So it’s come to this again. Politicians lying to get themselves elected.
Who knew?
Our hugely indignant candidates for president claimed this week that they are shocked, shocked and dismayed that the opposition would lie just to try to collect votes.
Of course the lying started in earnest several months ago when candidates started opening their mouths. But the deceptive rhetoric has really heated up now.
Obama was torched this week when former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt “Mormons-Don’t-Lie” Romney told the world he was incensed that President Barack Obama would undo the country’s workfare laws. He said Obama wanted to help welfare queens stay home and eat bon bons and spend your hard-earned tax dollars from their couches.
Romney said that if he’s elected president, or appointed by the U.S. Supreme Court as is increasingly the case for Republicans in the White House, he would reinstall a culture of hard work and ethics undone by the morally corrupt Obama administration.
Wow. Not only is Romney’s claim a big, fat lie, it’s a really stupid lie. It immediately prompted news types all over the country to ask Romney’s fellow Republicans if there was any truth to Romney’s claims that Obama was undoing workfare, which resulted in his allies calling Romney a liar so Democrats didn’t have to.
Both sides immediately remembered that Romney was among a host of Republican governors a few years ago asking the Bush White House to do exactly what Obama just did, giving states more flexibility in running the welfare system and helping those on the dole get better jobs.
Oops.
The lie was incredibly stupid, as well, because it would mean that if he is appointed or elected president, he would have to explain to his fellow Republicans why he would or would not repeal Obama’s “egregious” actions, when it’s just what everyone wants.
He should listen to the conservative patron saint of common sense, Ayn Rand, who had this advice on lying.
“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim,” Rand wrote. “What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on.”
Of course Romney isn’t the only prevaricator in this race. Obama, too, presses the truth until it squeals in agony on a host of issues. Just yesterday in Denver, Obama insisted that if the Supreme Court appoints Romney as president, or if he is shockingly, legally elected, he would turn back the clock on medical care to the 1950s.
That’s a dumb lie. First off, that kind of thing has real appeal to many conservatives, who think everything was better in the ‘50s when women and poor people knew their places, being gay meant only that one was cheerful, gas was cheap and China was a mess. Some of these people believe the U.S. didn’t even need much health-care back then because people rarely got sick.
But the anti-Romney claim is just as stupid a lie because everyone knows that the insurance companies that Obama got into bed with in creating Obamacare are the ones that would never allow some ranting Republican to roll back their trillion-dollar industry and profits to a time when people paid for health-care with chickens and cash.
It’s true that Romney — who only wants whatever will get him elected — wants to undo Obamacare, which is, sadly, the only hope Americans have at keeping the country from being bankrupted by our doctor and hospital bills. But don’t look for the return of iron lungs if the GOP’s grim gripper collects enough electoral votes to make good on his promise to help women escape the tyranny of equal rights they suffer under now.
Don’t be fooled. These are not “opinions” Republicans and Democrats are arming themselves with at this point. They’re pathetic lies that more than chisel away at credibility; in Romney’s case he just nuked that.
Obama prefers to tell the half-truth rather than the whopper, which for a respectable politician is the equivalent of slow death of believability rather than GOP-preferred shot to the heart.
“A lie that is half-truth is the darkest of all lies,” Tennyson wrote. It’s devious because it drags the listener down by a thread of credibility.
What so flabbergasting is that the lies are so unnecessary. Each side has provided the other with a gold mine of honest reasons to make their cases. Obamacare hasn’t done anything to actually lower the cost of health care in this country, for anyone. But Romney backed the idea of forced-insurance years ago, and what he’s offering now has even less of a chance of improving the situation for most Americans than living under Obamacare.
And that’s the truth.
