子曰：「巧言令色，鮮矣仁。」通常政治人物是「巧言令色」最好的示範，孔子本身也是一位在政治圈裡打滾的人，無怪乎會有如此的感觸。然而網路時代，一般人也可以輕易的找出昔日的新聞報導，雖然新聞報導也有不少為政治服務的媒體，但是像YouTube這樣的網站存有大量的影像資料，政客們想再抵賴以前說過的話，那幾乎是不可能。




From The Sunday Times
May 23, 2010
Don’t lie – try misspeaking instead
Dominic Lawson

There is no official league table for political lies. Some of us will be able to find it in our hearts to forgive a form of dissembling that others would regard as beyond salvation. Yet a candidate for office who, having gone to great lengths to avoid military combat, seeks public support on the basis of his invented active service would, you might think, be completely unelectable. Not necessarily, or so it seems, in America.

The frontrunner for a vacant seat in the US Senate, Richard Blumenthal, has been exposed as behaving in exactly this fashion; but he has no intention of giving up his fight to become the Democratic senator for Connecticut, and neither Barack Obama nor the vice-president, Joe Biden, has withdrawn support for Blumenthal’s candidacy.

It was last Monday’s edition of The New York Times that revealed how Blumenthal, despite having obtained no fewer than five deferments of military service in Vietnam — “[taking] repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war” — had told a group of veterans in March 2008: “We have learnt something important since the days that I served in Vietnam, and you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support.” The closest Blumenthal came to Vietnam was the Marine Corps Reserve’s 4th Civil Affairs Group in Washington, which carried out such social-working functions as distributing toys and games for the regular Toys for Tots drive.


After these revelations, the local Connecticut press duly plunged into its cuttings library and came up with many other examples of Blumenthal, currently the state’s attorney-general, claiming to have suffered along with other former Vietnam warriors. The following, from another tribute to veterans, is perhaps the most excruciating: “When we returned from Vietnam, I remember the taunts — the verbal and even physical abuse we encountered.”

Among the career moves pursued by the young Blumenthal during his military “deferments” was an internship at The Washington Post under Ben Bradlee, the editor whose pursuit of the Watergate story later brought down Richard Nixon; you might have thought this experience would have taught him what investigative journalism could do to the career of a dishonest politician.

With almost exquisite irony, the language used by Blumenthal to evade the charge of lying had been introduced into modern political discourse by Nixon’s men. Blumenthal declared that he had merely “misspoken” about his military record. It was Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, who came up with: “The president misspoke.”

A couple of years ago, during her campaign to be the Democrats’ presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton used exactly the same device when she was caught out in a much less heinous attempt to impress the military with a fictitious story of personal courage.


She told an audience of generals and admirals how she had landed “under sniper fire” at the US military outpost in Tuzla, during the Bosnian conflict, and that “there was supposed to be some kind of greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base”. When journalists who had accompanied Mrs Clinton on that trip declared this to be a fantasy, she stuck to her guns (so to speak). Then CBS unearthed its footage from 1996 of Clinton arriving at the Tuzla airbase. It showed the following: no sniper fire. No running for cover. Oh, and Clinton, accompanied by her daughter Chelsea, receiving a bouquet of flowers from an eight-year-old Bosnian girl in a charming greeting ceremony. Thus caught out, a clearly confused Clinton rambled: “You know, I say a lot of things — millions of words a day — so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement.”

The New Yorker columnist Hendrik Hertzberg seized on Mrs Clinton’s choice of language: “‘Misspeak’ ... is a word that is apparently thought capable, in its contemporary political usage, of isolating a palpable, possibly toxic untruth, sealing it up in an airtight bag and disposing of it harmlessly.” Well, it worked: Clinton’s failure to achieve the Democratic nomination had little to do with this incident, which remained of interest only within the Washington beltway.


Not only is the word “misspeak” a peculiarly American phenomenon; so too is the notion of personal reinvention — an idea that the would-be Senator Blumenthal exhibits in its least attractive form. Perhaps it is a legacy of the very idea of leaving the Old World for the New, or the way in which Americans were once able to escape the consequences of any murky past simply by crossing state lines; but it does seem that there is an acceptance in that country of personal reinvention, which in our smaller (and more cynical) nation is much harder even to attempt. In America, it seems, not only can you be whatever you want in the future, but the public will even accept an invented past.

Americans are not a separate species, however: at its most basic level, the convenient revision of one’s past is a universal phenomenon. It occurs most dramatically when we have done something of which we are ashamed. Friedrich Nietzsche expressed this memorably in Beyond Good and Evil: “‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains adamant. At last — memory yields.” I am not innocent of this. A few years ago I came across an old acquaintance, and told him how sorry I was that my successor as editor of The Spectator had terminated his column. He looked amazed: “But it was you who ended it,” he said. It was clear that I had reinvented the past in order to feel better about myself.


With that experience in mind, I am prepared to imagine that Hillary Clinton somehow persuaded herself that she really had encountered sniper fire as she entered the Bosnian war zone. We all (or almost all) create little myths about ourselves, which make our lives seem more heroic, or at least less ordinary. Yet in American politics, where party labels and policies matter less than personal narratives, this can emerge in grotesque form. It is also the result of the need to identify with powerful interest groups. Thus, for example, the Massachusetts senator John Kerry for years allowed it to be said — falsely — that his family came from Ireland: in Boston that was much more helpful than the truth, which was that his family was of Czech-Jewish origin.

Something similar lies behind the selfreinvention of Richard Blumenthal. America is a nation at war, and its public has responded to that in a way that contrasts strongly with the national mood during the intensely divisive Vietnam conflict. Now, American soldiers on leave from Iraq or Afghanistan are applauded in the streets; folk in restaurants or in airport lounges will give up their seats for them. Now, the aspirant Democrat politician will want to let the voters know that he is at one with the soldiers; that he identifies with what they have gone through and are continuing to endure. Besides which, there are thought to be up to 2.6m Americans who really did (unlike Blumenthal) serve in Vietnam; no longer ignored, these men now constitute a significant political lobby in themselves.

Something else has changed since the 1970s: thanks to the internet it is now possible for anyone to log onto YouTube and see, over and over again, amateur film from 2008 of Blumenthal telling a group of veterans that, like them, he served “in Vietnam”. As often as the politician protests that he merely “misspoke”, the public can see and hear the truth. Amazingly, however, many will still prefer to believe the lie.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article7133920.ece