Lies, Damned Lies, and Republicans

The Republicans opened their convention yesterday in Tampa. There, says Charles Pierce, they—

... set out on an experiment to see exactly how much unmitigated hogwash the American political system can contain on a single evening. The Republican Party has set out at its 2012 convention in search of the Event Horizon of utter bullshit. It has sought to see precisely how many lies, evasions, elisions, and undigestible chunks of utter gobbledegook the political media can swallow before it finally gags twice and falls over dead, leaving the rest of America suckers all the same.

Pierce has much more to say, including how—

It was an entire evening based on a demonstrable lie. It was an entire evening based on demonstrable lies told in service to the overriding demonstrable lie. And there was only one real story for actual journalists to tell at the end of it.

The Republicans simply don't care.

They don't care that they lie. They don't care that their lies are obvious. They don't care that their lies wouldn't fool an underpaid substitute Social Studies teacher in a public middle school, who would then probably go out one night and get yelled at by Chris Christie. ("They believe in teacher's unions. We believe in teachers," he said in his speech. Yeah, you just don't believe in paying them.) They don't care that their history is a lie and that, by spreading it, they devalue the actual history of the country, which is something that belongs to us.

On the other hand, as commenter Barry Friedman points out—

Thomas Carlyle once said, "No lie can live forever," and last night, the GOP said, "We just need it to live till November."

I read Hitler: A Study in Tyranny during Karl Rove's years [to date] in the White House. Although the concept of "The Big Lie" tends to be linked to Goebbels, Alan Bullock's quotes from Mein Kampf show that it was Hitler who first grasped just how to go about it.

This passage is merely GOP 101—and the last point shows how their forerunner set Turdblossom, et. al., on their course—

The first and most important principle for political action laid down by Hitler is: Go to the masses. 'The movement must avoid everything which may lessen or weaken its power of influencing the masses ... because of the simple fact that no great idea, no matter how sublime or exalted, can be realized in practice without the effective power which reside in the popular masses.'

Since the masses have only a poor aquaintance with abstract ideas, their reactions lie more in the domain of the feelings, where the roots of their positive as well as their negative attitudes are implanted.... The emotional grounds of their attitude furnish the reason for their extraordinary stability. It is always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge. And the driving force which has brought about the most tremendous revolutions on this earth has never been a body of scientific teaching which has gained power over the masses, but always a devotion which has inspired them, and often a kind of hysteria which has urged them into action. Whoever wishes to win over the masses must know the key that will open the door to their hearts. It is not objectivity, which is a feckless attitude, but a determined will, backed up by power where necessary.

Hitler is quite open in explaining how this is to be achieved. 'The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas.... Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of a crowd.'

When you lie, tell big lies. This is what the Jews do [Bullock summarizes], working on the principle, 'which is quite true in itself, that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily, and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters, but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. ... The grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down.' (Bullock, pp 69-70; 1964 ed., Harper and Row)