I, for one, would be all for imposing this curse by supernatural force. To the extent that the Democrats would be hurt by it, they need to be hurt by it. Obama would be reduced to saying: “I truly believe that I should not show emotion in public.” John Boehner would constantly be saying how handsome he thinks he is, and McCain would be offering to blow lobbyists. Joe Lieberman would confess that “I’m So Vain” is about him.
I think that Barbara Lee would come out looking like Barbara Lee and Dennis Kucinich would be repeating that he can’t believe that pretty young woman married him.
Yes, that statement would probably pass the test. Remember, you voted for Obama.
The Republicans would have thousands of Joe Barton apologizing to BP/Enron type moments, and would be unable to retract.
All would suffer, but the Republicans are the side that pretends to be above it all. Also, a Democrat closet case isn’t likely to feel the fury as a Pub, in fact, there are probably less closet case Democrats in general.
I’d stand by my assessment that the Pubs are the ones who would suffer more from the disease.
IMO, by far the most common lie in politics is tha false accusation levelled at one’s opponents in all it’s myriad forms (conspiracy theory, slippery slope, closet radical). And although they field a lot of accusations of racism, I think the Republicans clearly outdo the Dems in this area.
Trouble is, I’m not sure the “Liar, Liar” disease would all that effective, because if you believe your false accusations, that somehow makes it OK.
If you have a disease that keeps you from lying, it does not mean everything you say will be true, it only means everything you say will be what you sincerely believe is true. If my education has been so poor that I think Vietnam is in Africa, and I catch this disease, I will still, if asked, say that Vietnam is in Africa.
I think this would hurt the Republicans a lot more than it would hurt Democrats. Not because Democratic politicians are less sleazy and dishonest than Republicans, but simply because the Republican base seems to put a higher price on character than Democrats. A Democrat who says he really hates gays, but votes in favor of gay rights because its popular with his base is probably still going to get my vote, because I don’t really give a shit if he’s a decent and honest person, I just care that he’s able to get a legislative agenda I support passed. I could be mistaken, but it seems to me that Republican voters would react much more negatively to a Republican candidate who said he was really an atheist who believes in evolution, but wants Creationism taught in schools because he needs the votes.
I think this is where you would see the most dramatic effect. The Republican smear campaign is just so vastly superior to anything the Democrats would ever hope to emulate. Their ability to fire out a variety of easy to digest sound bites that get repeated over and over. Death panels, secret Muslim, tax and spend. Tax hikes. Confiscate your guns. Swift boating. Essentially anything Sarah Palin has ever said, did I mention death panels?
Without the ability to flat out lie about Democrat candidates or their policies, the GOP wouldn’t have nearly as much support.
I think the first time the Republican admitted that they were using their abortion, gun rights, and anti-gay marriage stances to rile up the masses to support tax cuts for the rich their popularity would decrease a bit.
You’ve got to be kidding. IIRC, his condition didn’t merely make him tell the truth – he seemed to have to say what he felt even when he didn’t actually have to say anything.
This would devastate all politicians. They live to spin, to not ruffle feathers needlessly, to make statements that are sufficiently misleading or ambiguous so that the listener is free to interpret them in his favor, and does. I base this not only on politicians I’ve observed, but those I know personally. This would be such a massive change of lifestyle that they’d freak out. And they’d lose even a lot of their current supporters. After the carnage of the first set of elections, it’d be a tossup as to who came out ahead.
Dave Barry suggested this in his book Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway, imagining with glee how constituents would react when they heard their sodium pentothal-marinated representatives suddenly telling them that he didn’t really care about their pet piece of legislation. But imagine the same thing happening with every set of constituents (and for every politician, including new prospective ones).
We’d have a huge change in government, until we settled into some new style of prevarication, possibly by having candidates who are deliberately given ambiguities to mouth by their support staff simply so they couldn’t lie or say inappropriate things. all we’d be doing is pushing knowledge of the real Way Things Are and the Responsibility for making policy to higher and less accessible levels, and we’d lose government transparency.
Nasty thought.
The SF short story “Satan’s Children,” by Spider Robinson (1979), involves a new designer drug, TWT (“The Whole Truth”), which (in addition to mild hallucinatory and euphoric effects) gives the user a compulsion to tell the truth – not merely to tell the truth when asked, but to hunt up everyone to whom he/she can recall lying and set the record straight. And then they remain honest. As the inventor of the drug explains, the drug itself is not addictive; “It’s the truth that’s addictive!”
The heroes to whom the designer hands this drug (just before being assassinated) face a moral dilemma: Do even good people need lies sometimes? Perhaps they should just bury this? They go underground for a while and secretly dose importantly-placed people with TWT and observe the results (e.g., they sneak a TWT-dosed cigar into a major auto company’s boardroom; and afterwards the company’s cars greatly improve in safety and fuel economy); they satisfy themselves that it would be more a good thing than bad if TWT were released on the open market. But the story ends more or less at that point; the actual social effects of freely-available TWT on the whole world is a thought experiment the author did not, here, undertake. It is interesting to think about.
I imagine that the Republicans would lose a lot of power due to many of them being hauled off to prison, actually. And they’d lose votes when asked questions like “would you betray America for profit?”, “did you care about the people killed in 9/11, or did you just see it as a political opportunity”, or “would you round up and kill everyone who disagrees with you if you could?”
But I think that would hurt Republicans more than Democrats; I think people who vote for Democrats would be more concerned about whether or not he’ll vote for that piece of legislation, and not care if he actually cares about it. The Republican voters are much more concerned with ideological purity at any cost.
In re-thinking the OP, I’m not so sure that would hurt their base. The masses they are riling are just as much bigots and racists as their candidates. To hear, “I’m actually against abortion because I want to punish slutty women, and I’m against immigration reform because I hate foreigners” will probably make them more popular. I can’t help but feel Republican lies are more about placating a handful of moderates that have actual objections to abortion or immigration reform.
But the flip side to that has already been mentioned: For a Dem to say, “I hate gay people but I vote for gay rights because it’s popular” wont’ hurt them, because their voters want gay rights.
I think the real question is what lies voters actually believe. I always just assumed Republican voters understood every comment was followed by a “wink wink nudge nudge.”
“What do you honestly think about your constituents” seems like it might do disproportionate damage to the republicans, given the amount of pandering to the lowest common denominator that they seem to be resorting to lately. I’ll note that this seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon, though.
For the opposite possibility, I recall a short story I read in which a very popular computer program had a secret subliminal component that induced a compulsion for truthfulness, put there by some well meaning type no doubt. The result was the collapse of civilization. The population crashed because men and women couldn’t stand each other, or convince themselves that children were worth the effort. Society in general fell apart because everyone grew to despise one another. And interest in fiction also died out as another side effect.
I think it would hurt Republicans much more than Democrats. Look at voting trends in the Congress: Democrats are very often split on issues, whereas Republicans have generally enforced better party discipline.
Is that better discipline because GOP politicians are automatons? No. It’s because they put loyalty to party above dissenting views. See also, the 11th Commandment as described by Reagan.
James Morrow has a similar story, where God appears to a Donald Trump expy and tells him the whole “Tower of Babel” thing isn’t working out, and he’s making it so that all humans can perfectly understand each other at all times again. Society goes into a tail spin as unstated and unsavory subtexts in daily interactions are made overt, and massive rioting starts breaking out as everyone hears what everyone else really thinks about them.
