Where O'Reilly goofed in Obama Interview

Conservatives need to firm up their jaw.  All you have to do in order to see the problem is to watch the Quayle-Bentsen debate in 1988.  It's a long term problem and it doesn't seem to go away.  The guy on the left says something, and the guy on the so-called right is like a deer in the headlights---struck dumb.

It continued with the O'Reilly interview, when Obama claimed that there wasn't a smidgeon of corruption at the IRS.  If so, why does Lois Lerner take the Fifth?  Instead of asking this question, O'Reilly lets it slide.  Thus he enables the lie to take hold, and gives it legitimacy.  This is the kind of thing that Solzhenitsyn warned about.  Angelo Codevilla, in his latest piece, Live Not by Lies, quotes him on this crucial point:

“the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me.” The lies that hold up corrupt regimes, he noted, like infections, “can exist only in a living organism.” Hence whoever will live in freedom “will immediately walk out of a meeting, session, lecture, performance or film showing if he hears a speaker tell lies, or purvey ideological nonsense or shameless propaganda.”---Live Not by Lies

 There is an infection all right.  If you check out Barnhardt again, you see a career military man give it all up because he saw something that wasn't right.  He says that all too many people think that whatever the government does is legal.

I had a similar thought recently to what that military man said in that piece.  People are confusing the office holder with the office.  The Constitution is sovereign, not the office holders who hold the office that the Constitution and the laws that were created under it made possible.  By criticizing office holders, we are not committing treason.  But rather, the office holders are the ones committing treason by failing to honor the oath by which made their office possible.  "The King can do no wrong" is worthy only of a King, of which the Constitution expressly forbids.  All men are subject to the law in a Republic.  "No man is above the law" we were told during the Watergate Crisis.  Somehow, that only applies to Republicans.

Asked what kind of government they created at the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin replied "A republic, if you can keep it."  Perhaps this is how republics are lost.

Update:

Gingrich made the same kind of mistake in his debate for the GOP against Romney.  Romney just flat out lied when he said that a moon base would cost a trillion dollars.  I pointed that out, and besides me, Spudis had an estimate from NASA at Marshall that a lunar refueling station would cost less than a $100 billion.

It's not a partisan thing necessarily. It's a preparation thing.  If Gingrich had been better prepared, he could have knocked down what Romney said.  Instead, Romney made Gingrich look foolish.  Gingrich lost the debate, but we all lose when a lie is allowed to become the established wisdom.