The woman who went on every major Sunday-morning news program after the Benghazi terrorist attacks and told flat-out falsehoods about its nature and motivations is now lecturing America about integrity.
.. A person who was one of the chief national-security officials when the Obama administration was spinning false narratives about the Iran nuclear deal
.. watching Demcrats spill crocodile tears over the Supreme Court, convinced that Neil Gorsuch was basically stealing Merrick Garland’s seat. Yet every sentient being in Washington knows that if the roles were reversed and, say, one of the liberal justices stepped down or passed away in the final months of a Republican presidency, the congressional Democrats would have behaved in the exact, same way
.. In fact, none other than Joe Biden made that same promise more than 20 years before.
.. The president and his team have repeatedly issued false denials about contacts with Russians, and the president himself keeps tweeting allegations and assertions that are most charitably described as incomplete, imprecise, and sometimes just outright wrong. Even when he’s “vindicated,” it’s often a strange kind of vindication, where his actual words were wrong, but something still happened. For example, wiretapping becomes “incidental collection.” Millions of illegal votes becomes millions of illegal registrations.
.. All of this nonsense is justified, excused, and indulged through the sheer force of tribalism. Unilateral honesty is seen as unilateral disarmament.
.. In one of John Adams’s most famous letters, he wrote that “our constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
.. “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.”
.. America needs political virtue. Where will she find it?
To Promise Free Things Is to Lie
They attempted to minimize the benefit of lying for politicians. Limited government made lying less worthwhile. Who would believe that a politician would use the government to provide “free” things when the government itself was banned from providing free things?
.. Trump spent most of his adulthood attempting to win friends and admirers in the upper-crust circles of Manhattan; he struggled with the fact that he was treated as a nouveau riche vulgarian. His solution: Embrace the vulgarity, brag about victories he never won, and turn the art of the sell into his persona. For Trump, the greatest sin isn’t lying or cheating: It’s losing. That’s why he spends an inordinate amount of verbiage calling his opponents “losers” or “failing,” as though victory and defeat amount to some sort of moral status.
.. after Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat, which Republicans attributed not to his overly cerebral civility but to his fundamental decency. The theory became prevalent in conservative circles that Romney had lost not only because he wouldn’t fight hard enough but also because he wouldn’t fight dirty enough. Establishment conservatives conflated civility and decency; anti-establishment conservatives made the same mistake. Instead of stating that a less civil but similarly decent candidate could have won in 2012, anti-establishment conservatives concluded that it would take an uncivil, indecent person to defeat Democrats.
.. But he’d win, don’t you see? And his dishonesty would all be worthwhile, since he’d then pursue policies conservatives would like.
.. Obama remained personally popular for his entire presidency. But his chief achievements are on the verge of destruction because he lied: He told people they could have everything, and then he delivered less than that. He told Americans that they could keep their doctors if they liked them; they couldn’t. He told Americans that they would not see rising premiums; they did. He said that he’d be fiscally responsible, but at the same time, he was blowing out the budget. His lies caught up with him.
.. Down: Americans distrust everyone in politics but simultaneously embrace the lies of their own side, justifying tissue-thin conspiracy theories that put the other side at a disadvantage, breaking down the social fabric and the political discourse until all faith in the system disappears completely.
CNN’s Fareed Zakaria: Trump ‘Has Succeeded By BullSh-tting’
Zakaria said, “I think the president is somewhat indifferent to things that are true or false. He has spent his whole life bullshitting. He has succeeded by bullshitting. He has gotten the presidency by bullshitting. It’s very hard to tell somebody at that point that bullshit doesn’t work because look at results. Right? But that’s what he does. He sees something he doesn’t particularly care if it’s true or not. Just puts it out there and then he puts something else out. Notice again at the press conference, when pushed on it, does take responsibility. ‘I wasn’t saying that just quoting somebody else.’ When you have the White House press secretary quote somebody to prove a point, you’re endorsing that view.”
Conservative Fantasies, Colliding With Reality
Many have a distorted view of the numbers. For example, people have a vastly exaggerated view of how much we spend on foreign aid. Many also fail to connect their personal experience with public policy: Large numbers of Social Security and Medicare recipients believe that they make no use of any government social program.
.. But the reality is that the proposed cuts would have ugly, highly visible effects. Zeroing out the Community Development Block Grant program may sound good if you have no idea what it does (which Mr. Trump surely doesn’t); eliminating Meals on Wheels, an immediate consequence, not so much. Nor would coal country, which voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump, like the consequences if he eliminates the Appalachian Regional Commission.
.. Republicans’ budget promises, like their health care promises, have been based on an essentially fraudulent picture of what’s really going on. And now the bill for these lies is coming due.