[Peace] Trump’s Hail Mary “Four Embassies” Lie Will Go Down in War Powers History

[Robert Naiman]

https://www.facebook.com/robert.naiman/posts/10159049034457656

Trump’s Hail Mary “Four Embassies” Lie Will Go Down in War Powers History

Every schoolgirl knows that Presidents lie. I.F. Stone taught us that. As
the old anarcho-feminist joke went: “How do you know when the President is
lying? When *HER* lips are moving.” George W. Bush lied us into the Iraq
war. Barack Obama lied when he said he would “end the mindset that got us
into war in the first place.” Bush lied us into war and Obama lied to keep
us at war. Every schoolgirl knows that.

But most Presidents don’t lie *CAVALIERLY*. They don’t lie about how tall
they are, or whether or not they have a dog, or what they had for breakfast
this morning, or what someone said to them in a “private” conversation a
year ago. A key reason that most Presidents don’t lie cavalierly is that
most adult human beings don’t lie cavalierly. A key reason that most adult
human beings don’t cavalierly is that even a strategic sociopath
understands that there are downside risks to developing the reputation of
being a cavalier liar.

Would George W. Bush or Barack Obama have made up the “four embassies” lie *ON
THE FLY* while doing an interview on national TV? Would they have said
afterwards that it didn’t matter if there was an “imminent threat”? In
other words, it just doesn’t matter what the truth about this is?

Surely George W. Bush and Barack Obama would have gone about this in a more
disciplined way. Surely they would have convened meetings of all the smart
people in DC, come to some kind of expert consensus on what the Official
Lies should be, and then had Message Discipline to all peddle roughly the
same versions of the Official Lies on national TV. They wouldn’t have had
to send poor little Esper to the national TV shows to walk back the
President’s Spontaneous Lie.
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