{"id":470,"date":"2004-09-12T20:02:03","date_gmt":"2004-09-13T00:02:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/benadida\/2004\/09\/12\/when-is-a-lie-really-a-lie\/"},"modified":"2004-09-12T20:02:03","modified_gmt":"2004-09-13T00:02:03","slug":"when-is-a-lie-really-a-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/2004\/09\/12\/when-is-a-lie-really-a-lie\/","title":{"rendered":"When is a Lie Really a Lie?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a147'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Bush and his team claimed that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction and thus that Saddam threatened the US. That was a lie, as we know now. But that&#8217;s okay, says the Right, because Saddam was a really bad guy, and we needed to get rid of him. So the lie about the WMDs, not a big deal. The end is what matters: we needed Saddam out, and anything needed to get there &#8211; including lying &#8211; is okay.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, documents have surfaced claiming Bush got significant preferential treatment during the Vietnam War when he was assigned to the National Guard, then shirked his duties as a National Guardsman. &#8220;One Big Lie!&#8221; says the Right wing. Well, actually, that&#8217;s not quite what they&#8217;re saying. They&#8217;re saying the documents are fake, and they&#8217;re going on and on about the details of how fake these documents are. Interestingly enough, they&#8217;re not denying the actual claims, only a small subset of the documents.<\/p>\n<p>So, let&#8217;s think about this one. In the first case, we should ignore the lie and focus on the claim &#8211; even though the claim amounts to little given the lie. In the second case, we should ignore the claim and focus on the lie &#8211; even though the supposedly-fake documents are not the only proof of this claim.<\/p>\n<p>Yep, that&#8217;s consistent. The Ends Justify The Means, as long the ends are, you know, stamped with the Bush seal of approval.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bush and his team claimed that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction and thus that Saddam threatened the US. That was a lie, as we know now. But that&#8217;s okay, says the Right, because Saddam was a really bad guy, and we needed to get rid of him. So the lie about the WMDs, not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}