Fiorina and her mentor in the dark art of lying, Dick Cheney

Judging from the amount of airtime and column inches devoted to the subject, most members of the press are deeply concerned with which dates Hillary Clinton actually started using a personal email server and whether or not what she considers a personal email is actually a personal email. One assumes that their obsession with such tedious minutiae is indicative of a well-founded suspicion that the candidate is engaged in a deception so outrageous that when it is fully revealed will show dishonesty and corruption on a level that will lead to criminal indictment, if not a trial for treason. So perhaps they simply don’t have the time and resources to devote to covering Republican candidate Carly Fiorina’s willingness to unrepentantly and repeatedly lie to their faces.

You’d think that after implying she rose to the top of Hewlett Packard from the bowels of the typing pool when she was actually a business school graduate who rose through their management training program, the press would have given Fiorina more than a side-eye. And after she boldly asserted that her time as CEO there was actually a success when by all meaningful measures it was an abject failure she would have been subject to daily cable news segments in which talking heads discuss her basic honesty and integrity. Certainly the thorough fact-checking by many news organizations proving her deceit (or delusion) about what she claimed in the Republican debate to have seen on those notorious Planned Parenthood videotapes (and the abject denial of reality when confronted with the truth last week-end on “Meet the Press”) should have led to a frenzy of attention to her serious problems separating fact from fiction. But for the most part, the media seem to have moved on.

Still a few members the press do seem to be nonplussed by her behavior on the campaign trail. Dahlia Lithwick probably best expresses their bafflement in this piece at Slate:

That is surprising. As Lithwick writes later in the piece, “it’s truthiness elevated to almost cosmic levels.” But again, the press can’t be everywhere and with the full court press on Clinton’s vastly important email story it’s understandable that they would be unable or unwilling to push Fiorina any further than they have. There are only so many hours in the day. Nonetheless Fiorina does merit some extra attention if only because it takes a very special kind of person to go on “Meet the Press” and look the directly into the camera and tell the country “you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes”.

Of course, she’s not the first special person to do that, is she?  Indeed, lying to the press is so common that it’s almost not worth mentioning.  But as Lithwick points out, there is something unusual about insisting that you are telling the truth when the facts clearly contradict you. You wonder where someone like Fiorina would get the idea that she could get away with such a thing until you remember that people far more powerful and important than she is have gotten away with much, much worse:

Recall Dick Cheney appearing in September of 2002 and saying this:

In March of 2003, he went back on and said this:

In fact both of those claims were false. They did not know any such thing. In fact we learned they knew the opposite and rigged the intelligence to reflect these falsehoods. (This Frontline documentary called Cheney’s Law is very informative on this subject.)