“Truthiness”
In war, Aeschylus wrote, truth is the first casualty. In political war, such as the current fight to become U.S. President, truth dies a thousand deaths. Case in point: who now leads the “popular vote” in the Democratic race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? When the results came in from Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary, Hillary quickly claimed that she had the popular vote lead, 15,116,688 to 14,994,905. But this tally included the results of two primaries that the Democratic Party National Committee had declared invalid. And it excluded the votes of thousands of Democrats who voted in states that held caucuses. Otherwise, Obama would hold on to the popular vote lead by at least a percentage point. These caveats were not mentioned by Clinton or her surrogates, since this part of the truth was — to borrow from Al Gore — inconvenient.
Countless inconvenient truths have been discarded along the campaign trail in recent months. How about John McCain’s statement last week in New Orleans that, had he been President at the time Katrina struck, he would have immediately flown to New Orleans? On August 29, 2005, just as Katrina hit, McCain was hosting President Bush in Arizona. The occasion? 
A photo-op commemorating McCain’s birthday. He could have told the President in person what to do. To admit last week that he didn’t was… inconvenient.
The Reverend Jeremiah Wright is destined to become this campaign’s unwitting victim of what Stephen Colbert parodies as “truthiness” — a manipulated, wished-for truth. The Clinton opposition research machine discovered some wild quotes from this pastor of a South Side Chicago church. Better yet, they had them on videotape so a couple of sound bites could be played over and over on the “news” networks and commented on by Clinton surrogates and by suitably outraged citizens who were not given an opportunity to hear Wright’s sermons in their entirety.
The knife turns slowly in the war against the truth. Less than two months ago, on 60 Minutes, Hillary could say, when asked, “He’s not a Moslem — as far as I know,” thus sowing doubt that Obama might be some sort of Manchurian Candidate for the Islamic faith. A month later, however, once the Wright tapes were discovered, Obama was “rebranded” a devout member of Wright’s Trinity Church — so close to Wright that he should be accountable for whatever the Baptist minister said.
Even Obama is not immune to the siren call of Truthiness, as when he quotes McCain as wanting U.S. troops in Iraq for “a hundred years.” McCain was clearly not talking about a wartime deployment, but some sort of peacetime basing arrangement like the U.S. has with Japan, South Korea, Italy or Germany.
For many years, it was assumed that our news media would challenge such misrepresentations of fact, but now most seem more intent on generating heat than light. Every allegation, no matter how spurious, is grist for the news cycle; if an allegation is quickly shot down, the controversy ends. So the news media, especially the commentators and the on-line partisans, do all they can to keep the “story” alive. And each camp, knowing the futility of putting out truth, responds by shooting off a new salvo of “attack” ads, or having a surrogate do it for them.
For a taste of things to come, watch the work of a freshly minted anti-Obama group, National Campaign Fund, aka www.exposeobama.com. If the North Carolina Republican Party feels obliged to take down its own TV attack ad against Obama, they can always turn to a 527 group, like the National Campaign Fund, to get the “truthiness” out. Not directly, of course. That’s against the law.