What is truth?

What is truth? It’s an eternal question and eternally hard to answer, because in effect, truth is what you believe it is and what you believe is often a manufactured product.

Caught with its gray striped pants down in 2001, the Government needed some good men to come to the aid of their party and with the aid of the internet; cover stories began to cover the country. Although many stories were immediately debunked, the cyber world is not like the real world; the demolished lies reassemble themselves like pools of spilt mercury and rise again – and again. On Tuesday last, I got another copy that had been sent to a huge mailing list.

Efforts to pin the Destruction of New York’s Twin Towers on Bill Clinton, Al Gore and the “liberals” began before the dust cleared. One of the first bits of creative writing that appeared in my mailbox; enthusiastically forwarded by some passionate patriot, concerned a story that Oliver North during his 1987 trial for misappropriating government funds, cited the threat of Osama bin Laden as his reason for purchasing some very expensive security systems.

The man interrogating him “before God and country” was said to be Al Gore – that name appearing amidst pictures of the flaming buildings – and Al was said to have quashed any suggestion of going after and assassinating Osama. The Liberal Press was said to have edited out this story.

Amidst more maudlin exhortations never to forget and always to forward this e-mail, we are told that Mohammed Atta had been imprisoned by Israel for a terrorist act and that Clinton and Warren Christopher had agreed as part of the 1993 Oslo accord to release them, forcing Israel to let the man go.

Please don’t break the chain, it said, with animated graphics of bleeding hearts. Send this to everyone and expose the cover-up!

Of course the story is 100% fiction, Gore never said those things to North, North was in fact questioned by committee counsel John Nields, not a senator. North was talking about Abu Nidal (Osama bin Ladin was an ally in 1987, fighting the Commies in Afghanistan.) Mohammed Atta was not a prisoner in Israel; Clinton did not demand his release.

The only cover up here is this attempt to distract from the fact that Bush had been warned and did nothing; Clinton launched an attack on Osama and had been criticized for it by the Republicans who as this bucket of slime circulated on the web, were stonewalling an attempt to investigate what went wrong. To his credit, Oliver North long ago issued a lengthy denunciation of this box of lies, but it had been told too often and like some retrovirus, lying dormant somewhere, it’s re-emerged with greater passion, more colorful graphics and accusations.

Short attention span America is embracing it again and people like me will be slimed again for telling you the truth. The truth is that you can’t kill a lie and the truth is that there is neither lie so foul or false nor any act of corruption so putrid that the Republican lie machine will not plaster over it with another layer.

I have addressed some of the people who forward this, some of them claiming to remember the circumstances and to have had personal involvement with things that never happened, but the response is “close enough.” The real truth is that truth is meaningless. The truth is that you can always fool enough of the people all the time.

Bonus Blast

We're transforming our military. The things I look for are the following: morale, retention, and recruitment. And retention is high, recruitment is meeting goals, and people are feeling strong about the mission.

-- George W. Bush, in a Jan. 26 press conference

Of course recruitment isn't high at all and one wonders how high the President is when he makes such statements. Salon.com claims to have documents that show the military, which recently raised the enlistment age to 40 in an attempt to meet quotas, is accepting people with fairly serious criminal records, such as domestic abuse, drug dealing and drunken driving. That's got to be just great for morale, but perhaps Bush can depend on the fact that comfort addicted Americans don't read and don't trust those who do.