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Saturday, September 1. 2007

Wrong Again!

DAMMIT!

Seven days was my prediction Thursday. Craig did it in two. Well, once the airport police released the recording of his interrogation — it was the recorded interview after the senator’s untimely arrest that sealed the deal. Pretty much proved he was lying. I’m a pretty good liar, I like to think anyway, and I can detect an amateur at 30 paces. Actually, I’m not a good liar at all. People can detect my misinformation at 100 yards, but what the hell, I still try.

There’s nothing like a good line of bullshit to liven up any good tale; what’s a good story without a little embellishment?
 Lying, if done well, is an art. No lesser than Mark Twain said so and quite frankly, he is the King of American letters. So it goes without saying, his opinion on the matter can be trusted without reservation: lying is a virtue.

 “No fact is more firmly established than that lying is a necessity of our circumstances—the deduction that it is then a Virtue goes without saying. No virtue can reach its highest usefulness without careful and diligent cultivation—therefore, it goes without saying that this one ought to be taught in the public schools — even in the newspapers. What chance has the ignorant, uncultivated liar against the educated expert? What chance have I against Mr. Per — against a lawyer? Judicious lying is what the world needs. I sometimes think it were even better and safer not to lie at all than to lie injudiciously. An awkward, unscientific lie is often as ineffectual as the truth.” — On the Decay of the Art of Lying
 Okay, some might argue that Twain was being satirical when he wrote his essay and delivered it as a speech to some antiquarian society in New England, a section of the country as littered with half-truths and tall tales as any, save for maybe Hollywood and Washington, D.C. But I say nay, for Twain was foremost a fiction writer and fiction is the formal telling of tall tales and litigation-free slander. In other words, Samuel Clemons was defending his occupation!

So, it comes as no surprise that myth-making, especially in the realm and grime of a police interrogation room, is first and foremost the path most of us will take when caught red-handed trying to get a handy helping of hedonistic delight—especially if it’s other than heterosexual hedonistic delight.

We get busted looking for sex in a men’s room and what do we do? We try to lie our way out of it. Hell, I’ve tried to lie my way out of speeding tickets. Never works. I once had a heart attack as the nice police officer was writing me a ticket and by golly, that did the trick! But I wouldn’t recommend it. Yep, lying seems to be the first reaction when confronted with the embarrassing facts of the case.
 “But officer, when I was peeking through the crack between the door and the wall of the stall, I was just checking to see … err … if you were almost finished.”

Okay, Senator Craig didn’t actually say that, but that’s the lie I’d tell, but quite frankly, it probably would be just as ineffectual as the senator’s lie. Lies, plural. If you listen to the recording, the good senator actually used “I don’t recall” more frequently than disgraced and resigning Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee; that is, more “I don’t recall’s’ per minute than Gonzales.

Up until the recording became public, we were all amazed — no, I’d say dazzled—by the attorney general’s rather liberal use of the phrase. 78 times, as I recall, in five hours of testimony. I’m crappy at math, especially at 3 a.m., but my figuring has that at 3 “I don’t recall’s” every five minutes. Senator Craig rolled out one a minute! Dang!
 “Sir, place your right hand on the Bible, ehhh … wash it first …”

So, Senator Craig is going to resign. Yet another hard-core member of the religiously intolerant caught doing exactly the behavior he was so noted for being intolerant of for all these years. Remember in Bush’s 2000 campaign he said he would “restore honor and dignity to the White House?” And we see one administration official after another leaving the White House and then getting subpoenaed to appear before one Senate committee or another. Not to mention Randy “Duke” Cunningham, formerly my congressional representative, now doing time for his crimes. He took millions in bribes if you’ve forgotten.

Congressman Mark Foley, who got caught trying to diddle the teenage male congressional pages.
 “Hi Mom! Congressman Foley took me out for ice cream tonight and then we went to his apartment and listened to Michael Jackson CD’s!”

Ha ha! The party that built itself on family values! Just running it through my sleep-deprived brain, it appears the Republicans far out pace the Democrats in divorces and multiple marriages. The personal lives of the congressional delegates wouldn’t even concern me if they didn’t campaign on their holier-than-thou platform, placing themselves high on the moral pedestal above the rest of us who, to them, bear little resemblance to the ideals of a Biblical nation.

Maybe that sort of proves my point, a point often made when I receive those awful chain e-mails that implore us to “pass it on” to save the nation; you know the ones, God will strike us DEAD if we disagree with the e-mail but go ahead and delete it if you disagree, you paganistic satanic heathen! The point is: maybe we’re not a Biblical, God-fearing Christian nation. Certainly the elected arbiters of all that is legally welcome in the country don’t appear to live what they claim to believe.

Morality doesn’t have a religious preference. We can all know right from wrong without a religious person telling us so, but the religionists want us to believe, especially at election time, a person, a candidate, can’t be moral without paying homage to God—and that’s “God” with a New Testament twist.

Religion is the root of all evil, at least the Judeo-Christian-Islamic variety, that teaches intolerance and hatred for anything or anyone the religionists can’t control with their words and political influence. And they’re happy to pay and support a political party that gives it a lot of lip service.

Well, maybe not this time around, but with ole Mitt Romney now singing the praises of the new “traditional” Republican platform:
 Choice = BAD; Homos = BAD, Guns = GOOD! Stay the Course in Iraq = GOOD! More Torture of Detainees = GOOD!

Maybe ole Mitt can win his party’s nomination. And let’s face it, “Flip-Flop” is an old issue, and quite frankly, Mitt Romney took flip-flopping to a new level so he may win kudos (and votes) for his chutzpah! Remember how President Clinton was excoriated for being a draft dodger? Our current president was a draft dodger extraordinaire! He was even AWOL from his duties for 18 months and still won his party’s nomination in 2000 and actually won the election in 2004.

Draft dodging is bad—unless you’re a Republican, then you were serving your country in different ways. Flip-flopping is bad, unless you’re a Republican, in which case you were just changing your mind. Taking bribes is bad, unless you’re a Republican and can keep it a secret; lying is bad, unless you’re a Republican and not under oath and/or can successfully get away with “I don’t recall” 78 times in a congressional hearing.

And being a queer is bad, unless you’re a Republican and can successfully keep it in the closet for your political career. Say what you will about the Democrats; at least the gay members can be out of the closet.

Posted by Tim Forkes in NEWS and POLITICS at 16:23 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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