What the paper was referring to was of course the testimony of two top-ranking generals and President Biden’s own Secretary of Defense to the effect that they had all recommended to the President leaving 2500 troops in Afghanistan after the American withdrawal. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Biden had denied that he had received any such recommendation.
“No. No one said that to me that I can recall,” he said.
No, it was unmistakably a lie. And then Psaki told another lie to cover it up.
But I think we have a problem with that little word “caught”—as in “caught in a lie.”
He had appropriated a self-related episode from the life story of the then-leader of the British Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, also known as the Welsh Windbag, and represented it as his own experience.
Having been caught in the lie, the then-Senator Biden still had enough of a sense of shame to have dropped out of contention in the following year’s Democratic presidential primaries. Not that he would have stood more than the slimmest of chances of winning any of them anyway.
That’s what we mean when we say that someone has been “caught in a lie.” It implies some punishment to follow, or at least some shame felt by the liar on account of his exposure as one.
If a tree falls in the forest when no one is there, does it make a sound?
That’s what it meant to be “caught in a lie.”
That was then.
It’s my belief that the media culture of today, a third of a century later, and the virtual disappearance of shame from our public life—certainly of any shame for being caught in a lie—are closely related phenomena.
Just look at the lie on which Joe Biden last year claimed to have based his whole campaign—the reason, he said, why he ran for president: the lie that Donald Trump had called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, “very fine people.”
That lie had already been exposed as a lie numerous times. It was an even more obvious lie than the one about a residual American force in Afghanistan, since there was documentary evidence in a transcript of the interview in which Trump had explicitly excluded the Nazis from his designation of the “very fine people” wishing to preserve a statue of Robert E. Lee—as well as those wishing to take it down.
But that tree fell in a part of the new media forest where there was no one around to hear it. The big media, the legacy media, the mainstream media have found that their readers, watchers, and listeners don’t care if they simply ignore news from the right-wing media ghetto that they don’t want to hear.
It’s as if he had never lied at all! There’s nothing for him to be ashamed of, even if he were any longer capable of shame.
Small wonder then that, having gotten away with it for so long, Biden’s lies have now become so shameless that he hardly even bothers to pretend that they aren’t lies.
If ever there were a lie to catch a man in—a lie that a child could catch a man in—it was that lie. And yet the mainstream media were ready to accommodate him.