Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan has just published his ‘memoirs’.
What do you make of it? Revenge and concotion of lies or truth to generate revenue?
How can one concoct truth?
Nice try. Read the whole sentence and put a comma in a place of your choice.
Any subject-specific views?
The truth dwells somewhere in-between
Unless you feel one cannnot generate revenue by telling lies. Do you?
It’s supposedly a mixture of lies and truth to generate revenue for McClellan, but its release is evidently timed as an attempt to damage the Republican party for the presidential elections. This is a common stunt in an election year. However, it doesn’t seem to be working very well this time, since McClellan was kind of a lightweight and supposedly not very good at his job. Talking heads are coming on TV now saying that White House press secretaries aren’t really such insiders, and the bad ones largely parrot what they’re told to say, so McClellan couldn’t have had all the exclusive knowledge he says he did.
Mainly, though, it’s an election year stunt that we see all the time.
What you’re going to see now is an attempt by the Democrats to convince people that John McCain is the same thing as George W. Bush. They do this whenever there’s an unpopular Republican president leaving office. When Jimmy Carter ran against the very clean Gerald Ford, Carter often didn’t answer debate questions, but used his time as an opportunity to slather Ford with the sins of his resigned predecessor, Richard Nixon. You’ll see something like this in the election coming up. It’s already starting, in fact.
The whole thing is going to be interesting, because you’ve got a relatively clean war hero running against the nation’s first Marxist candidate.
To concoct is, etymologically, “to cook together”.
“To concoct the truth” would therefore be “to combine certain facts in a way that does not involve falsehood, but is misleading”.
Cf. Alan Clark’s coinage, “being economical with the actualité”.
In the context of political memoirs, the phrase would be peculiarly apt.
MrP
11 English pages for “concoct truth”.
4 English pages for “concoct the truth”.
1,460 English pages for “concoct lies”.
And:
52,500 English pages for “the lacking of”.
Funny how Mr P likes to deny marked and/or uncommon usage when they rub up against his knowledge - how he loves to insist on default forms. Then, he suddenly calls on marked and/or uncommon usage when he feels like it. LOL!
Yes, I’ve seen this type of thing happening many times, instigated by Reps or Dems. These kind of stalling tactics are endemic to many countries.
Jamie, I know that your political views differ from mine, but isn’t this polarising statement a bit extreme?
Try these, old boy:
1. Concoct the truth, etc.
“concoct truth” + “concoct the truth” = 18 hits
“concoct lies” + “concoct the lies” = 1,513 hits
18 / (18 + 1513) = 0.01%
2. The lacking of, etc.
“the lacking of” = 30,800 hits
“the lack of” = 10,500,000 hits
30800 / (30800 + 10500000) = 0.003%
MrP
Try again, Mr P.
I should have modified the word, as some commentators do, and called him a quasi-Marxist. His beliefs are largely from the 1930s and 1960s and are heavily influenced by Marxism.