Adrift on an Ocean of Lies

By Alan Caruba

“The men the American public admires most extravagantly are the daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”  -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

One of the insights that age provides is that we are all adrift on an ocean of lies from the moment we are born to when we pass from this world. So much of what we initially “know”, taught to us at home and in school, broadcast via newspapers, radio and television, in the workplace, and, in particular, requiring us to make decisions about the politicians we select to govern in our name, are lies.

The British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, categorized them as “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Lies and lying, however, may be the natural order of life because even nature employs lies when various species devise ways to camouflage themselves either as a means to deceive and lure prey or to avoid becoming prey.

The prevalence of lies in the affairs of men and nations accounts for why the U.S. has a CIA and a NSA, two giant intelligence and counter-intelligence operations. It is why a third branch of our government is the judiciary.

Americans are now experiencing an avalanche of lies in the form of political ads, media reporting intended to sway the outcome of the forthcoming elections, and the pronouncements and predictions of various politicians and pundits. Not all are lying, but it is safe to presume that most are.

The rise of talk radio and the popularity of personalities such as Rush Limbaugh are based on a hunger for the truth. The revelation that National Public Radio has a deliberate leftist agenda enraged many who genuinely enjoy its programs.

The great anger driving the midterm elections is directly traceable to the lies of the President, his administration, and the Democrat leadership in Congress. Beyond and behind these lies is a mortgage banking system that had been in place for years leading up to the moment that the critical housing market collapsed. The “American dream” of a home must still be earned and paid for. There is no free lunch.

Simply said, making loans to people who were never expected to repay them, turning around and selling those mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government entities who in turn “bundled” those bad loans and sold them as securities to banks and investment house was, in hindsight, a system that had to fail at some point.

Passing a “financial reform” act that did not mention Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while vastly expanding the Securities and Exchange Commission only compounded the lies.

The elections are about the lies told to sell Obamacare, to hide the real numbers of unemployed, to shut down oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and to insanely increase the national debt by borrowing more in two years than all previous administrations combined had done since George Washington was president.

The lies came at a dizzying pace from the day President Obama was sworn into office.

He told the world that America is not a Christian nation.

He said that “green jobs” were an answer to no jobs.

He said that Medicare “reform” was not a lie designed to implement a governmental takeover of healthcare, one-sixth of the nation’s economy.

He said that General Motors and Chrysler were taken over as wards of the federal government instead of being permitted to reorganize (shake loose of union demands) under the normal process of bankruptcy.

He said the stimulus act was a solution to a stagnant economy when it was, in fact, a laundry list of Democrat earmarks, a “porkulus” bill.

He pushed for a Cap-and-Trade act to sell “carbon credits” as the lies about global warming were crashing around the world. This is the year that the Chicago Climate Exchange will end carbon trading.

The President who dazzled so many with soaring oratory during his campaign proved so inept at explaining his actions that his formal press conferences virtually ceased while his access to the nation’s print and broadcast media increased.

His use of Teleprompters became a national joke.

In a world where lies and the use of violence have always been a driving force throughout human history, where greed is instinctual, we should not be surprised at the folly with which we are surrounded, but we can and must strive to educate ourselves about the truths that are essential to the survival of our form of governance and the future of America.

We can learn that humans have nothing to do with the Earth’s climate; that nothing compares with or can replace the original, totally natural biofuels—oil, coal, and natural gas—that socialism/communism always enslaves and always fails; and that telling the truth is always superior to telling a lie.

© Alan Caruba, 2010