Lying 101

Rafael Palmeiro got suspended for using steroids yesterday. This is a big deal, non-baseball fans. For all this talk about steroids, the only folks that had been caught before Palmeiro were piddly singles hitters. This time, a cat with historically impressive numbers will be gettin’ an ass full of oak for the next ten days.
There’s really only one lesson to be learned from this one–never oversell the lie.

That’s right–don’t oversell the lie.
During the congressional hearings on steroids in sports, Palmeiro was a panelist, chosen by virtue of Jose Canseco’s allegation that he used to inject Palmeiro with the juice when they were both members of the Texas Rangers and because he, like Curt Schilling, is a friend of the Dubya. In his own defense, Palmeiro defiantly pointed at the panel and said he had “never” used steroids, that he’d never put a performance enhancing substance into his body. The look in his eye was dead serious. He was surprisingly believable. At that time, we all assumed that Jose Canseco was just making all this stuff up to get paid, so Palmeiro’s statement was needed for those looking for someone to spit in Canseco’s face. As the sessions went on, Palmeiro’s direct answers to the allegations that he juiced made him seem almost-heroic when juxtaposed against the evasive answers a shriveled Mark McGwire gave the panel.
But what we never considered was that Palmeiro really may have been juicing. It never dawned on most that he was just giving lip service. Now, that appears to have been the case, and that means that Palmeiro committed the worst mistake someone can make while not telling the truth–he oversold his lie.
Overselling a lie is one of those things that can have serious short-term benefits, but the long-term losses can be insurmountable. For example, even though everyone with a brain knew that Pete Rose gambled on baseball, he oversold his lie. He spent fifteen years denying that he put money on games, and he did so with a verve that made some folks think that maybe, just maybe, Rose’s insistence that he did nothing wrong was enough to trump the mountains of evidence that implicated Rose in gambling.
So after fifteen years of triyng to piss on our collective head and tell us it was raining, Rose finally came clean and admitted he bet on baseball. Rose hoped this would get him into the Hall of Fame. Instead, he made himself into even more of a pariah. Why? Because he oversold his lie. He lied so hard that he left himself no choice but to never deviate from the half-truth. So, in his case, he put himself in a position where he could never come clean and get anything from it. After telling a lie like that for so long, the liar can never tell on himself. Nothing good will come from that. Beyond never being believed, people really hate being lied to. I’m willing to bet that most people find lying far more offensive than steroid use or gambling.
Palmeiro sold his lie hard. “I have never used steroids. I don’t know how to put it more clearly than that.” That was pretty clear, but it doesn’t seem to be true. After wondering why on earth he was on that panel–perhaps a favor from Dubya to get people to leave Raffy alone, which worked–we now need to think about whether we were lied to. Most people will think that we have been. The anger people direct toward Palmeiro will not be because of the steroids. It will be about overselling the lie. If one sells a lie that hard, the truth better never get out. Once sold that hard, one is imprisoned by the lie, dictated by it, almost defined by it.
Need another reference on that? Remember when Dubya said that he would fire anyone associated with that CIA leak? That seemed pretty believable. That violation was particularly egregious, so Bush had to make sure folks knew that he was serious about stopping such things from happening. Well, then it turned out that Karl Rove, the most important man in Bush’s inner sanctum, was behind the leak.
Then, Bush has to start backtracking a bit. There’s no way that Bush could afford to fire Rove, his chief advisor and the architect of his political career of the last decade. That left Bush trying to dance around that dictated statement, one he could never deny making. But Bush had absolutely no intention of firing Rove, so he was stuck a bit.
Why? Because he oversold the lie. He grandstanded a bit too much and got trapped behind fire, brimstone, and lip service. So now, as though Bush wasn’t untrustworthy enough, he’s got this lie dogging him. He may have gotten away from it, but he oversold the lie.
Plenty of other examples, of course. Clinton/Lewinsky. Tricky Dick. Milli Vanilli. The list goes on and on.
If you’re gonna tell a lie, just say what you’ve got to say. But if you get up there hoopin and hollerin’, you better be right as rain, pimpin’. Otherwise, that lie will be, in the words of Mobb Deep, the start of your ending.