous evidence (videos, photos, documents), but that Obama boldly told anyway, bolstered both by his own narcissistic approach to truth (“the truth is what I say it is”) and by a media anxious to see him elected.  That hasn’t changed.  Brutally Honest points out that, all video evidence to the contrary, the White House is now contending that Obama was just trying to bring his face down to the level of the much shorter Saudi ruler’s face.

Interestingly, Obama did not feel compelled to make this gesture for the even shorter Queen of England — and we’ve got the video to prove it:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gJtIss7xso[/youtube]

I’ve got a little trio of quotations to explain exactly what’s happening here:

There’s a sucker born every minute.

— P.T. Barnum

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

— Abraham Lincoln

… in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X

And no, I’m not saying that Obama is Hitler, because I’m not accusing him of committing genocide against large groups of people or of using the instruments of war to take over the world.  Those are, after all, the reasons that calling someone a Hitler is such an insult.

Certainly, though, to the extent Hitler was a master propagandist with an intuitive grasp of moving the mob, Obama too seems to recognize useful techniques for abandoning the truth in service of a more personal, Obama-esque goal.