Everyone acknowledges that there was an electoral mess in Broward and Palm Beach counties in Florida. Irregularities in how votes were counted cannot be denied. Nonetheless there is a huge gulf in explaining what went wrong. Conservatives blame fraud, whereas liberals cite incompetence.
That there is a question about which of these interpretations is correct is, however, a sign of a bigger problem. Were the observed “mistakes” evenly distributed across party lines, the incompetence construal might make sense. The breakdowns could have been due to sloppiness.
But that is not the situation. Going back decades now, questionable actions have always broken on the Democratic side. This includes finding new ballots in back rooms, getting people to submit forms after an election is over and tabulating non-citizen submissions.
These illegal actions were not accidental. They were conscious attempts to influence who won. As such, they were no different from counting the ballots of the dead, or allowing people to cast multiple votes the way Mayor Daly’s Chicago did, or buying votes as in Boss Tweed’s New York. This chicanery is fraud—pure and simple.
Yet liberals deny it. Instead they accuse those who brought dishonesty to public attention of undermining confidence in the democratic process. Meanwhile, those who engaged in falsification are allowed off the hook.
This should come as no surprise. Those on the left have taken to specializing in lies. Almost every day there are new examples of deceit. Anything that makes liberals look bad or conservatives good is open to conscious misrepresentation.
Although this is brazen misconduct, Democrats have succeeded in convincing most Americans that lying is uniformly distributed among political activists; that everyone does it. This is itself a lie. Progressives would never be able to persuade ordinary citizens to elect them if they did not hide embarrassing truths behind a facade of falsehoods.
The tactic of accusing conservatives of being liars is part of this policy. Liberals correctly conclude that the best defense is a good offence. If they can focus on alleged rightwing mendacity, their own fabrications disappear from view.
Thus, how often has Donald Trump been charged with dishonesty? Almost anything he says that offends the left is immediately classified this way. When, for instance, California’s “camp” fire got out of control and the president blamed poor forest management, he was castigated for telling a whopper.
The same thing happened when he cited the caravans traveling toward the U.S. border as including felons. According to the liberals, innocent women and children dominated these processions. As for the alleged Middle Easterners among them, this was a hoax.
When subsequent evidence demonstrated that Trump was correct, not a word of retraction was issued by those who castigated him just days before. This sort of silence, however, is a liberal specialty. It too is a form of lying.
Lies come in many shapes. One of the most insidious is lying by omission. In withholding information from the community, false impressions are propagated. To illustrate, the economic benefits of the Trump tax cut are barely mentioned in the mainstream press. The objective is to make sure he does not get credit for reviving our prosperity.
This, of course, is opposite the treatment Barack Obama received. In his case, laggard economic figures were downplayed, whereas his personal attractiveness was celebrated. From what the public was told, his administration might have been one of the most effective in history—and the most honest.
The Democratic penchant for lying has a long pedigree. It was on exhibit when George W. Bush was accused of lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We saw it when the women who denounced Bill Clinton for sexual improprieties were vilified. Decades earlier, it was front and center when Alger Hiss was defended against charges of spying for the Soviets.
Even so, thanks to the explosion in media channels, we have never experienced such a flood of lies as those in which we are currently drowning. Nor will the spigot be turned off as long as ordinary Americans cannot tell the difference between truth and falsity.
Hard-core liberals will not change. They reap too many benefits from a culture of mendacity. It is therefore up to the rest of us to end this madness. If we don’t, the trust that enables our nation to function will be lost—as will our social cohesion.
Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Kennesaw State University
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