By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
Carnage. Absolute carnage. Tens of millions of Americans are losing their health insurance plans, Save Jerseyans, including over 800,000 over our fellow Garden State residents.
Someone who lies is called “a liar.” President Obama repeatedly lied about millions of folks losing their health insurance. The President is, therefore, a liar. Even hardcore lefties like Bill Maher get the joke; the HBO host recently observed that Obama “didn’t lie; he evolved on honesty.” So why is it so hard for so many of our countrymen to form the syllables and admit the obvious?
As with most things, folks, the answer lies in the history books. And you don’t need to dust off too many tomes or reach back very far for the answer.
Let’s revisit the events of January 1998 surrounding one of Obamacare’s most popular and high-profile apologists…
Beset by scandal and looming constitutional crisis, President Bill Clinton went on national television and told the world that there was “not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship” between the leader of the free world and a previously obscure White House intern. Clinton defended the “truth” of this statement eight months later, even after it had become apparent that there was a sexual relationship, owing to the fact that he had spoke in the present tense about a previously concluded sexual relationship.
After lying to a grand jury about it during the civil trial, the President of the United States’ ultimate defense was that oral sex wasn’t sex, which is kind of like arguing that mini-vans aren’t vans, but it worked and the political will to convict Clinton on the adopted articles of impeachment collapsed.
Keep in mind that this was the same guy who defeated his predecessor just six years prior, at least in part, by reminding voters that the Republican elder statesman had failed to live up to his promise to impose “no new taxes.”
America’s culture was changing. There had always been corruption and licentiousness in the public arena. Voters would not, however, suffer a politician who embarrassed the country within view of the public eye. Now lying had almost warped into a virtue of sorts; being “human” trumped having integrity for the first Internet generation and the baby boomers who bore them. And as far as that Internet generation was concerned, Bill Clinton had proven that lying wasn’t so bad provided that “your intentions were good” or conditioned upon the fact that “you do your job well.” How often did we hear that? Well, it sunk in.
Clinton had help to be sure. The media celebrated a “less judgmental” cultural shift. Schools ditched prayer and bibles in favor of “tolerance” and anti-bullying campaigns. Truth, justice and the “American way” quickly gave way to an almost militant attitude of acquiescence to all behavior and hostility to moral norms.
Flash forward to 2013. It’s all coming full circle for those of us who came of political age in the Clinton era.
The American people, having refused to elect a man (Mitt Romney) whom they failed to “related to” despite exit polling showing they appreciated his economic prowess more than the incumbent, are presently grumbling because all of the warnings from Mr. Romney’s campaign were coming to fruition. Irony much?
Romney was simply too clean, too rigid too rich and insufficiently “human,” particularly for many millennials who grew up without a religious foundation but with Bill Clinton’s non-traditional morality positively-portrayed on their dinnertime television screen.
Causation aside, the end result is brutally undeniable. The American people headed to the polls in November 2012 and went with the delightfully flawed rags-to-riches story despite harboring serious concerns as to his competency and truthfulness.
Sure enough, this half-baked decision-making process has come back to bite the electorate in the ass and all within record time in the form of millions of dropped coverage notices hitting mailboxes throughout the autumn 2013 season.
Plenty of voters are waking up to the problem only now that it’s too late. Others remarkably still offer a verbal shrug: “Well, they’re all liars! So what?”
Therein lies the problem! We’ve developed a permissive attitude to this behavior over the years, a process which Mr. Clinton accelerated. When you let the small lies go (“I did not have sex relations with that woman…”), then the big lies inevitably follow (“You can keep your doctor…”).
It’s time for American voters to redevelop some basic standards for our public officials, Save Jerseyans. Integrity should be at the top of the list. It’s the only way to save our health care system and the country, too.
The LYING KING
Any comment on the lies of the non-existent WMD's in Iraq that led to thousands of US deaths and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives lost?
Theodore, didn't you hear? The WMD's were shipped to Syria just before our troops got to Iraq. Obama wanted to attack the Syrians because they were alleged to have crossed the "red line" by using those WMD's on their own citizens. Putin said he will take care of it. Obama backed off.