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Why Hillary’s Lies Don’t Matter
The only thing that seems to be multiplying faster than the national debt, Donald Trump’s audacious comments, or the left-wing punditry’s gasps of horror over the death of what was apparently the globe’s favorite mammal, is Hillary Clinton’s accumulation of prevarications about … well, nearly everything she’s ever said for the past generation or so.
Hillary’s claims about never having been served a subpoena and maintaining only one device for her emails were lies. Her claim that Colin Powell did the same thing she did — and that she wasn’t required to turn over anything to the proper channels — was another whopper. Finally — and this is the kicker — her insistence that people “should and do trust me” should have generated tears of laughter from pollsters. It was for good reason that the late William Safire once claimed that Hillary Clinton was a “congenital liar.” And that was almost 20 years ago. Matters have not changed at all since that time — and arguably have gotten worse.
The question is whether or not her pathological lying makes any difference to her chances to become the next president. The most likely answer is, tragically: no, not a bit. Why not? Because we live in an era saturated by habitual lying, brazen lawlessness, and spectacular hoaxes.
Consider lying. President Obama once famously declared that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan” — which we all know now was a deliberate lie, among the multitudes he has committed over the course of his presidency. But this lie aided in the passage and implementation of Obamacare, so what did it matter?
Richard Blumenthal talked about the time he served in Vietnam, which was a simple lie—veterans know that you don’t “misspeak” about something like that. Now he’s a United States Senator from Connecticut. Elizabeth Warren famously assumed a Native American ancestry (which was about as believable as a claim that she was abducted by extraterrestrials — actually, upon reflection, perhaps less so). No matter: she’s also a United States Senator.
Rachel Dolezal said she was an African-American because apparently that’s the way she felt about herself — still, however, another lie. Ditto for Bruce Jenner, who evidently was never comfortable in his masculine skin and now pretends to be a woman, with some various accouterments here and there to make his case stick. And his imposture was not only accepted by the smart crowd, but rewarded as well.
Indeed, supporters have brayed about how Jenner was being “courageous” for his gender flip-flop. Quick thought here: if the word ‘courageous’ is applied to someone who obviously needs therapy instead of approbation for his delusion, then there are no words left in our vocabulary to describe our real heroes, such as the courageous men and women in uniform. Moreover, pretending that a person can simply change genders on a whim is a pernicious lie.
The sad and sick part of this is that such examples only scratch the surface of our lying, dishonest political culture and the media that supports it — call it the Sharptonification of America. Words mean whatever you want them to mean, or not mean, depending on the outcome you desire.
Certainly this was the case with the Supreme Court’s decision in King v. Burwell, where a majority of the Court handed the Obama Administration a victory by dismissing the unambiguous meaning of a very simple word. How hard is it, after all, to grasp the meaning of the word, “state,” when the law declares that federal subsidies can only be provided if said entity establishes an insurance exchange? Arguably, the Supreme Court didn’t just “interpret” the law; it broke the law through ludicrous reasoning. It’s like speeding: if you’ve ignored the law, you’ve broken it.
The judicial branch is not alone, of course. The Obama Administration constantly broke the law by delaying or extending deadlines to enroll in the Affordable Care Act; it has ignored laws for securing our southern border that it deems inconvenient, and has turned a blind eye to the blatant lawlessness of so-called “sanctuary cities.”
Indeed, Mr. Obama’s contempt for the lawmaking branch perhaps has no parallel among American presidents, especially with his executive orders on amnesty, the NLRB, and net neutrality, to cite but a few. His cavalier disregard of Congress’s constitutional duties with regard to the nuclear deal with Iran will probably go down in history as the most contemptuous action his administration ever undertook, especially in light of Secretary Kerry’s hint that the administration just might ignore Congress if that institution fails to approve of the President’s actions.
All of which follows a pattern, of course, especially when lying and lawlessness merge into that moral sinkhole known as a hoax. Thus, claiming “Black Lives Matter” while yelling “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” to justify riots, destruction, and the murder of white police officers is a hoax based on a lie. If black lives really mattered to those who uttered those words, then nearly all of their attention would be consumed by the tragedy that the overwhelming percentage of black homicides are committed by other blacks, not by white police officers. And of course the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” mantra is simply a lie, invoking an event that never actually took place.
Still, these examples of lies and lawlessness pale in significance to two spectacular hoaxes that dominate our political culture: multiculturalism and climate change.
Multiculturalism is the doctrine that all cultures should be considered more or less equal to each other in terms of their intrinsic value. Thus, for instance, one must believe that a constitutional republic is neither better nor worse than a regime or a culture that perpetrates beheadings and mass murders, obliterates free speech with death sentences, and consigns half the human race to a status of virtual slavery.
To take another example, multiculturalism makes it impossible to condemn the dismemberment of infants for the purpose of selling their body parts to purchase a Lamborghini. Now, one might respond with abhorrence to such evil behavior, but this would be a psychological reaction, because rendering a value judgment is not possible if you’ve been morally castrated by multiculturalism. In short, multiculturalism commands a person to deny the evidence of one’s own senses and to embrace a fictitious world where moral judgments are not permitted, because, as Nietzsche once put it, we are all truly beyond good and evil.
