Speaking of lies and lying

... (see my post a few posts below), Glenn Greenwald has a greait piece up over at Salon that is well worth the read.

As CarolynC notes in Comments, the Straussian endorsement of "noble lies" is completely consistent with the two-tiered system of justice that dominates our political culture (the subject of today's first post), as only some people -- the elite -- are permitted to tell such lies, while ordinary citizens who do so must be punished. From Harper's Earl Shorris in July, 2004:

For Strauss, as for Plato, the virtue of the lie depends on who is doing the lying. If a poor woman lies on her application for welfare benefits, the lie cannot be countenanced. The woman has committed fraud and must be punished. The woman is not noble, therefore the lie cannot be noble. When the leader of the free world says that "free nations do not have weapons of mass destruction," this is but a noble lie, a fable told by the aristocratic president of a country with enough nuclear weapons to leave the earth a desert less welcoming than the surface of the moon.