The bigger the lie

Politics.  Nothing has changed in all the hundreds of years that law makers have stood before the masses and projected themselves as “champions” of truth.  Americans went through about a 20 year period of head in the sand ignorance, but we are returning to the days of the Lincoln – Douglas debates; thank God.  This go around the main issue isn’t slavery, or immigration, or race relations.

 

It’s getting the United States of America back into the hands of the people voting and just like in the 1860’s Americans are wising up.  We are listening, but folks, let’s actually listen this go around.

Politicians in general are currently viewed as self-serving professional wallet-skinners and I am right there with this assessment.  As my Nigerian-born friend George Eligiri once told me about Nigerian politicians, “once they go back to make radical changes in the system, they are instantly corrupted and join the problem.”

I think the cancerous environment of law-making is so overwhelming; no one survives their initial intentions of making changes.  No politician, regardless of what their political flavor, can get anything accomplished without massive trade-offs or outright finagling.

Yes.  I said finagling and we’ve seen this so abundantly that it is almost expected.  Mrs. Clinton is a prime example.  Her trail is so littered with dubious and dishonest (either by commission or omission) finagling that she dismisses with an almost flippant sarcasm; belligerently daring anyone to question her.  The bigger the lie the more people will accept it.  On top of that, her erased email server screams guilt.  Her reaction is pure contempt that her integrity is even questioned.

“The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

In my April first column, titled: “The dog catchers bacon”, I talked about a fictitious character who drove around in the shadows, basically identified only by his broad and friendly smile and the crispy bacon.  In the story, every hair on my head stood up in warning, but I was drawn in by his smile and the wonderful fragrance of his gifts.  These two wonders caused me to drop my guard, even though everything about the man was blatantly wrong.

In the parody, I somehow came to my senses before I gave up my two prized possessions (read my rights and property or if this doesn’t make sense, my two dogs).  The sneaky thief who almost beguiled me with false promises skedaddled in a cloud of smoke and I was so confused, I couldn’t even file a police report.  Thus I was manipulated for the whole process to repeat itself, most likely in another guise.  That is exactly how our political pundits survive to stay in a position of power.

The bigger their lie – Remember Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook”, or Hillary’s husband, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”?  J Edgar Hoover stayed in power for years by spying on everyone.  No one said a word when he was recognized at parties dressed as a woman – a very ugly woman too.  This was conservative America and folks we tight-lipped as a clam.  The bigger the lie the more people will accept it.

Has our President fulfilled any of the promises and hope that won him the vaunted Nobel Peace Prize?  He won it on hope and a promise.  In doing so, he devalued the prize exponentially, just like his crony Al Gore did.  The bigger the inconvenient truth the more people will accept it.

Giving these guys a Nobel Peace Prize pretty much means Ernest P. Worrell should be awarded one for bringing hope to children who feel they cannot excel.

My dogcatcher story was so preposterous, it became credible to some.  3 TV stations called me, the Baytown Sun, and even the Baytown Police Department’s Lt. Eric Freed for a follow up.  I was standing in Sedona, Arizona when my phone rang April 1^st after the story ran.  “Is this Bert Marshall?  This is ____ at Fox News in Pennsylvania, we want to do a follow-up on the dog catcher story…”

I grinned and said, “Are you a journalist?”  She said she was and I told her it was a political satire piece for April Fools Day.  I heard her yell to someone, “Oh!  It’s an April Fools prank!”  She then hung up.  My first thought was, “Geeze, don’t journalist’s comprehend what they read any more?”

Nope, the bigger the lie the more people will accept it, so get ready to hear about a year’s worth of verbal dodgeball while we try to elect a pre-selected politician who actually cares about the people.  Oh, the quote in paragraph 6 is by the propaganda minister of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels and was paraphrasing from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”.