About the dogma of man-made climate change, what more needs to be said? It is the prevailing religion of the elites. The main lesson of the environmentalist cult is that imposing a policy with tens of billions of dollars buys academic support, with the connivance of the media, and produces a political climate of supine acquiescence among the masses, tinged with fear for one’s livelihood in the case of dissent.
All of which brings us back to Hillary’s lies, because if there’s anything that the Clintons have it’s money, academic support, and media collusion (along with no small ability to strike fear in the hearts of those who get in their way). What is all this fuss about, anyway? A few missing emails here and there? You’ve got to be kidding me! Selling State Department favors for some substantial contributions to the Clinton Foundation? Just a coincidence, nothing to see here.
What about all those polls showing high unfavorable ratings for Hillary and demonstrating that she isn’t forthright and trustworthy. Fuhgetaboutit, doesn’t matter; her supporters don’t believe her critics, and those on the fence about whether or not to vote for her don’t care. Why not? Because we live in a culture where lying is normal, lawlessness is accepted, and hoaxes are just too immense and pervasive to be challenged—too big to fail, we might say. Indeed, compared to barbarism (which we’re not morally equipped to condemn), what’s the big deal about a few lies here and there? Mere peccadillos, nothing to be concerned about.
God help us all.
Published in Politics
Nice article. There is no shame anymore. The consequences of losing shame have not been half realized.
Like. dt
Hillary does not matter, because she is better option than Trump.
Hillary’s slide is a result of finally losing the support of those willing to put up with her endless lies and someone who pretends to be the champion of “little people” with whom she reluctantly grants audiences. So, in this case, even though, congenital lying in today’s culture seems to be the norm, even a sizable contingent of Democrats may have finally had enough of the Clintons.
The question is whether President Obama-Jarrett will eventually unleash Attorney General Lynch on Mrs. William Jefferson Rodham Clinton and Huma, Cheryl Mills and perhaps others because Hillary’s poll numbers against Republican candidates are in a precipitous slide. That’s why there’s rumblings about Biden and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to enter the race. When either of these guys signals he’s ready and willing, the criminal investigation may begin.
I don’t know why but the Clintons live in a charmed way where the rules don’t seem to apply to them. You’re right, the lies will not bring Hillary down. Our hope is that she’s a cold fish who doesn’t connect with the electorate. That might still bring her down.
Excellent piece, thoroughly true and accurate. There is hardly a thing to add. Except that it is so sad to have lived through the age of Reagan/Thatcher and now to see such a rapid and apparently unwitting decline.
Thanks for this phrase:
I lived through the Reagan era, too. And while I liked Reagan for many reasons, it’s hard not to recall a few little fibs…
The Chicago “Welfare Queen” story… okay, that was more of a wild exaggeration…
Iran-Contra (the thing itself, then the flat-out lies told about it. “We did not trade arms for hostages…” he said, and then a few months later “…um, okay…facts and evidence…yes we did.” And how about his telling Yitzhak Shamir, Simon Wiesenthal and other interested persons that he was personally present at the liberation of the concentration camps, even though he spent the entire war in California?
His press secretary famously said (when challenged on one of RR’s more fanciful falsehoods) “If you tell the same story five times, it’s true.”
Marvin,
You nailed it – you either need a radio or TV talk show, or a place in the next (God-willing) conservative administration! Bonus – The pronunciation of your last name could even add to the confusion of our enemies! :-)
Please run for something!
The lies should matter, but the Bonnie and Clyde of federal politics have so far tainted the well that you’re probably right that they won’t.
One can only imagine the extent to which American political life would have been cleaner had Poppa Bush been able to banish these grifters back to the Ozarks. We would never have had to deal with “it depends on what the definition of IS is”, or “everybody lies about sex”.
They have been instructive in one valuable sense though: the extent to which the Left, and by extension the Democrat party worships power to the exclusion of principle.
rather small fish next to Mr Obama, no?
I don’t know. They were pretty unnerving at the time. And the OP isn’t talking about Hillary’s lies in relative terms, but in absolute terms: Hillary is a liar because she tells lies. If Obama is a liar because he tells lies, then Reagan was a liar because he told lies. Or he was senile and couldn’t tell reality from fantasy—take your pick.
I’m not sure this beats “We did not trade arms for hostages.”
Politics requires some lying. The trick is to keep the lying to a minimum, to only lie when the benefit of doing so outweighs the potential costs, and to try not to make statements that are obvious lies to everyone hearing them.
Jimmy Carter thought he could go through his whole presidency without lying, but he found that he couldn’t. Other presidents have had to lie from time to time. Hillary Clinton, like her husband, seems unable to tell the truth.
Yup. Thank you, MWTA!
This just in from Powerline, about Obama’s baldfaced lies about ISIS, which he insists on calling ISIL, which acronym is itself a lie, an attempt to pretend that ISIS is not present in Syria.