Obfuscating with Verbiage

A concept I teach all students is the mechanism of obfuscating with verbiage: hiding truth behind a barrage of words. Speaking lots and saying little of any substance. Flooding the airwaves with red herrings to distract from serious social issues that have grave impact on our future.

First, Congressman Wilson did blurt out a spontaneous “You lie.” While a breach of decorum, not an untruth: today’s actions confirm that the President was not telling the truth when he said that no federal monies would be spent to provide health care for illegal aliens, an untruth remedied by the quick passage of a quick fix bill. Congressman Wilson did apologize to the President for his comment, perhaps more honestly and openly than the President apologized to the police officer whose actions the President labeled “stupid.” You say poe-tay-toe and I say poe-tot-oh. Today, it's reported that the President remarked that Kanye West is a “jackass,” so let’s all say “hash browns.” Even Speaker Pelosi said move on, but that was last week in a moment of magnanimous weakness, when she had nothing to gain by censuring Wilson’s unfortunate outburst that lasted oh, about a second!

This week, however, it’s a different story: is an ACORN related to a potato?

The problem is that revelations about ACORN that were squashed during the election have burst to the surface with the release of a series of undercover sting videos by journalists that clearly show that ALL of the years’ worth of accusations against ACORN seem to have substance. Each video is worse than the one before it: people on the government dime are lying, stealing, cheating, breaking laws, but their actions are being obfuscated by the demands that Congressman Wilson again apologize for his spontaneous outburst during the President’s speech.

Last week, the 2010 census administrators distanced the census process from ACORN’s involvement, which will be none. This week, the undercover videos surface. ACORN fires the people shown in the videos while decrying the illegal means used to obtain them. The young reporters say come on, charge us: we’d love to get you all in court for the cross-examination phase of our trials. We all know that this is going to go backward, that the charges against ACORN that arose during the election are going to come back around, and no one wants that to happen – most especially the President of the United States, a former community organizer who benefited hugely from ACORN’s organized efforts to get him elected. The charges of impropriety are still out there, including election fraud, and no one wants that to be targeted for an in-depth Senate investigation because an investigation may reveal truths that will shake the foundations of the current administration.

Better we follow Charlie Sheen’s lead and revisit 9-11: let’s take another look at the government’s involvement in masterminding the events of September 11, 2001. Better that we go back to the prisoners at Gitmo: were they unfairly detained, tortured? Better that we take another look at … anything other than ACORN because any look at ACORN is going to get ugly in a hurry.

Obfuscating with verbiage depends on those being inundated with the words not being able to dig out from under them, in a sense not being able to see the forest for the trees, but many of us are smarter than that. Really. It was a United States Senator, Joseph McCarthy, who took this country to the brink with his charges of Communism that targeted prominent individuals and entertainers; it was a journalist, Edward R. Murrow, who asked the hard questions that both McCarthy and the Senate refused to answer: show me proof of your accusations. It was a media giant, William Randolph Hearst, who used his publishing empire to encourage McCarthy’s witch hunt and squash the opposition to it because it was in his best financial interests to continue to whip up the frenzy.

Absolute power does have a tendency to corrupt absolutely. Is a similar pattern developing here? If we refuse to learn from our past, we are committed to repeating it.