Pants on Fire

Okay, in this one I sound like a raving lunatic, but I am really ticked with the constant dishonesty exhibited on the public stage.

________________________________________________________


We elect people who tell us the lies we want to hear, and then are surprised when they turn out to be liars. – unknown

As I was shaving this morning I listened to the news on the radio. There was a short interview with a man from PolitiFact Georgia. It was one of many interviews over the past year discussing and revealing the facts and fiction of statements made by politicians. It isn’t important who the highlighted politicians were this morning. They happened to be the two presidential candidates, but it could have been, as it has been in the past, almost any of our leaders at the local, state, or national levels. At one time or another they all seem to come up on PolitiFact’s radar.

The disturbing part of the interview was that the two politician’s statements, unsurprisingly, for the umpteenth time, day after week after month, had been judged respectively “false” and “pants on fire”. What I found sad was that I wasn’t surprised, because it was exactly what I had come to expect from past experience. That realization aggravated me.

Our country’s emotional climate right now is that our politicians cannot be trusted, and our government cannot be trusted, both locally and nationally. Also, we don’t trust the media to give us unbiased news. I could easily digress into a rant about our distrust of the banking industry and corporate America who all too often have abandoned honesty and ethics in pursuit of profits. Each individual’s pursuit of self-interest has devolved into behaviors that resemble adherence to Machiavelli’s principle – The end justifies the means.

I feel like a citizen in China or the former Soviet Union. I know the politicians are lying to me. Our government doesn’t intentionally lie as a policy, but individual politicians and their election campaigns do intentionally lie.

Getting back on point, the question I want to pose is how do we as citizens become informed voters and make good decisions on issues when we are placed in a position of relative ignorance and fed a constant stream of misinformation, outright lies, and contradictory statements. No doubt there are some truths within that stream, but as an ordinary citizen it’s hard to discern the truth from the fiction.

It is obvious that I have become jaded about our political discourse, but given our current environment, I don’t see how anyone could not be jaded. And what depresses me even more; I don’t see a way for me or my country to recover from the affliction of universal distrust.

I would oh so much like to have just one person on the national scene who never lies, never misleads, never misquotes, doesn’t allow their campaign staff to do so, and truly has the nation’s best interests in mind rather than getting elected. I’d even settle for almost never.

I just want somebody worthy of my trust.