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This is how dumb I am: I don’t understand how public officials can consistently go in front of the American people and lie. I legitimately don’t understand. This week, Republicans far and wide have been (loudly) spouting unsupported claims of vote rigging in this week’s California elections. This week, the president lied to Kristen Welker about his campaign promise not to start any new wars. This week, Marco Rubio lied about Cuba’s energy crisis, blaming Cubans for the fact that their island is without power (rather than the fact that the Americans are blockading the island from receiving fuel shipments). This week, Markwayne Mullin lied, under oath, to Senator Patty Murray that he was “heavily involved” in negotiating new DHS reforms. Murray countered that he was not—she knew this, she said, because she was there, and Mullin “was not.”
Lies, lies, damnable lies. Of course, it’s not just Republicans who do so—but they seem to do so more often and more blatantly. When not actively lying, they also evade the truth. Has a single Trump nominee acknowledged that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election? Not to knowledge. Not a single one is willing to contradict the administration’s lies about immigrants, so-called narco terrorists, or the lunacy of his Iran War.
And I don’t understand it.
All politicians shade the truth. But why do we accept such behavior? If I had an employee—I have exactly zero employees, to be clear—who consistently refused to give frank answers to my questions, that person would not be in my employ much longer. But when politicians do it, we’re just supposed to shrug our shoulders? Pardon my French, but that’s a load of hooey.
We’ve somehow allowed ourselves to be conditioned to accept less than the truth from the people for whom truth ought to be their highest calling. Truth and transparency are base requirements for a functioning democracy; if we can’t trust what the government is telling us, we cannot trust what the government does. When we cannot trust what the government does, “representative democracy” is nothing more than a branding exercise.
When citizens do not trust their governments, bad things happen. Notably—and crucially for the people doing the lying—a lot of people just drop out of civic engagement altogether. The liars prefer less engagement to more because it reduces opposition, both in terms of quantity and efficacy. When Steve Bannon talked about “flooding the zone with s--t,” this is what he meant. When you open up the full force of your s--t-spewing machine, you’re not concerned with aim. What you want is to spread enough feces over enough territory that people either spend all their time cleaning up your mess or walk away. Either way, you win because while they’re dealing with your excrement, you’re busy picking their pockets.
It’s a deeply cynical and deeply effective strategy. Consider our mainstream media, which will happily open its collective mouth for whatever dookies Bannon et al wish to deposit. Take the president’s aforementioned Meet the Press meltdown. For days now, we’ve been focused on Trump’s heated walkout rather than the substance of the interview, which concerned, among other things, Trump’s lies about the California election and his lies about the Iran War. So now we’re talking about temperament rather than actual problems facing farmers, for example, who cannot afford their fertilizer because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. That we were encouraged to take Trump “seriously, not literally” ought to have been disqualifying for a candidate for President of the United States. Instead, because we’re used to obfuscation from public officials, we accepted it.
Why? Why do we just take it? Being accustomed to something does not mean we need to accept it. Part of the problem is that too many politicians recognize voters do not hold them to account for their lies and misrepresentations, so they feel free to go right on doing it. They know there are no consequences in American political life for lying, not even lying under oath. We know this because, just this week, Marco Rubio—under oath—testified that he’s never seen Trump asleep, despite the fact that his interrogator, Rep. Ted Lieu, played clips of Trump sleeping during multiple Oval Office meetings with Rubio in attendance. They lie because lying is easy for them. Practice, I guess, really does make perfect.
We accepted the volume of Trump’s lies during the first term, which led to the deadlier lies of the second. We accepted the corruption of the first term, which led to the exponentially greater corruption in the second. We allowed the revisionism of January 6 to infect the truth, paving the way for pardons and the rehabilitation of the insurrectionists, some of whom have now found jobs within the administration. This isn’t gaslighting; it’s a gas explosion. It’s deliberate, and it’s likely to be our undoing.
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