The idiot chorus continues, the insistence that any lie told to protect the higher truth is made of God’s own breath.   It is like comparing a fart to the breath of an angel.  I’m sure there are bad breathed angels dancing on the heads of pins in some pious person’s imagination, but you get my point, I think.  A lie is not a lie, people tell themselves, if you actually believe it’s true and tell it with no intent to lie, since you honestly believe it is not a lie.  This is the madness we are up against as a species, as a planet.

Certainty, for many people, is preferable to the sometimes terrible challenge of uncertainty.   What is certain is only your eventual death, but let’s put that depressing one aside.   The world is a raging mess, give me THE REASON.   You want one?  I have a pretty good single cause theory: the incomprehensible greed and egotism of our “greatest citizens” and the way they use vast, often inherited, wealth to set up influential “think tanks” and hire genius advertisers to shape public opinion and buy the laws that help them indulge their mad greed and acquire a million times more than any hundred humans need while a third of humanity is hungry, living without sanitary facilities of any kind, dying in droves every day of poverty-related illness.  

More commonly the reason given to the masses is a devilish Other, all-powerful and supremely destructive.   In one African country an ethnic group was described as parasitic insects, rodents, scum.  You want to feel better?   Take machetes and hack them to little pieces, everything will be good when they are all dead.  To Nazis it’s Jews, and Blacks, and Poles, and Gypsies, and Communists, and Homosexuals, and all inhuman enemies of Nazism.   Explains everything, all our problems, you know, that we have these subhumans sabotaging everything we do!

How do you make people hate others that they’ve never met?  Make up the ugliest lies you can think of, things that would enrage anyone and repeat them on an endless loop.   Take a page from Mr. Putin, whose enemies are always publicly accused of being pedophiles.  Tom Hanks and his degenerate liberal friends?   Well, they have these parties, as reported by the anonymous Q, who cannot be doubted, since he/she/it, being a very well-connected insider (and possibly even Russian speaking), knows things we don’t know, where these fake, smiling, insanely rich, sick bastards have group sex with children and babies.  Disgusting and evil as that is, it gets worse, much worse, somehow.  They slash these babies and lap up their blood.  THEY DRINK THE BLOOD OF THE BABIES THEY RAPE — AND EAT THEM!   To get eternal youth and power, despicable and deserving of no less than the same in return.

The calculus, I suppose, goes like this: our party has been taken over by a compulsively lying opportunist who is also very charismatic to our base and our most amazing fundraiser– and who most of the base consider a very honest, no bullshit kind of guy. So, if we lie about a many armed attack on the results of an election whose result we hate, culminating in a riot to stop the certification of and overturn that election, that gouged out police eyes and sent 140 to the hospital with grievous injuries, while threatening the lives of the lawmakers inside, and the other side is doing everything possible to expose our obstruction of their investigation, we are only doing so because WE HONESTLY BELIEVE WE ARE NOT LYING!   If we believe we’re not lying, lawyers tell us, then we lack the intent to lie, no mens rea so therefore we are not lying.  And if we are, so what?!   We will lie to cover past lies, of course, because we now believe those lies are true, we honestly believe the lie we are telling now cancels out the other lie that we now know was a lie.  When I told you I was lying, cracked Elvis Costello, I might have been lying.

Look, clearly, there is no political price to be paid for lying your ass off.  Lindsey Graham defended McConnell blocking Obama’s Supreme Court nominee for almost a year, because of the upcoming presidential election, in order to preserve the right of the People to decide who serves on our highest court.   He said it was a righteous decision he would stand behind if Republicans controlled the White House and Senate and invited them to play the tape of him if he ever changed his mind.   He supported the confirmation of the last of three Federalist Society nominees as votes were being counted in the 2020 election.  The tape of him from 2016 was played.   Everyone on the right laughed, it was pretty funny, the brazenness of it, really triggered the damned libtards!   He announced from the floor of the Senate, after Trump’s January 6 riot, that it had been a wild ride but that he was done with Trump.  Very soon afterwards he realized the taste of Trump’s ass was too irresistible, and announced that Trump was, as always, the future of the Republican Party.  Who can really say which contradictory statement of the cagey single white male from South Carolina was the lie?  And those lies are harmless compared to more recently revealed ones.  That’s why Republicans as a party now refuse to take oaths to tell the truth, if there is no legally binding promise not to lie there is no perjury!

Lying in defense of lies is no vice, after all, if you’re on the side of the goddamned angels and you truly hate evil.   USA!   USA!!!