“Honesty may be the best policy, but it’s important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.”
— George Carlin

(Illustration found here).

Telling a non-truth in a truthful way has apparently become an art form; in this modern world with all kinds of techno ways to flub or expose the lie, the ability to spin a successful falsehood is getting harder and harder to handle — only a complete dumb-ass will blubber shit out without thinking of the electronic consequences.
And seemingly, there’s a shitload of dumb-asses out there.

Of course, the biggest dumb-ass currently on the loop is the big dog-boner, Tony Weiner, who at last count was thinking about resigning, but only after rehab — who’d ever believe there was a rehab for Tweeting nasty pix on the Internet?
And like most-likely a shitload of other people, I sick of the whole Weiner affair — wish it’d be stuffed back inside the pants of public discourse, but not likely.

Another big lie, which has mostly flown under the radar of the MSM, is the saga of “A Gay Girl in Damascus,” who reportedly for weeks had been blogging on the horrific uprising in Syria, and then suddenly went silent, apparently because she’d been arrested by authorities.
As it turned out, the whole thing was a hoax — not only was it not a lesbian, but a 40-year-old US guy, Tom MacMaster, currently a student at Edinburgh University in the UK.
A lot of people who’d been following the blog were pissed, but MacMaster says it was all for the good: “It was a fiction but the facts I was presenting about Syria, about Islam, about the Middle East, about all of these things are true. I think the most important thing is to get the information out.”
However, MacMaster used a real person’s name on the blog, which could have put that lady in harm’s way.
He’s sorry:

The graduate from Georgia, who is studying for a master’s degree at Edinburgh, has also been condemned for using photographs of a woman from London for his blog’s character, without her permission.
Jelena Lecic, an administrator for the Royal College of Physicians, said using images of her for a blog about a homosexual in Syria had placed her in danger.
Asked about why he used Lecic as the face of Amina Arraf, Mr MacMaster said: “I’d really like to apologise to her.
“I had an idea of what my character should look like.
One day, I was flipping through something and I saw a picture of Jelena and I was like: that is the face.
“She’s pretty and just fit exactly.

And MacMaster concluded with a most fitting line, one which all liars, including Tony Weiner, I’m sure, consider as they do what they do: “I didn’t think anyone would notice.”
Hahahahaha.

Warfare has a mega-long list of lying down through the ages — of course, George Jr. and The Dick kept the glory of Vietnam-like lying alive in this modern age.
And the latest war liar is David Petraeus, the big-mouthed US commander in Afghanistan, who apparently figured that if the war there can’t be won, or even handled, the best thing to do was lie about shit, creating a sense that the enemy is being beaten.
From one of the better war journalists, Gareth Porter, via antiwar.com:

The claims of huge numbers of Taliban captured and killed continued through the rest of 2010.
In December, Petraeus’s command said a total of 4,100 Taliban rank and file had been captured in the previous six months and 2,000 had been killed.
Those figures were critical to creating a new media narrative hailing the success of SOF operations as reversing what had been a losing U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.
But it turns out that more than 80 percent of those called captured Taliban fighters were released within days of having been picked up, because they were found to have been innocent civilians, according to official U.S. military data.
Even more were later released from the main U.S. detention facility at Bagram airbase called the Detention Facility in Parwan after having their files reviewed by a panel of military officers.
The timing of Petraeus’s claim of Taliban fighters captured or killed, moreover, indicates that he knew that four out of five of those he was claiming as “captured Taliban rank and file” were not Taliban fighters at all.
…
When Petraeus decided in mid-August to release the figure of 1,355 Taliban rank and file allegedly captured during the 90-day period, he already knew that 80 percent or more of that total had already been released.

My underline for emphasis: As a politician, big Dave knew he was lying as he lied.
If that’s a lie, what else is under the covers?
In the nimble, sarcastic words of Mark Twain: My complaint simply concerns the decay of the art of lying.
Twain, however, didn’t have time to open a Twitter account.