“Truth will out” is a phrase routinely recited by politicians to calm down fears that government might be conspiring against the peasants. It is, as James Bovard, likes to say, “the biggest fairy tale in Washington” that should be “confined to sarcasm and satire, not serious pontificating.”
Politicians have always lied because they have powerful incentives to do so. There’s money to be made by selling their voice and vote to lobbyist and powerful donors. And voters, well, the majority of have come to accept this as just part of the political process. Politics has become that old joke – How do you know a politician is lying? – his lips are moving! And shame on us.
They get away with it because some voters don’t want to know the truth. The prefer to stick their heads in the sand rather than be confronted with the national debt, or the real costs of an open border, or how broken our health care system has become. They would rather believe that disarming law-abiding citizens will make everyone safe, or that free government run healthcare is better than the free market, or that social workers can control the crime rate, or that keeping criminals out of jail prevents crime, or ceding more power to unelected bureaucrats will provide our children a better education.
In D.C., truth is replaced by power. Credibility depends on titles, not veracity. Blind deference to authority might be expected from semi-literate peasants in some mountain hollow but, it is more of a problem coming from the academic elite and establishment heavyweights,” according to Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
As Daniel Ellsberg stated in 1970, the Pentagon Papers provided thousands of pages documenting “twenty years of crime under four presidents. And every one of those presidents had a Harvard professor at his side, telling him how to do it and how to get away with it.”
Big government requires Big Lies. The more powerful it becomes, the more abuses it commits, the more lies it must tell to hold on to that power. Voters trust in government becomes mass Prozac, keeping the peasants docile and compliant.
Mitt Romney once told a reporter who was dissatisfied with his evasive answer that “you get to ask the questions you like. I get to give the answers I like.” Politicians have elevated dodging questions to an art form. It has become an effective means to hoodwink voters without technically.
source: Why do we let Politicians get Away with Lying? by Doug Mataconis, Outside the Beltway
