'Open Your Eyes See the Lies Right in Front of You'

So the media is making hay of a conversation between US President Barack Obama and French President Sarkozy at the recent G20 meeting in Cannes in the south of France. A private conversation between the two at the meeting about Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu where they referred to him as a liar was picked up on a microphone and now the media, including BBC World, is making much hay out of it. Beyond the media a host of knee jerk right wingers drunk on the demagoguery of the American right are now doing their five times a day anti-Obama catechism complaining about Obamhole, the phrase one of these civil "intellectual" types refers to the US president as on Yahoo.

Interestingly the same poster who slurs Obama goes on to make yet another slur, this one against Jews. Tom the Bomb, as our poster refers to himself--presumably this passes for wit among right wing posters--claims that Jews just love to be tortured. Presumably what Tom the Bomb is trying to say here is that Jews continue to support Obama ergo they are torturing themselves because anyone who supports Obama must revel in being tortured. I suppose Tom the Bomb thinks of this as a kind of peculiarly Jewish form of self-hatred. This Jew, however, isn't in love with Obama. But he likes the Republicans even less. Remember one of them recently, if memory serves, uttered an anti-Jewish slur. Tom the Bomb just made another.

Tom the Bomb is not alone in typing anti-Semitic slurs online. Yet another right wing Republican type has ambled to the Web and is also making anti-Semitic slurs on Yahoo. The aptly named Diablojailisco who, as his post makes clear, accuses Jews of controlling American finance including, presumably, the Wall Street investment houses that brought the US and much of the world into economic bust in 2008. Apparently in the perverted mental worlds of some right wingers the Jews were responsible for the collapse of 2008. Not derivatives, not greed, not a lack of government regulation but Jews who are apparently conspiring to destroy the American way of life. What is it with the right and Antisemitism?

Meanwhile back on the Sarkozy, Obama, and Netanyahu front. Sarkozy and Obama by calling Netanyahu a liar have actually gone up slightly in my estimation. Netanyahu is a liar. He has lied on a number of occasions for a number of reasons.

Of course, all of this raises one obvious question: do politicians lie and do they have to lie? American politicians of all stripes have been very economic with the truth on a number of occasions. LBJ lied about the Tonkin Gulf. Richard Nixon lied about far too many things to list. Ronald Reagan lied about Iran-Contra. George H.W. Bush lied about raising taxes. Bill Clinton lied about having sex with that woman. Bush le petit lied about so many things but I only have time to note one: lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Now don't get me wrong, this lying is not entirely the fault of politicians. Most Americans prefer to hear lies about the nature of war rather than to understand what war is really like. Most Americans seem to prefer to hear lies about taxation because they want government services without paying for them. Most Americans want Julia Roberts and Richard Gere to get together at the end of Pretty Woman despite the fact that street ho's rarely get glass slippers from wealthy capitalist shock and awe traders. I suspect that most of these right wing blowhards on Yahoo will continue to prefer to live with the myths and lies of right wing demagogues rather than with the truth of history. This is the pathetic ethnocentric, xenophobic, racist, and anti-intellectual world that the American right wing has created. This is the ethnocentric, xenophobic, racist, and anti-intellectual world I have to wake up to every morning.