Monday November 03, 2003

LYING LIARS, GULLIBLE GULLS. Here's an interesting line from a con job from the American Enterprise Institute (about more later):

...Kissinger's conversations with relevant figures in Washington and elsewhere. Some of these conversations took place by telephone. Records of Kissinger's telephone exchanges, covering the entire span of his government service, are now in the process of being released--they form, for instance, the primary basis of his new book, Crisis...

Kissinger learned well from President Nixon, apparently: if you're going to record your conversations, make sure they go your way. Then you can corroborate a version of history with the tapes instead of hanging yourself with them.

The Kissinger phone records are so favorable to their owner that he has graciously lent them to AEI's Mark Falcoff to help prove, sort of, that Nixon and Kissinger had nothing to do with the 1973 Chilean coup.

Falcoff's many defenses are pitiably weak: he argues that Nixon didn't care all that much about Chile, as if that would prevent mischief. (Why? Scruples? Or the possibility of getting caught? The fucker had bugged incriminating conversations involving himself for years!) He also argues that, while it's true that Kissinger's agents had ordered the sequence of events that led to the failed first putsch right after Allende's election, Kissinger later ordered them stopped (but for some reason they went on anyway, which certainly was not Harry K's fault...), etc.

But the funniest and saddest part is Falcoff's faith in the Kissinger tape. At one point Falcoff throws this on the table like the opposite-of-smoking gun:

As for President Nixon, he was evidently pleased -- how could he not have been? -- but exhibited no sense of complicity with the coup-makers themselves. As he said on the phone to Kissinger on September 16, "Well, we didn't -- as you know -- our hand doesn't show on this one though." To which Kissinger replied, "We didn't do it."

"As you know, our hand doesn't show on this one." "We didn't do it." Yep, that's how innocent men talk about someone else's crime. Nice digging, Falcoff.

I observed long ago about the movie Atomic Cafe that its archival footage is comical to us moderns because we know the people in it are lying outrageously and, as they are unaccustomed to the omnipresence of cameras, they look clumsy when they're trying to look believable. Lying was not then the fine art it has now become, but some of Cafe's stars, notably Nixon, did pick up a few tricks quickly. What's amazing is that they're still taking people in.