“I’ll tell you what I want, Magic! Yes, yes, Magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don’t tell the truth. I tell what ought to be the truth. And if that is sinful, than let me be damned for it! – Don’t turn the light on!”
Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire
When Bill Clinton was caught in a lie about not having sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky, a sympathetic media tried to lessen the outrage with articles about how, actually, we all lie, and how lying can sometimes be a good thing where honesty could be brutal. The byline for such articles could have been “Captain Obvious”, but the thinly veiled ulterior motives were like excusing Jack the Ripper by saying we all can have violent thoughts. Never the less, we understood Bill’s dishonesty, even if we didn’t excuse it. Given the depravity of his character, it came as no surprise that he would be less than truthful in an attempt to cover it up. He was a liar, but he was a good liar, and a reasonable one. The same cannot be said for his lesser half.
“She was never in the circle,
Or the round would be a square,
And the more she seemed to want it,
The less they seemed to care,
Sold out and no admission
It’s never who- but only why,
She’s living the lie.”
Dio
Unlike Bill’s cover-up, Hillary’s lying seems more often to be an attempt to alter a reality she finds unbecoming. The psychiatric term for it is pseudologia fantastica; pathological lying. While not identified as a disorder, it is often seen as a symptom of such maladies as narcissism, sociopathic personality, or severe self esteem issues. Perhaps you’ve had the misfortune to know a person who meets this diagnosis. For them the truth is only a starting place for their embellishments and alternate realities. They lie so unabashedly that you begin to wonder if they actually believe the stuff they’ve invented, and at some point you begin to doubt your own perception of reality, so earnest are they in their prevarications. They treat reality as if it were a multiple choice question, where the correct answer is whatever they would like it to be.
Hillary’s latest lie was about all of her grandparents being immigrants. Actually, only one of her grandparents was an immigrant. The rest were born here. The pettiness of the lie makes critics seem pettifogging; after all, don’t we all tell a fish story now and then? Well, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, but neither should they feel comfortable with that woman with the automatic machine gun! That we have been occasionally dishonest in our own lives doesn’t condemn us to blindly excuse a presidential candidate who treats truth like play-doh. It’s lying for the sake of lying. There was no need to include all her grandparents, the one real immigrant would have sufficed to make her point. Then the explanation for the lie was just as ludicrous, that all her grandparents spoke about the immigration experience, and so she always thought of them as immigrants? But this is no isolated white lie, but rather a clear pattern of blatant disregard for reality. Remember how she blamed Benghazi on a video we were later to discover she knew full well was not the cause, and this lie was not just to the public at large, but even to the grieving parents of the victims? Remember how she made up the story about dodging sniper fire in Bosnia? Actually the only thing she had to dodge was a little girl giving her flowers. If you’re Brian Williams that kind of story means you can’t do your job anymore, but I guess it doesn’t disqualify you from running for President. Remember when she said that she was named after Edmund Hillary who became famous for climbing Mt. Everest? Turns out the Australian climbed Everest five years after Hillary was born, and no one knew who he was before that. Remember that her explanation for this was to throw her mother under the bus explaining that her mother had told her that, but that it was a good lie to encourage little Hillary to keep climbing (maybe the pathology is hereditary!). Remember when she said Chelsea was jogging around the Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001? Maybe in her dreams, she was actually in bed watching TV. Remember all the subterfuge around her miraculous investment in the futures market? The explanation then was that she learned about futures trading from reading the Wall Street Journal… unfortunately the Journal didn’t even cover the futures market back then! Then there’s all the suspected lies around travel gate, the FALN pardons, that she was always a Yankees fan, and her latest email fiasco. The list is too long, and the internet possibly too small.
IMHO:
“Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies”
Fleetwood Mac
Would you accept this level of dishonesty from your husband? From your employee? From your lawyer, mechanic, doctor, or pastor? It would seem as though some of us would, and do all the time, because we prefer the lies to the alternative. We tell ourselves there must be a reasonable explanation, we make excuses for the liar, we turn a blind eye, we lie to ourselves so that we can ignore the lies we’ve been told. And so we suspend disbelief in this reality show called politics so we can support our candidate without reservation, as if he or she were actually a good person. And then we become self-righteously indignant when we get a Richard Nixon, a Bill Clinton, or a Barack Obama. Is it too much to demand an honest candidate instead of a pathological liar? If it is, it’s because we’ve placed party above truth, our agenda above honesty; we have become invested in the liar and partners in the lie. Don’t do that.
Kevin – so sad – so true!! How can we expect the young and immature to grow in character and uprightness when surrounded with the corruption that we are now seeing in the upper echelons of government, education, law, even in classrooms, where history books are altered to bring opinions and alter facts.
I could almost see a picture, with your closing sentence, of God’s finger pointing down to us in the clouds, and with a thundering voice saying, “DON’T DO THAT!!!!”