Soap Box

There is an old worn out clich� of a political joke that goes, "How can you tell when a politician is lying? His lips are moving." And while this is somewhat overstating the situation, lately it seems that every few days we are reminded that all too often it's true.

Of course this is nothing new and follows no strata of government or party line and unfortunately is fairly common at city halls, state legislatures and is not unknown on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Campaign promises are almost universally considered to be, at best, good intentions and at worst, empty promises, but rarely cut from whole cloth or followed through on, which amounts to either a partial or complete lie.

We all know what happened to Richard Nixon. When faced with a situation that could have been easily remedied with a little truth - renouncing the Watergate break in and firing a handful of underlings - but by taking refuge in a lie, he was forced from office in disgrace, negating any possible positive legacy, always to be remembered for covering up a petty, meaningless burglary, instigated many levels below the Oval Office.

Bill Clinton probably holds the record for telling the most public and blatant lie and doing penance by admitting it on television and asking forgiveness from the American people which I personally feel he received to a great degree, but still that piece of video about "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" will be dragged up ad infinitum.

All lies are poisonous but some are fairly innocuous and don't do a great deal of actual harm. I don't believe that anybody really believed that Al Gore invented the internet or that Hillary has always been a New York Yankees fan, that Joe Biden ended up at the top of his class or that Michelle Obama sat on her daddy's lap in 1984 when she was 20 years old and watched Carl Lewis in the Olympics.

But other lies are vicious and hurtful and are told for nothing more than personal political gain or an elaborate game of CYA.

When Lois Lerner makes the statement that she has done nothing wrong but nevertheless hides behind the Fifth Amendment, she is telling one of two lies. She has done something wrong and refuses to plead guilty or she knows that somebody else has done something wrong and is covering for them, which in itself is something wrong.

Either way it shows the smallness and dishonesty of people in high places unworthy of public trust, taking actions detrimental to the Republic and violating the freedom and fairness it's citizens are guaranteed in the constitution and other federal papers.

Eric Holder's stonewalling the facts in Fast and Furious is a form of lying, of not admitting the mistakes and keeping the truth away from the people who he is supposed to be serving. His selective enforcing of the federal laws, cherry picking the ones he agrees with and ignoring others is actually blatant dishonesty, violating the oath he took to enforce all the laws, basically living a lie.

One indelible scene to my mind is President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton standing with the grieving families of four Americans killed in Benghazi while supporting the lie that they had been killed by a spontaneous gathering of protestors.

Was the existence of weapons of mass destruction which precipitated the latest war with Iraq an intentional lie by the Bush administration, were the weapons moved out of Iraq, or was it a result of bad intelligence? Everybody can draw their own conclusions on that one.

Telling the American people that they could keep their own doctor and insurance plan is, to my mind, the cheapest, most foul kind of lie, knowing full well that millions would have their insurance cancelled and that Obamacare was not and would never deliver the healthcare it was promised to provide.

The grabbing of more and more power by the federal government is presented to the citizens as being beneficial to the masses, when all along it is designed for nothing more than controlling the masses.

Lies are rampant on social media as the sites are frequented by little people with what I call "cyber-ego", who hide behind a cyber handle or an avatar and pour out vile language and issue insults they'd never have the nerve to deliver in person, a poison blather of hyperbole, innuendo and downright lies.

I ignore such people, much as I don't believe what a politician promises until what they've said actually starts to happen.

It's a sad state of affairs when a nation's citizens have to operate on best guesses and instinct while they try to figure out what our leaders are really doing when they open their mouths.

What do you think?

Pray for our troops and the peace of Jerusalem.

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels