Truth - Editorial, The Week in Review

Analysis, Commentary, Opinion

06.01.2019

Truth

All politicians lie. Even my favorite ones.

They lie about their intentions, they lie about their motivations, they skew the data to support their position, the promise what they know they cannot deliver.

Such is the nature of politics.

We lie to ourselves when we give credence to them, when we take the hand that we are offered as they lead us down the primrose bath. We slip on the shaded lenses, focus on the technicolor dream, narrow our criticism while they slip on the blinders. We are willing accomplices in all this.

Have we entered a new era? It seems that we have.

Truth itself is under attack, our ability to understand it to predicate policy on it, to cleave to its norms, those things too have seemingly been swept away.

We used to be able to acknowledge and appreciate a difference between the elected (political) leadership in government, and those career bureaucrats who keep the institutions running, year after year, through all of the ups-and-downs in the political fortunes of either party.

The safeguards that protected those structures have been undone.

We are in a dangerous place.

I listened to Mitch McConnell coyly suggest that if a vacancy in the Supreme Court were to appear in the presidential election year he would seek to fill the seat, he laughed as he said it, remembering how he refused to have hearings on President Obama’s last nominee on the grounds that it was a presidential election year, and the voters should decide.

He was lying about his motives then, he gave a deceptive rationale. He overturned constitutional norms to have his way, and now he would gleefully go back on himself.

President Trump nominated men to the highest court who told bald faced lies to the Senate in their confirmation hearings, perjuring themselves before the bar of justice, so that they could ascend to the highest place.

They had no regard for the truth.

The truth is under constant assault.

All politicians lie, but none have ever lied as much as Donald Trump, or dragged so many with them into the morass of lies as he has, just because they fear for their political life, or things they might enrich themselves from the little crumbs that he might drop from the table.

How did we get to this place where a bankrupt TV star, the World’s biggest loser, one Donald J. Trump, conspired with our adversaries, the Russians to get himself elected President of the United States, and nearly half the country does not care.

He get up on TV and lies to the American people everyday, and they do not protest.

They repeat his lies when he says that Mexico will pay for his wall, that China is paying for his tariffs, that he cut taxes for the average people,

They accept his love affair with the leader of North Korea, and the unreciprocated bro-mance he has going with Vladimir Putin.

What has happened here?

Where are the patriots among the republican electorate?

Why don’t they abandon him?  

The republican party is anathema to America. They do not want a constitutional government, they are not worthy of the name republican. They do not want to live in a representative democracy, they are afraid of the people and an informed electorate. 

They lie, cheat, and steal, because they hate America.