....still giggling like an idiot...

[fpb]

Do you think that Hillary Clinton has talked herself out of a nomination? I know that I could not vote for someone who told a lie that was certain to be found out. Sure, politicians have to lie. The more reason for knowing how to lie...

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much what I said. The problem is not so much the lying as the complete absence of any sense of reality. When Bismarck lied, which he did as often as he could get away with it, he did so with a solid understanding of exactly what his lie would do and why it would be believed (if he meant it to be believed; sometimes he told the common sort of diplomatic lie that nobody believes but which allows one to withdraw from an impossible position - as when, having been defeated horse and foot by the unarmed armies of the Catholic Church, he withdrew from the Kulturkampf by blaming the underling who had actually signed the anti-Catholic laws). This lie was unleashed upon a world that had all the means, even without bloggers, to show its falsity; all the old media had massive written and filmed archives on the Bosnian war; and it was so inherently unlikely (no current or former POTUS would be allowed within miles of a combat zone for any reason whatsoever; his own staff would not let him, even if he wanted to go) that it can only represent a reversion to student-room Vietnam-age fantasizing. You can take the hippie out of the dorm, but you cannot take the dorm out of the hippie, it seems.