Deception

Abstract

It would be difficult to observe the 2004 electoral process and deny the significant role deception played in it. From the President’s continuing insistence that a link exists between the attack on the World Trade Towers and the regime of Saddam Hussein to his challengers insistence that altering the tax code will create jobs in Ohio, the candidates did not much hesitate to deviate from more or less well-known facts in making claims directly contrary to them or only made consistent with them by the most implausible and tortured argument. In the battle to create an altered reality, the President clearly dominated not only in the extent of his appeal to facts that he must have known defied the evidence, but in the significance of the facts denied.