The Erosion of Truth

As I've noted before, I think we've witnessed a real erosion of accepted standards of political discourse over the last two decades. Politicians have always trafficked in spin and half-truths, but it wasn't always as easy to get away with blatant deception, particularly in the context of a well-publicized policy debate. But over the last two decades, the GOP has continually pushed the envelope, making ever more frequent forays across the line of 'mere spin' and into the realm of demonstrable falsehood. These increasingly bold assaults on the intelligence of the American people have been made possible, in large part, by the rise of partisan media outlets (talk radio, cable news, the Internet), which have allowed the GOP to bypass the old gatekeepers in the mainstream media and directly inject falsehoods into the public domain. Faced with this steady onslaught of deception, journalists have become increasingly passive and jaded, content to chalk up just about anything to 'politics as usual' and rarely, if ever, motivated to point out when a politician is lying.

I know all of this, and I'm sure that on some level I've internalized it. But there's still a part of me that's capable of being shocked anew whenever I hear the President of the United States intentionally mislead people about an important issue of public policy. In his weekly radio address this weekend, President Bush said the following:

Democrats in the House and the Senate also recently passed their annual budget resolutions. Their budgets would raise your taxes and raise government spending in Washington. . . .

Overall, the Democrats would raise taxes by a total of nearly $400 billion over the next five years. To put this in perspective, this would be the largest tax increase in our Nation's history, even larger than the tax increase the Democrats passed the last time they controlled Congress.

I'd explain to you why this is a breathtakingly disingenuous claim, but I probably wouldn't do as good a job as Hilzoy did a few days ago:

The Bush tax cuts are set to expire automatically. They were written that way. What the Democrats are proposing to do is simply not to change this.

Moreover, guess who wrote these sunset provisions into the tax [cuts]? The Republicans, that's who. They were trying to make the tax [cuts] seem less fiscally ruinous than they were, so they made them last only so long before they expired. . . .

So here's what [Bush's] "largest tax increase in U.S. history" actually comes to: the Republicans passed a series of tax cuts that they set up to expire. They intended to make them permanent, but never got around to it. The Democrats are proposing to leave their tax cuts alone. But this counts as a tax increase, apparently on the grounds that whatever Republicans sorta kinda thought they were going to do, but never actually got around to doing, counts as already done, and anyone who proposes to leave things alone counts as undoing the things they were intending to do.

Incredible, isn't it? Despite the fact that neither the House nor Senate budget resolutions contain a single tax increase, our president is willing to go on the airwaves and tell the American people that these budget resolutions contain the largest tax increase in U.S. history. As Hilzoy snarkily noted in a follow up post:

Curiously, he failed to mention the fact that the Republicans have repeatedly "passed" this very same "tax increase" every time they passed budgets that did not extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. Funny how that happens.

It would be even funnier if the subject at issue wasn't the fiscal survival of our country. Everyone, including Bush himself, knows full well that we cannot afford to keep his tax cuts, particularly in light of our open-ended commitment in Iraq and the rapidly escalating costs of programs like Medicare and Medicaid. And Bush and his advisers certainly know how and why the sunset provisions were included in the first place. But they clearly care far more about scoring short-term political points through blatant deception than acting in the best interests of the American people.

I'm not sure what is more depressing: that this sort of deception has become so commonplace that it scarcely raises an eyebrow, or that it's being used to support policies that even the deceivers themselves know are ill-advised and unsustainable.