Lying Because They Can

It's been an insane week, and I'm charging out the door for a long drive to an even more insane place with my entire family and my little dog, too.

Meanwhile, Lambert seems to have been the victim of a disinformation scam. As usual, it's impossible to tell whether this came from a source within the government or was simply some hayseeds having fun. And they wonder why we stay anonymous if the NSA knows who we are...

I like his response:

...So much for the changing stories. Frankly, I don’t care what the motivations were: Malice, curiosity, profit, anger, whatever. I guess I’m with the Bible on this one: “By their fruits you will know them.” (Matthew 7:16) And, in this case, the fruits are a wounded C-list blog, another one of the endless series of talking points and anecdotes for the VRWC, and the classic ratfucking Rovian ploy: Fake evidence on a story, make sure the evidence surfaces, reveal the fake, and discredit the entire story. We’ve seen it before with the TANG records.

One thing we know with Republicans: When their stories change, they’re lying.

Implications for disinformation campaigns in 2008
It’s unfortunate that we live in a political environment that is not sane. We’ve got a Vice President who’s annointed himself as a fourth branch of government (whether before, or after, he shot an old man in the face is not clear), a media environment where that yawns when a Federal court hands down a judgment that says Bush is guilty of 30 felonies, where massive, illegal, and unconstitutional surveillance has become the norm, where Republican presidential candidates believe in the power of imprisoning American citizens with no charges or review, and where secret prisons and torture are the new norm.

Oh my goodness. Do I sound like I’ve lost my sense of humor? Like I can’t take a joke?

...

Not only is the political environment insane, the administration is the very reverse of open and transparent. Therefore, the rest of us—those of us on the outside, not on the cocktail wienie circuit, certainly not wired enough to get into Porkers, take photographs, fake one, get away clean, and then write an Op-Ed about it—have to do the job that our famously free press should be doing. (With sites like TPM, this is changing. But it hasn’t changed enough yet.) Since it’s clear that neither the press nor the administration has any interest in telling the truth, we have treat politics as a form of police work, and look for the modus operandi: “A criminal’s characteristic patterns and style of work. Far from propagating conspiracy theories, Xan analyzes Rove’s M.O. and concludes that the techniques that Coptix used to plant and propagate disinformation in our blog are the same techniques that Rove would use...

I agree.

But now I'm off to Atlantis, to watch my wife drink the wine while my girls lie in the sun.

I'll be the gaunt man running eternally under the sun, stopping only to drink the hot black coffee and endlessly looking at the horizon.

It's a life.