O What an Angled Web We Weave

On Good Morning America, Rudy Giuliani claimed there were no terror attacks under Bush. This sort of comment is not new: Dana Perino had earlier asserted that the Bush administration inherited 9/11. Which points to an important general truth: liars don’t need a good memory so long as they can count on listeners who can’t remember anything very well and interviewers who will never call them on their premeditated falsehoods. Giuliani knew that the chronology of events in the distant past, i.e. eight years ago, was already becoming murky in the public mind and rightly calculated that George Stephanopolos, master of the convenient scruple, would find it in his own interest to let this studied lie pass on air and only correct the record later in the relative privacy of a blog.