Smoking gun emails have been unearthed which prove the Obama administration lied about the Benghazi attacks. This lie was repeated. It was compounded. It was uttered at the United Nations General Assembly.

The families of Americans who died in Benghazi deserve compassion. The veterans and their families impacted by the Veteran’s Affairs scandal deserve our compassion.

The unseen victim in the rubble is the truth. We have, as a people, forgotten that the first duty is to the truth.

Without truth there is no justice; and without justice, compassion misses its mark. Hillary Clinton said, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” when questioned about Benghazi. She might as well have said, “What difference does the truth make?” The difference is that an innocent filmmaker would not be unjustly punished for violence he didn’t cause. The families of the dead, and We the People, would know why our own people are dead in Benghazi and who is responsible. We could learn from it and avoid it being repeated. We could remove the individuals in charge so that their poor judgment would not cause further damage. Gandhi said, “Truth never damages a cause that is just.” Imagine, if we punish the innocent and fail to punish the guilty, all because we didn’t know the truth, then our cause is damaged. If we do not act upon the truth, then America’s voice on the public stage shall contain no inspirational moral authority. Our allies will shrink from us. Our enemies will feel all the more justified to destroy us.

We live in a culture that often denies truth exists and substitutes person for principle. Many have virtually deified Barack Obama. His resonant voice and face-to-heaven posture (as if he was anointed by the divine) sent thrills up people’s legs.

John F. Kennedy once said, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.” Barack Obama does not transcend principle. He is a false god. The persona he projected, the one many bought, is a myth, one that was persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. The truth, for so many, didn’t matter. By becoming “sort of God” in their eyes, he has had the power to confuse, misdirect, befog, and substitute lies for the truth. His mendacity eludes the light because he is seen as the light. When things have gone wrong, they have blamed the subordinates but never the conceit they created or embraced.

If we were a country where truth truly matters, then Obama’s words and actions would be more carefully measured, tested, checked and double-checked, to reveal the content of his character, to dispel the myths. There are some who have looked for the content but have found it carefully concealed. Peggy Noonan analyzed Obama’s identity:

Does he stand for something? I suppose he stands for many things, but you can't quite narrow it down and sum it up. A problem with his leadership is that there's always the sense that he's not quite telling you his core and motivating beliefs. There are a lot of rounded banalities. There are sentiments and impulses. But he isn't stark, doesn't vividly cut through. There's a sense he's telling people as much as he feels he can within the parameters of political safety, and no more.

Barack Obama was the fill-in-the-blank candidate. He became what people wanted. He reflected back people’s hopes and dreams. He was the change they could believe in. He was something that couldn’t exist. He was a lie. We didn’t know and we didn’t demand the truth of who he was before we empowered him. Is it any surprise then that that what he says is no more truthful than what many thought he was? Peggy Noonan also wrote this:

As for speaking truthfully, well, he speaks, in many venues and sometimes at great length. But rather than persuade the other side, he knocks down a lot of straw men and deploys no affection or regard for those who disagree with him. He says the great signature program of his presidency will do one thing and it turns out to do another. He is evasive about Benghazi and the other scandals. He winds up with polls showing Americans do not see him as a truth teller.

It is an unavoidable conclusion that Barack Obama is symbolic of America’s attitude about truth in this country. He was elected twice. He is symbolic evidence that truth, as a core value, is dying in American culture. Today lies are commonplace; we have developed euphemisms for them. They are called “narratives” and maintaining the lie is called “preserving the narrative.” “Spin” and “spin doctors” are shiny euphemisms that mask ugly deceit and deceivers.

Ironically, we are not ignorant of the lies. As seen here, in a Gallup poll, said they do not trust Congress, and only 23% of viewers trust the mainstream media television news, the two institutions upon which we rely on for truth in leadership and information. If telling the truth is not a core, motivating principle for these institutions, then there must have been a decision penetrating their rank and file that it is somehow better to lie. When you decide it is somehow beneficial to lie, you impair your soul. Thomas Jefferson said:

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

Later, as truth becomes less important and lies become more important, when the soul becomes tainted, especially the soul of a country…the soul of the state, then so often violence follows. This is perhaps inevitable as the need to preserve the lie inspires ever-greater methods to suppress, rewrite, and recast the truth. Those methods begin with the curtailment of freedom, shift to compulsion, and eventually to violence. Today it is the IRS targeting conservative groups to curtail their financial ability to oppose the Democrats. It is the stonewalling of subpoenas for evidence on Fast and Furious. It is the subtle violence of the VA Scandal, where people die by inaction and the neglect is covered up by falsification because it is better, they thought, to preserve the lie that the VA Administration delivery model works.

It is a frighteningly small step from death by neglect to overt violence.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn said:

Let us not forget that violence does not and cannot flourish by itself; it is inevitably intertwined with LYING. Between them there is the closest, the most profound and natural bond: nothing screens violence except lies, and the only way lies can hold out is by violence. Whoever has once announced violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose lying as his PRINCIPLE.

Lying is dangerously close to a principle in Obama’s America.