Skip to main content

The Biggest Lie

I may have picked it up from something I read, but for a while now I've been saying that The Biggest Lie in politics is that everybody does it. When a politician is caught doing something they shouldn't, the common response from them and their supporters is that a) everybody does it and b) you shouldn't single them out for punishment.

But you name it: bribery, lying, forging, personal scandals, whatever, it's as with every other antisocial activity: a small proportion of folk commit these kinds of public sins and they receive a disproportionate amount of attention, making it seem to some as if everybody does it.

This is the ultimate rationalization, offered without documentation to back up its thesis, preying upon the cynicism of the weak. In this instance as in so many others cynicism is a weakness often used to justify inaction ("why bother?").

So for whatever insane reason the US Supreme Court is actually having a hearing about whether the president is above the law. As with so many issues affecting our lives they are treating it as an academic exercise instead of affirming that we have no king, no kaiser, no tsar in our land. A system of checks and balances exists explicitly to limit power by those who govern us, but, you know, whatever. 

Trump claims that every other president needs immunity from criminal prosecution and that's why he should have it, although given the multiple trials going on sometimes he claims those violations of the law he was found to have committed (such as sexual assault) were both as an office-holder and as a private citizen. There is no way to accept his contradictory defenses as consistent truth, but he has a lot of lawyers and a lot of money and does not seem to care.

So, let me shout it again from the rooftops: the biggest lie in politics is that Everybody Does It. People that claim that are lying to your face and unworthy of any of your respect, let alone your support.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Standing Your Corner

I'm a long-term David Simon fan ever since I read his book "Homicide", detailing a year-long embedding with Baltimore homicide detectives. It was clear-eyed about all of the strengths and weaknesses, good reflexes and prejudices of everyone that he met.  I enjoyed the television show that followed that he wrote for, and then of course "The Wire" on HBO and a number of his other shows---only limited by my access to streaming services.  There was a histrionic moment in a later season of "Homicide" where he just let a character vent; a homicide detective who was part-owner of a bar frequented by cops watched a particularly violent drug criminal, responsible for many unsolved homicides, come into his bar with his associates, violating the detective's territory. The detective came around the bar holding a billy club in his hand and loudly discussed his first year as a patrol officer walking a beat. His supervising officer told him that he had a corner a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Momentum

In my youth my primary social justice commitment was through Amnesty International. As an affluent white male I enjoyed freedoms that I thought ideally everyone should share; in the 1980's we had had the vine of United States support for repressive regimes that were nominally anti-Communist bearing cruel fruit and I in my small part of the world wanted to do something about that.  It was a more active support Amnesty International sought back then; nowadays they just ask me for money. We members were encouraged to write to foreign government officials to urge them to take care of political prisoners that we named, the idea being that as long as they knew that they were seen the cruelty would diminish. One letter per prisoner, because they were all human beings, not just a faceless group. I have no independent way of verifying if the hundreds of letters I wrote eased any suffering; I know that they changed me. Selfishly I am grateful. At the time I made a point of reading journalism...
Post a Comment
Read more