Salon: A Nation of Scared Sheep (Why don't Americans care…?) [View All]

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Why don't Americans care that Bush may have lied to them about Iraq? The answer lies deep in our reptilian brains.

By Louise Witt

(snip)

People don't focus as much on the sin as on the sinner," says Robert P. Lawry, a professor of law and the director of the Center for Professional Ethics at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, in Cleveland. "Bush's popularity explains the shrugging of the shoulders. An awful lot of people seem to have a visceral, negative reaction to Martha Stewart; they don't like her. They like Bush, so they forgive him. It has nothing to do with the lie. Going to war is much more problematic a lie than one that nets you a small gain, relatively speaking, in the stock market. People are not paying attention to the implications and importance of the lie."

Lawry surmises people base their likes and dislikes on fairly superficial assessments: They see Martha as an uppity bitch and George W. as a regular guy. Yet, there are deeper, more complicated reasons why Americans are forgiving Bush -- and it has nothing to do with his magnetic personality and far more with the times we live in.

We're scared.

(snip)

When Gustave Gilbert, a psychologist who interviewed the Nuremberg prisoners, talked to Hermann Goering, the former leader of the Third Reich's Luftwaffe, Goering volunteered that it was relatively easy to persuade a populace to go to war. As quoted in Gilbert's book "Nuremberg Diary," Goering said: "It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship."

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http://salon.com/news/feature/2003/07/09/lying/index.html