Posted on 08/21/2019 6:22:10 PM PDT by Kaslin
There is an exceptional amount of lying in Washington these days, and our media and politicians are entranced by it. Lies must achieve extraordinary bulk and quality to impress the sport’s most ardent practitioners: Only a particularly nasty outbreak of mendacity could draw Washington’s attention to a subject it knows with such intimacy and depth.
Most Americans are unsurprised. Long ago, they learned lies are the oxygen of the political world. They know the phrase “political deception” is a redundancy, like “false pretense,” “free gift,” or “foreign imports.”
Most electoral lies, they’ve found, are dandruff on the body politic, pedestrian deceits they can brush unremarkably from their shoulders. Besides, Mark Twain’s dictum that “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” is no longer true: A tiny tweet can hunt down the ordinary political lie in a mouse-click in our hyper-connected world.
Big lies are tougher prey. They are protected by their boldness, because most people find it difficult to believe others would lie about something so big, instead of “little white lies.” Then, then a noble purpose cloaks the Big Lie, when we want it to be true, it grows exponentially attractive. It becomes the unchallenged truth, as evident as the law of gravity, as pervasive as our atmosphere, as inescapable as rent.
Our politics soaks in a Big Lie today. It is the lie that Washington can do the work of every American with only a legislative wish.
Cast your ballot and relax. Washington is the first, best, and only solution to every problem. A secure and fruitful society does not have to be earned by each of us with the individual sweat, discipline, and imagination that cultivates a better culture. If we demand it, Washington can decree it.
Pass a law: That’s all governing ourselves requires. We no longer need to roll up our sleeves and work, bottom-up, to earn a growing economy, a just society, or a stronger nation. What we do in life is less important than the politicians we elect.
The institutions that used to help govern our lives—our families, business, churches, charities, and other mediating institutions—none of them can be trusted. Our politics has no place for them. The only implements in Washington’s toolbox are the collective state, its industrial-age bureaucracy, and a man-made Bible full of shiny, new, legislative prayers.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren tells us, “I have a plan for that,” regardless of the malady in question. Like a huckster selling patent medicine, Warren claims socialism’s old, top-down, artificial solutions will, for the first time, make our lame government walk again.
Sen. Bernie Sanders tells the same gargantuan lie: His complex set of laws, programs, and regulations will protect the little guy—when we know only the big guys, who can afford pricey lawyers and lobbyists, can win at Bernie’s game.
Why worry, when another Democratic contender tells us more money, with more strings attached, will fix our schools, although they are already the world’s most expensive? Or that the same government that has undone our inner cities can repair them, by doing more of what brought them to shame?
The Big Lie ennobles the cast of “Morning Joe” when they call to ban assault weapons, even though there is no gun with which you can’t assault another human being. The Big Lie defends a Democratic presidential candidate when he promises that extending background checks to friends, family members, and gun shows would have “done a lot” to help prevent mass murder in El Paso and Dayton. After all, “something must be done,” preferably by someone else.
The Big Lie walks again when Democrats tell us that Baltimore is a paradise beyond criticism: No Democrat can acknowledge the failure of legislative wish-making. How could they? That is what they sell us.
The Big Lie bans paper straws and old lightbulbs with the modest promise to save the planet. It claims the Green New Deal will be a self-fueling, perpetual-motion engine of prosperity. Laws are all we need to “end gun violence forever,” erase sexual harassment or make us love our neighbors instead of shooting them.
The alternative to the Big Lie is not anarchy. It is not reckless libertarianism. Yes, there are things Washington can and must do. Capitalism has never existed without the restraint of government. But is government best that governs everything?
The Big Lie says if big, old, industrial-age government is capable of constructing bridges and interstate highways, it must be equally good at building better people. Yet the opposite is true: When we give up the responsibility to do good, we surrender the opportunity to be good, and our society frays.
The Big Lie does not require accountability or accomplishment. It does not ask for sacrifice or effort. It only needs noble intentions. That reduces our politics to theater, playing under a fraudulent marquee.
Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Tony Award-winning 1960 musical, “Camelot” starred Richard Burton, Robert Goulet, and a young Julie Andrews. The play was based upon “The Once and Future King,” T.H. White’s romantic novel about the pursuit of nobility in King Arthur’s court.
In the play’s key musical number, Burton, as King Arthur, sings about “Camelot,” a land where the rhythms of nature are no obstacle to the King’s demands: “It’s true. It’s true. The Crown has made it clear. The climate must be perfect all the year. The rain must never fall till after sundown, by eight, the morning fog must disappear…”
Washington sings the same song today but with more naivety: Camelot was only a play. Outside the theater’s doors, even when it is enshrined in legislative ritual, wishing isn’t as productive as work. “In short, there’s simply not, a more congenial spot, for happily-ever-aftering than here in Camelot!”
Anyone I know that thinks the government will won’t let them down, I recommend playing Lotto.
It’s a fight against the technocrats and totalitarianism on all fronts: gun rights, healthcare, business regulation, education, land use, police and criminal justice, privacy in the private sector, transparency in the public sector etc.
Power needs to flow down to the States otherwise it will keep getting worse. The statists own the police state and bureaucracies and even trump can’t change that.
Reminds me of an illustrated meme I saw:
Jesus: “Help your neighbor and take care of the poor and helpless.”
Someone in the crowd: “But Jesus, can’t we just give our money to the Romans and let them do it for us?”
Jesus: “Okay, I’m going to start over from the beginning. Let me know where I lost you.”
the big lie is actually that govt CAUSES most of our problems....and they won’t go away.
It can’t even protect one man. Why would you trust it to accomplish anything?
Don’t sane people stop believing that about the time they stop believing in Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy?
Name ONE problem the government solved. OK, WW II, the moon landing, the Interstate Highway System, and some amazing weapons. I’ll grant you those.
I’d also say “The Constitution” but the government that it created destroyed it.
Why does the Left hate Trump?
Because Trump:
- created over three million new jobs,
- sunk unemployment across the board to historic lows,
- increased paychecks, and
- sent consumer and small business confidence to their highest marks in years.
The Left HATES that. The Left HATES individual success. Individual success feeds freedom and militates against government dependency.
The Left is the Enemy Within.
My Father knew that the Democrat politicians were liars and thieves, but he still voted for them.
Why?
Because he felt it was in his best fiscal interest to vote for them.
He hated abortion. He disliked homosexuality. He thought the environmental stuff was mostly baloney. He was for a strong Defense Department. He had a strong sense of law and order.
But he voted Democrat.
Because he FELT that it was in his best fiscal interest to do so.
There are a few die hard Democrats.
A few.
In order to get the Democrat voter to switch, President Trump is going to have to convince them that it is in their best fiscal interest to switch.
Politicians that stay forever are the problem
There is no problem so great, that the government cannot make even worse.
You said it.
Your father was probably one of the good democrats that once existed, but don’t anymore.
My in-laws are the very same way.
They vote Democrat because they FEEL that it is in their best fiscal interest to do so.
With trillions upon trillions in deficits and negative interest rates, the government solving global warming one wasteful polluting budget after another
We don’t want Washington to solve our problems. We just want Washington to quit BEING our problem.
My elderly neibor was a Yellow Dog and said said I was making it up that Obama's name was Hussien.
When she learned his name at the coronation, she said her party lied to her. But she was still a Yellow Dog.
Well, maybe two reasons - defense, and de fence (between us and Mexico)! The rest is an excuse for taxation.
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