My guess is that Liasson probably feels that wildly asserting things to be true when she's just guessing (after wilfully keeping herself ignorant) counts as truth telling, comparatively, because she decided to throw in her professional lot with people who tell blatant whoppers like this for a living:

HUME: But is [Obama] on the verge of changing on his long-stated promise that says, "The mission is to get out and I'll have them all out, all the forces out, in 16 months?"

As Hume certainly knows full well - and as Liassan, meekly acquiescing in the lie in order to build her little sandcastles on top of it, knows full well, Obama has never said "all the forces out". He has been scrupulous in always saying "all the combat forces out."

When lies are the air you have chosen to breathe, how can you be expected to notice when mere falsehoods slip out of your mouth from time to time?

But I have less fear of taking the gop on. I play by their rules and use their tactics against them. I like to put those reading this in their place, and fear in their heart. So they can see what it's been like for us to fear the last 8 years.

I want to apply the same rules to them, as they apply to us. Like I would like to apply the same standards to mr greenwald, as he applies to keith olberman. fox/rush to the gop. Yin and yang. Cause and effect. balance. i have differant goals than carol. But she is a genius, so they say ;)

He allegedly has no clothes.

And why do these facts and conditions on the ground keep reminding me of certain allegedly illegal settlements?

Apologies, you're right. I was actually assuming that Obama will cave on his Iraq policy. THat's not fair, at all. But I expect it to happen anyway.

In logical terms, the statement reads: "Liasson said that Americans don't want A, but rather, want A only if B."

A = withdrawing troops

B = "conditions on the ground" warrant it

Polls conclusively show that Americans want A - not "A only if B."

That is an inaccurate abstraction of what you originally wrote. In logical terms, the statement reads: Liasson said that Americans don't want A but rather want B.

A = "to withdraw troops from Iraq within 16 months"

B = "withdrawal only when 'facts on the ground' permit it"

A and B are too different kinds of withdrawal: A is withdrawal in 16 months; B is withdrawal only when "facts on the ground" permit it. The polls do not conclusively show that Americans want A and do not want B. The polling data are ambiguous and equivocal, making the possibility that Americans want both A and B a plausible reading. What will happen if Americans come to believe that they cannot have both A and B at the same time is unclear from the current polling data.

Could it be that these people either actually believe their lies or get off on believing that they have pulled one over on everyone.

• Them believing their own lies is probably unavoidable on some level after repeating the same bullshit so many times AND surrounding themselves with other people hypnotized by the crap...
• Pulling something over on people, especially something as brazen and reckless as the 'great bush lie' has to be quite thrilling...

The fact that their own bullshit isn't absorbed by the 'average American' isn't so shocking because they are the ones force fed on the diet of total bullshit. Other people, the rest of us (mostly us?), have better taste and can smell a fraud at twenty paces.

No one had the guts to confront the naked emperor because he also has access to your phone, medical and email records.

Job security? Yeah. Bush style...

Credit where due

It was Lenin, at a party meeting in 1903, who had the brilliant idea of naming the minority faction the "Bolsheviks" (from the Russian word for majority).

-- sysprog

Yes he did and the political right, ironically, have been practicing Lenin's tricks and tactics here for years. How else could you make a credible claim that the "majority view" is held only by the "fringe", as reader cr paraphrases:

"[Liasson and her establishment colleagues] just lie and claim that the majority view is the one held only by the "left-wing" fringe"

Case in point... The Moral Majority. William remembers them.

History

Moral Majority was initiated as a result of a struggle for control of an American conservative Christian advocacy group known as Christian Voice during 1978. During a news conference by Christian Voice's founder, Robert Grant, he claimed that the Religious Right was a "sham... controlled by three Catholics and a Jew." Paul Weyrich, Terry Dolan, Richard Viguerie (the Catholics) and Howard Phillips (the Jew) left Christian Voice. During a 1979 meeting, they urged televangelist Jerry Falwell to found Moral Majority. This was also the beginning of the New Christian Right.[1][2]

Moral Majority was an organization made up of conservative Christian political action committees which campaigned on issues its personnel believed were important to maintaining its Christian conception of moral law, a conception they believed represented the opinions of the majority of Americans (hence the movement's name).

