Pay No Attention to the Stack of Fakes Behind the Curtain

Here's the part that bugs me.

It's hard to talk about my reservations about Bush's Guard story without violating "Godwin's Law" - the internet convention that says any time Hitler or anything Nazi is invoked in an argument, the argument is basically over.

So thanks to a bunch of Usenet stooges who couldn't keep their Ribbentrops in their pants ten years ago, I'm supposed to do without perfect historical analogies?

I'm claiming immunity for this one - the example is perfect. But I have another idea.

Goebbels said...you know it, don't you? I don't wanna see the same hands, here. Everyone?

He said that if you repeat a big lie often enough, people will assume it's true.

But I don't want to invoke Goebbels. People get pretty touchy about Godwin's Law.

Much of the lefty blogosphere has been chanting "the dox are real the dox are real the dox are real" for the past week. As a parenthetical, I'm going to start using a new term:

Willis: verb, to endlessly repeat an unproven or false premise, in order to make it appear true. See "The Documents are Real", "Bush was AWOL", etc.

For example, the entire lefty blogosphere has spent the last week Willising; yesterday was a rude slap upside the head for some.

Now, the fallback position:

In any case, the whole “fake but accurate” line shows how tone-deaf these people are; it’s like saying a body in a pine box is “dead but lifelike.” It boggles, it really does: the story is true, the evidence is faked, but the evidence reflects the evidence we have not yet presented that proves our conclusion – ergo, we’re telling the truth. They just can’t give it up; they just can’t say the memos were typed by the guy in the “Dude, you’re getting a Dell!” commercial and leave it be, because that that puts the knife in the story regardless of what happened. So they keep going.

None of this stuff would pass the stink test with an eleven-year-old, and the eleven year old would know it's time to quit Willising.

And if I were a Kerry supporter, I'd move my stock to a "Strong Sell" when I realized that my candidates best hopes were not even based on 30 year old allegations of shirking duty - but merely Willising about them!

Posted by Mitch at September 16, 2004 06:24 AM | TrackBack