The Truth about Lying.....

 

    In the innocent world that I grew-up in, lying was considered a 'bad' thing.  If you lied, then you were being a wrong-headed deceiver of others....and, you were, in general terms, a 'bad person'.  The lead-in to the Superman show on our tiny, black and white t-v's even celebrated, "...Truth, Justice and the American Way."....along with the super-dude being, "....faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound."  It was broadly held that 'liars' were sub-standard, indecent and undesirable people.  It was a serious insult to call someone a 'liar'.  

  My how things change, eh.  In the present, it now happens that lying is just something people do to get what they want....money and power, almost always.  Right?  If 'the Truth' truly is 'inconvenient' then you simply suppress it with a barrage of lies.  Once you begin doing this, you have jumped out onto a very icy slope and you are headed down a path from which return is rare, if not impossible. Once a person has managed to subdue, even to slay, their conscience, the way back becomes unclear and murky. Most who decide--either by default, or with real intent--to be dishonest people, have made a decision and will stand behind it to the end.  We are watching this manifest on a massive scale across the land:  people are choosing to believe the Idiot's 'Big Lie', and in many cases they even know it's bogus...but, they will fly that 'Trump 2020' banner on their lawn regardless.  And, they hope he'll run again and this time they won't be so incompetent about stealing the election.  They will just do it and let the devil take the hindmost....and he will.

  When Kellyanne Conway stood in front of television cameras outside the White House and took a deep-ish breath before speaking, it was her feeble and dying conscience's last breath.  The next words out of her mouth have become a permanent part of her legacy and will follow her to the end of the trail.  She put forward the idea that there are such things as, "...alternate facts".   It was a truly gob-smacking moment.  She stood before the entire world--in effect--and said, essentially, that facts are elusive.  You can have this piece of  information, and it can be 'true'.....or, maybe not.  There exist--according to Kellyanne--no real means of establishing that one 'fact' is 'true' while another is 'false'.  It's all a great big ol' swamp and it's not even clear if it's full of alligators.  One supposes that we'll have to drain it if we want to find that out.

  As I have mentioned previously on this venue, we now live, move and breathe in a 'post fact' world. Just because you say something is not true...or true, for that matter....doesn't mean it is so.  You have your facts and I have mine, and, the fact that they don't agree no longer means that one of them is 'false' and the other is 'true'.  No, no....   Now, I can have my own made-up factual reality, and you can have yours.  Except, of course, for the fact that I will relentlessly attack your version and promote my own, until yours is impugned and mine is widely accepted.  Then I will have the upper hand and you will be the loser.

  Hey, this is the basis for the entire argument being jammed down viewers throats by the far-right....which, by the way, is no longer so far out on the right wing spectrum of possibilities.  In fact, the so-called 'far right' is now squatting firmly in the middle of everything conservatives want you to believe and will lie, cheat and steal to obtain. The lying has become so pervasive and outrageous that the Orange Idiot could stand in front of a rally in Georgia last weekend and go on and on about how the farcical re-count in Arizona had proven the election was stolen from him....when it was public knowledge that this is a very big, fat lie.  The genuine FACTS of the situation are that it proved he lost by an even larger margin than originally stated.  He has zero restraint and is seemingly confident that he can lie his ass off and his sycophants will believe him.

  AND THEY DO.

Write him off at your peril.  This man is the greatest
danger to Democracy and America that we have
ever had.

    This might not matter in a world where such despicable behavior is simply understood as an inferior and terrified mental case doing what he's always done.  I mean, who cares, right?

  Well, we might tell ourselves that such blatant, dishonest, and dishonorable behavior is just more of the same.  But, the fact is, he is doing grave damage to our republic.  If you look at what happened on January 6th, at some point, you have to realize that this was not just a bunch of mal-contents who cannot accept that their asshole-idiot lost the Oval Office....but, that these people conducted a violent assault on the rule of law, on democratic principles, on LIFE as we know it, on the government itself and thereby ON ALL OF US.

  The Idiot and his cronies....a whole lot of them, many of them just as willing to lie, cheat and steal like he is....are a growing and dangerous threat to the American way of life.  If we allow ourselves to remain at all passive in the face of this dire threat, we will be living in a third-world style banana republic before we can even understand that it has happened.  The forces for this are gathering themselves, making bogus laws in state legislatures that will render the idea of open, fair, and honest elections to the dustbins of history.  

   As I have, along with many others, said so frequently, this democracy will disappear overnight and we will have something painfully in common with the people of Germany, i.e. we will have watched in disbelief as it all happened.  And, our means of fighting back, of resisting, will be beyond reach for most Americans.  It will be a 'done deal' and we'll be standing here asking ourselves, "What the fuck happened?"