Of course, you are properly shocked to read that any red-blooded
American patriot, which I assure you I indeed am, would even suggest that lying
politicians are as homegrown and as American as apple pie, but think about it!
While you think, I’ll share with you what prompted this
particular topic. I was considering
writing about religion and typed the word into my browser to get a couple of
standard dictionary definitions of the word in order to expound on various ways
of interpreting and examining different aspects of religious practices and
understandings. Suddenly, I came across
one of political satirist Andy Borowitz’s “reports” that nicely linked politics
with religion. This is what Mr. B.
wrote:
In a landmark decision, the Supreme
Court of the United States declared on
Tuesday that lying by politicians is
protected by the First Amendment because
it is an expression of their
religion. By a 5–4 majority, the Court
struck down
an Ohio law that would make it
harder to lie in political ads, arguing instead
that “any attempt to restrict or
punish lying by politicians is an unconstitutional
infringement on a religion they have practiced for decades.”
The Court’s decision won praise from
politicians of both parties, with many
saying that the Justices’
recognition of lying as a religion was “long overdue.”
Writing for the majority, Chief
Justice John Roberts argued, “For politicians, lying
is a religious observance akin to attending a church or a
synagogue, except that
they do it seven days a week.”
Politicians, when you think about it, are very special liars
because political lies are different from “run of the mill” lies. Twenty-first
century politicians and their ideological backers mostly lie within an
ideological context. After all, liberals
and conservatives find little if any truth outside of their political
faiths. Of course, no political ideology
really has a monopoly on truth telling or lying, but their capacity for truth
telling is limited by their inevitable agenda.
In fact, the more ideological you or your favorite politician is, the
more likely you are to be a bigger and more committed 21st century political
liar.
Recently, the health care exchanges more than met the
minimum number of applicants necessary to make the affordable health care
system work. Republicans can’t
politically afford to recognize that fact, so they won’t. Hence, John and Suzie Q Citizen can’t depend
on a political leader to provide an honest, non-ideological assessment of the
national affordable care act. As for the
lie, liberals say publically funded health care will work. Conservatives insist that such a suggestion
isn’t true and thus the liberals are the ones who lie. Just ask South Carolina Congressman Joe
Wilson: he’ll shout it out to you once again if you like.
Everyone knows that Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton were
probably the fastest and loosest abusers of absolute truth ever to reside in
the White House. FDR often admitted that
he seldom let his left hand know what his right hand was doing. Bill Clinton, who’s blessed with one of the
quickest minds ever to reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, insisted at one time
that there were multiple meanings of the word “is.” Depending on how you
perceive things, even our greatest presidents lie.
President Ronald Reagan insisted that he never traded arms
for hostages and was backed by conservatives who, had Jimmy Carter done the
same thing, would still be sermonizing about it today all over Fox News and
Limbaugh/Hanity radio. Papa Bush (Number
41) insisted during the 1988 presidential campaign that Congress ought to read
his lips as there would be no new taxes under his administration. In 1990, however, he made a presidential
decision to increase taxes by signing the 1990 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation
Act. Thus, despite his remarkable foreign policy successes, Bush was defeated
for re-election by a much more skillful political liar -- an Arkansas gentleman
Republicans came to refer to as “Slick Willie.”
In the wake of 9/11, George W. Bush insisted that he had
knowledge of existing weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq when
he only hoped he possessed such knowledge. After all, those weapons had to be
there in order to justify GWB’s agenda.
Question: Were FDR, Reagan, Bush No. 41, Clinton, and Bush No.
43 liars? Is President Obama’s
insistence that health care should be publically financed a question of
integrity? If politicians’ assessments
of public matters are merely efforts to deceive, where does that assessment
come from?
One of the reasons George Washington bemoaned the
establishment of political parties in his 1796 farewell address was the damage he
thought they would do to our capacity to accurately and wisely evaluate the
wisdom or usefulness of national policies.
Washington clearly realized that the competition for political supremacy
between, or perhaps even among, political parties would invariably poison the
well of legitimate ideas and strategies.
Political parties would invariably make national issues reflect the
motives of men rather than the wisdom or usefulness of ideas.
Finally, where do these lying politicians come from? Who were their parents, their friends, their
schoolmates, their teachers, their professors and, if you insist, their
clergy? Who provides them with ongoing
financial, intellectual and emotional/spiritual support?
If Andy Borowitz is right that lying constitutes a “religious
act” for today’s politicians, it is due to an even greater truth as I see it.
Twenty-first century Americans have substituted their traditional spiritual
faiths for doctrinaire politics. If
lying is the religion of the politician, the demanding, parochial, self-righteous,
and too often ideologically-oriented American voter is that religion’s “patron
saint!”
Thus, the primary reason we enjoy Andy Borowitz so much is
because he tells such outrageously amusing lies -- or does he?
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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