Letter From America (About Respectable Mendacity)

Why Hillary Is Never Held Accountable for Her Lies

The media excuse her mendacity because it serves the progressive cause.

By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

Everyone rightly catalogues Donald Trump’s fibs, distortions, and exaggerations: his assertions about his net worth, his charitable contributions, his initial supposed opposition to the Iraq War, or his “flexible” positions on illegal immigration. After all, he is flamboyant, right-wing in his present incarnation, and supposedly bends the truth either out of crass narcissism or for petty profiteering. So the watchdog media and popular culture have no problem with ridiculing Trump as a fabricator.

But not so with Hillary Clinton, whose untruths far overshadow Trump’s in both import and frequency, but are so often contextualized, excused, and forgotten because of who she is and the purpose her outright lying supposedly serves.

Lying in America has become not lying when “good” liars advance alternative narratives for noble purposes — part of our long slide into situational ethics and moral relativism.

Every new bad idea in America today can ultimately be traced to the university. And it seems to take only about 30 years for academia’s nihilism to filter through the elite institutions and make its way into popular culture. So it is with our present idea of truth as a mere construct.

Damnable Lying

A Web of Self-Deceit

O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!

Sir Walter Scott

Telling habitual lies is not unusual amongst intellectuals.  So Paul Johnson alleges in his book, Intellectuals.  [Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988.]  He cites Rousseau (a notorious dissembler), Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Russell, Sartre and Gollancz.  Their lying was systemic, infecting their personal relationships (wives, children, friends), their writing and public personae. 

The more a culture removes itself from the constant exfoliation of Scripture upon the epidermis of its conscience, the more it tends to tolerate, accept, and practise mendacity.

Despite this, and despite in many cases the public exposure of their respective mendacities, the public has continued to fawn over them--both whilst alive and long after their deaths.  In a post-Christian culture, this comes as no surprise.  In a Christian culture--or a culture pervasively influenced by Christian ethics--lying is regarded as an egregious evil.  The reason why rests with God, Who is Truth.  He has declared definitively that He hates lies.

There are six things that the Lord hates,
    seven that are an abomination to him:

haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
    and hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked plans,
    feet that make haste to run to evil,
a false witness who breathes out lies,
    and one who sows discord among brothers.
(Proverbs 6: 16-19)

Notice that lying gets a condemnatory double billing.

Zero Credibility

A Mouth In the Shape of a Polygon

Let's assume that most governments around the world of any consequence study the utterances of the President of the United States.  Are his words to be taken seriously?  Is he bluffing?  Is there a hidden message?  What is hyperbole or literary license?  If so, what is the real message beneath the trope?

All political leaders eventually realise, if they did not know it to begin with, that credibility, if you have it, is an enormous boon.  It buttresses one's influence and power far beyond laws, rules, and institutional power.  In a democracy it is electorally life-threatening to lose one's credibility.  If it gets to the point where a growing majority of people disbelieve what a leader says, and he is sinking in the credibility, stakes it is only a matter of time until he is rejected by voters.

In recent decades we have seen politicians rise up--usually on the Left--who believe that politics is all about focus groups.