11 Jul Lying Liars and the Lies They Tell
As you may know, the Democrats, their supporters, and their allies in the mainstream media are lying again. They’re lying boldly and brashly, about a host of issues, but mostly about the cuts to Medicaid in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and the role of weather forecasters and emergency services in the lead-up to the heartbreaking and deadly flooding in Texas last weekend. According to the Dems and their friends, the OBBB sentenced all but a handful of Americans to imminent death by cutting low-income health insurance to able-bodied men, while previous and monstrous staffing cuts rendered the National Weather Service’s early warning system completely inoperative, thereby sentencing hundreds of people to death even before they could die from lack of Medicaid. None of this is even remotely true, of course. But they don’t care. As even the normally staid and decidedly non-Trumper editorial board of The Wall Street Journal put it the other day on the subject of Medicaid reform in the OBBB:
Democrats and their media collaborators always distort GOP policy, but the coverage about the big budget bill has kicked free of the earth….
By now you’ve seen the headline in every outlet: The Republican law will soon toss millions from Medicaid and cut the program to the bone….
Democrats think they can ride the Medicaid scare into a midterm victory, but there’s still time for the GOP to lay out the facts.
Now, I chose the lines quoted above deliberately. I included the first two sentences because they demonstrate just how detached from reality the Democrats’ claims on Medicaid and the Texas floods are. If even the folks at the WSJ are saying that the Dems have “kicked free of the earth,” then you know that the Left is being exceptionally dishonest. As I say, the editorial board is generally remarkably sober, but even it can’t contain its revulsion at the Democrats’ tactics.
I included the last line, by contrast, because it shows that the Washington insider-types – smart and perceptive though they may be – don’t quite grasp just what all of this indicates about the slow-motion collapse of our political system. “There’s still time for the GOP to lay out the facts,” the editorial board says, but they know as well as anyone that the GOP has been laying out the facts. Over and over and over. On Medicaid and the Texas flooding, that’s all Republicans have been doing for the last couple of weeks, laying out the facts. On both of these issues, they’ve laid out the facts consistently and undeniably enough that even some of the media have had to concede the point. Here, for example, is the Associated Press admitting the truth about the staffing of the National Weather Service office at New Braunfels, Texas, on the night of the flood. In short, the NWS had extra staff on duty that night. Moreover, the situation was understood well enough ahead of time that local fire and rescue teams requested to be deployed the night before the floods, but were denied by the Austin fire chief, who has since been saddled with a no-confidence vote by his angry and rank-and-file firefighters.
The bottom line here is that the lies told by the Democrats have been thoroughly and inarguably debunked. But they keep on telling them. And most of their supporters keep telling them. And most of the media keep telling them. As I said above, they don’t care.
Anyone who has paid even the remotest attention to politics for more than 10 or 15 seconds knows full well that lying is a part of the game. Everyone does it. Everyone has always done it. And everyone always will do it.
Nevertheless, this is different.
These are not the first examples of this type of lying, and to be fair, Democrats aren’t the only ones who do it or have done it. These are, however, the clearest and most obvious examples of this radical treachery in recent memory. Everyone involved in these conversations knows that these are lies. They tell them anyway and use them as excuses to be angry and outraged because they want to be angry and outraged. This isn’t lying to persuade, as lying is usually done. No one here cares about the truth, and no one cares about convincing anyone of anything. These are lies told with the specific intention of dehumanizing their subjects. They are intended to confirm to the liars their own righteousness and to justify to them their hatred of their enemies.
In other words, these are the tactics of Total War adapted to the domestic context. This is Total War in the Total State, in which nothing matters but power and the “values” that animate it.
I tried last week, in my 4th of July note, to be optimistic – or at least optimistic-ish. I’ve failed. It’s hard to see a road back to normalcy from any of this. It’s hard to see how we go from “YOU VOTED TO CUT GOVERNMENT, THEREFORE, YOU PERSONALLY KILLED THOSE LITTLE GIRLS,AND THEY DESERVED IT ANYWAY!” back to something simple, dignified, and non-toxic.
I refuse to give up hope altogether – as despair was the common sin of Judas and Carl Schmitt – but, as I say, it’s hard to imagine how we get from here back to there without an intervening collapse of some sort.
Lying in politics is normal. These lies, however, are not. They are as destructive as anything you can imagine.