[...]

Some issues for which the Moral Majority campaigned included:[4]

outlawing abortion

opposition to state recognition and acceptance of homosexuality

opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and Strategic Arms Limitation Talks

enforcement of a traditional vision of family life

censorship of media outlets that promote an 'anti-family' agenda

The Moral Majority had adherents in the two major United States political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, though it exercised far more influence on the former.

Falwell was the organization's best known spokesperson throughout the 1980s. By 1982, Moral Majority surpassed Christian Voice in size and influence. The organization dissolved officially in 1989[4] but lives on in the Christian Coalition network initiated by Pat Robertson.[5]

In 1981, a series of exposés (later nominated for the Pulitzer Prize) by Memphis reporter Mike Clark led to some condemning the interactions between the Moral Majority and the Republican Party.

In early October of 2007, Cal Thomas openly admitted on Fox News' popular show Hannity and Colmes that the marketing department of the Moral Majority would commonly discuss ways to demonize homosexuals (among others) in order to manipulate the public into following the Moral Majority's agenda.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority

Obviously one must still be cautious with data from polls. From last month's Mother Jones...

The Myth of the Moral Majority

Books: Here's the church. Here's the steeple. Open the doors and — hey, where did all the evangelicals go?

By Debra Dickerson

May/June 2008 Issue

This February, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the most comprehensive of its surveys of the "religious landscape" of the United States. Front and center was the finding that 26 percent of American adults—around 54 million—are evangelical Protestants. The idea that 1 in every 4 of us thumps a Bible only confirmed what many had assumed to be gospel since 2000, when evangelical voters were credited with winning the White House for George W. Bush and the media began its grand genuflections toward a resurgent fundamentalism, casting evangelicals (and more broadly, "values voters") as a politicized wedge that politicians ignored at their peril.

And who could blame them? Not only are evangelicals supposedly our biggest religious voting bloc, but Pew reports that nearly 80 percent of Americans are Christian, and 40 percent attend church weekly according to Gallup Polls. But what if those numbers—and everything we've assumed they tell us about the power of the religious right—are wildly wrong?

Take that 40 percent church attendance stat. Looking around her half-empty Southern Baptist church outside Dallas, Christine Wicker had her doubts. Wicker, a veteran Texas newspaper reporter, was born again when she was nine but drifted away from her evangelical roots in adulthood. A few years ago, she returned to the Southern Baptist Church to both renew her faith and write The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, an insider's look at evangelicals' power, wading in where secular journalists feared to tread. When she started looking into the numbers on church attendance, she found that researchers could vouch for only 18 percent of Americans being regular churchgoers—less than half the accepted figure. That led her to wonder about the already widely reported claim that 25 percent of Americans are evangelicals; could the real number also be less than half that?

[...]

But Wicker discovered that the numbers the Southern Baptist Convention (sbc) releases for public consumption tell a much different story than the ones it uses internally. The organization claims 16 million members, but as one reverend cracks, "the fbi couldn't find half of [them] if they had to." A 2006 sbc report states that only 11 million of its members live in the same area as their home church anymore; that number includes those who've been double- or even triple-counted elsewhere.

[...]

With more digging, Wicker came across a 2007 sbc report that found only 5.4 million adults attended services regularly enough to be considered church members. Further complicating matters, many of those who regularly filled the pews weren't official members, and, most significantly, 1 in 8 wasn't saved or born again. Factoring all this in, Wicker calculated that there are fewer than 4 million devoted Southern Baptists. Her math seems to be backed up by collection-plate totals: If the church truly has 16 million members, then they contributed a miserly $3.50 each to a nationwide fundraising campaign last year...