When Did Lying Become Our National Culture?

A couple of examples:

First, via This Modern World comes a
story about the arrests during the Republican National Convention in NY during the last presidential campaign (registration required):

Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue.
"We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed," the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. "I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."

Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.

During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.

A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive, lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention.

For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors.

There's more of the same in there, go read. Then
Jesus' General points us to a story (via Buzzflash) on John Lott, who apparently decided to pose as a woman on discussion boards in order to bolster his image as an expert on the issue of gun control. Plus, he also seems to have a history of just, not to put too fine a point on it, making shit up, like poll numbers that support his claims.

(This quote is actually from a link in the Buzzflash article.)
What are these “18 national surveys”? Well, numbers 1 to 14 are the surveys listed in table 1 of Kleck and Gertz. Trouble is, if you look at the table, two of the surveys don’t give any estimate and three aren’t national surveys. Less obvious is the fact that the estimates were produced by combining the results with information from Klecks’s own survey. Only four of the surveys give independent measures of defensive gun use: Kleck’s NSDS: 2.5 million DGUs, Hart: 650,000, Mauser: 600,000, Tarrance: 300,000. Survey 15 is the NSPOF which estimates 23 million (twenty-three million—not a typo) DGUs. Survey 16 is from Hemenway, Azreal and Miller. Lott falsely claims that this survey yields an estimate of 2 million DGUs a year when actually it is 400,000 a year. Survey 17 is Lott’s own 2002 survey. Lott claims this indicates 2.3 million DGUs per year, but he screwed up the calculations. And survey 18? That’s the one that exists only in Lott’s head. Yes, he’s still citing it. Lott is incorrigible.

Let's not even get into the multiple examples we all can pull up concerning Fox News, Swift Boat Veterens for Truth (there's an ironic name), the Bush administration, Bill O'Reilly... The list can go on and on and on, unfortunately. You know, if we saw more of these people getting punished when they were caught, I might feel a little better about this. But too often it seems like everyone just shrugs and looks the other way, or is distracted by the latest set of lies. It reminds me of the old saying -- "Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter because nobody listens."