{"id":2519,"date":"2005-11-17T19:30:04","date_gmt":"2005-11-18T02:30:04","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2005-11-17T19:30:04","modified_gmt":"2005-11-18T02:30:04","slug":"in-defense-of-lying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2005\/11\/17\/in-defense-of-lying\/","title":{"rendered":"In Defense of Lying"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/opinion\/la-oe-goldberg17nov17,0,287582.column?coll=la-util-op-ed>Jonah Goldberg gets off to a bold start at the <i>LA Times<\/i><\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>What if Bush did lie, big time? What, exactly, would that mean? If you listen to Bush&#8217;s critics, serious and moonbat alike, the answer is obvious: He&#8217;d be a criminal warmonger, a failed president and &#8212; most certainly &#8212; impeachment fodder. Even Bush&#8217;s defenders agree that <i>if<\/i> Bush lied, it would be a grave sin.<\/ul>\n<p>But they&#8217;d be wrong, see, because FDR lied a lot, too.<\/p>\n<ul>Even the most cursory reading of any presidential biography will tell you that statesmanship requires occasional duplicity. If great foreign policy could be conducted Boy Scout-style &#8212; &#8220;I will never tell a lie&#8221; &#8212; foreign policy would be easy (and Jimmy Carter would be hailed as the American Bismarck). This isn&#8217;t to say that the public&#8217;s trust should be breached lightly, but there are other competing goods involved in any complex situation. \u2026<\/p>\n<p>If Bush succeeds &#8212; still a big if &#8212; the painful irony for Bush&#8217;s critics is that he will go down in history as a great president, even if he lied, while they will take their paranoia to their graves.<\/ul>\n<p>This last bit doesn&#8217;t even make sense, of course, because it ain&#8217;t paranoia if it&#8217;s true, but Goldberg&#8217;s butter-fingered grasp of logic is the least of his problems. <a href=http:\/\/www.washingtonmonthly.com\/archives\/individual\/2005_11\/007549.php>Great move, <i>LA Times<\/i>.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jonah Goldberg gets off to a bold start at the LA Times: What if Bush did lie, big time? What, exactly, would that mean? If you listen to Bush&#8217;s critics, serious and moonbat alike, the answer is obvious: He&#8217;d be a criminal warmonger, a failed president and &#8212; most certainly &#8212; impeachment fodder. Even Bush&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-2519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2519\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2519"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}