Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Name the issue, and you can be pretty sure that Democrats will lie about it until they’re convinced it’s safe to come out and say what they really mean

The indispensable James O’Keefe rolled out another video last week
quips Benny Huang,
this one targeting Alison Grimes, a Kentucky Democrat who hopes to unseat Senator Mitch McConnell in November. Her website and campaign advertisements state in no uncertain terms that she opposes the Obama Administration’s attempt to strangle coal industry, a vital sector of Kentucky’s economy. Too bad it isn’t true. O’Keefe’s video reveals that Grimes has been mouthing platitudes about her love of coal just to get herself elected.

Grimes’s campaign staffers will be happy to explain their Machiavellian strategy, provided they believe a sympathetic ear is listening. In clip after clip, organizers and foot soldiers for the Grimes campaign opined that opposing coal is political suicide in Kentucky, which necessitates lying on the candidate’s part. Politics, you see, is “a lying game, unfortunately,” according to one Grimes staffer.
Another staffer was asked: “If we can get her elected, do you think she’s going to do the right thing, and she’s going to try to wipe out that coal industry and go for better resources?” The staffer responded: “I absolutely think she is.”

Oh, I see. First she poses as the coal miner’s best friend just to get their votes, then she deliberately “wipe[s] out” their livelihood. A masterstroke!

Wouldn’t it be great if we knew where candidates stood on the issues? Then we could match their positions to our own and decide which candidate most closely matches our beliefs and priorities. But that would mean they’d have to tell us where they stand, and they won’t do that.

Yes, it’s true that “both sides” engage in this kind of duplicity—Republicans and Democrats, that is.

 … While “both sides” may fib to get elected, the two parties do not engage in electoral fake-outs in equal proportions. Democratic politicians are more prolific in their lying, and Democratic voters are more comfortable with being lied to. They know a line of baloney when they hear it but so long as it’s utilitarian they don’t care.

Liberals, I believe, have begrudgingly accepted the notion that ours is a center-right country. I don’t believe that we are anymore, but in this instance perception is reality. As a consequence of their perceived minority status they have embraced the “noble lie” concept. They gain their victories by stealth, always pretending to believe what anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows they do not.
 
Does anyone think that Barack Obama actually opposed same-sex marriage at any point in his political career? I certainly don’t, but he claimed that “[M]arriage is the union between a man and a woman” when he ran for president in 2008. He made a point of visiting Pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, one of the country’s largest evangelical congregations, where he told the audience: “Now, for me as a Christian, [marriage is] also a sacred union. You know, God’s in the mix.”

Why didn’t the tolerance bullies tear Obama limb from limb over that remark? Doesn’t that type of rhetoric qualify Obama as a bona fide member of the American (Christian) Taliban? Well, no. Because he was lying through his teeth. The foul-mouthed homosexual activist Dan Savage admitted as much in a column he penned earlier this year.  “…[T]he president pretended to oppose marriage equality and we pretended to believe him… The president’s evolution on marriage equality was a lovely piece of political performance art. And by the time Obama was ready to publicly endorse marriage equality—another calculated decision on his part—Obama had managed to bring a lot of the country along with him. So, as it turned out, the president’s political calculations were pretty f—g sound.”

The lie advanced the cause. The lie was good.

Furthermore, did anyone expect that the flood of illegal alien children who inundated the border this summer would be sent home? Polls indicated that a supermajority of Americans supported that position so Obama claimed that he did too. We know now that most will be treated as refugees and allowed to stay, and the others will probably be granted amnesty by royal decree after the election. But back in the summer, Obama’s ideological compatriots were spraying invective at anyone who actually agreed with Obama’s stated position. Was Obama a heartless racist like the other deportation supporters? No, because he was lying.

Name the issue, and you can be pretty sure that Democrats will lie about it until they’re convinced it’s safe to come out and say what they really mean. There’s a reason why Planned Parenthood supported Obama’s health care overhaul, even when he swore that it would not cover abortion. It’s because they knew it would! I have no doubt that he told them so behind closed doors. The illegal alien advocates were similarly tacit about public proclamations, made at the State of the Union Address no less, that Obamacare benefits would never find their way to illegal aliens. Why weren’t they apoplectic? Because the statement was a lie and everyone knew it, even the illegal aliens.

Politics may be a “lying game,” as Alison Grimes’s staffer put it, but it shouldn’t be. Voters should punish these deceitful finks at the polls every time they try to snow us with assurances that they don’t want to do what they obviously will do. They should be hounded with questions until they’ve made completely clear what they mean, and never allowed to skate away with weasel words and generalities.