And what a liar. A fellow who told serial whoppers over thirty years about being secretly and illgally in forbidden countries on covert war missions. Didn’t the Gong Show guy do this? Not on the Senate Floor, he didn’t.

Imagine further that your boss was aloof and arrogant, and extremely hostile to criticism. The kind of fellow who always blames someone else for his mistakes. He blames speechwriters when he says wrong things in speeches, cause, darn it, they just wouldn’t remove the offending lines. He blames the conductor when his special train fails to stop in Lawrence, Kansas.

He’s worse than that: he calls guys who are literally supposed to die protecting him SOB’s. Swell boss, eh?

Imagine having to deliver bad news to this guy. ” People have said, sir, that you did not spend Christmas in Cambodia in 1968.” He responds first by screaming bloody murder and by firing you. On reflection, and after consultation with his wife, he says that maybe he was mistaken about the date, but he was definitely in Cambodia. He tells you to go away and fix things. But here’s the problem: you know he is still lying.

So you try to peddle various stories, and you try to sound cheerful and convinced of their veracity as you do so: it was getting dark on 12/24/68, there are no road signs on the river, or maybe it was another date completely, but the boss is 110% sure he was in Cambodia.

Too bad the boss didn’t take the easier way out: eat some crow today, and let thing pass. Explain the Cambodia talk as rhetorical excess, a metaphor for the whole rotten war. Dealt with so that lies of the past do not become new lies in the present, the whole story might just fade away. No, the boss had to go and pull a Watergate, telling unconvincing stories that simply lead to more questions.

So now the boss has created his own potentially devastating problem. Now he has to explain the several trips he took to Cambodia; now he has to tell about how he got the Magic Hat. Now he’ll have to explain the geograhic absurdity his employee has now offered as an explanation.

Maybe the boss will get away with these lies. After all, Mommy and Daddy don’t seem interested in them yet, as Glenn Reynolds reports this morning.

Then again, maybe in a day or two, you’ll have to go back to the boss with some more bad news.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 12th, 2004 at 4:38 am and is filed under General, New Media, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.