A Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Leftism is a pathology of mendacity. When Obama told us that his grandfather liberated Auschwitz, that was a gratuitous fabrication – he could have honestly stated that his grandfather was part of the army that helped liberate concentration camps in western Germany, but truth means so little to him that inventing the Auschwitz fable pinged no conscience at all. In the same way, when Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton told America that she was named “Hillary” in honor of Sir Edmond Hillary climbing Mt. Everest, even though that happened years after Mrs. Clinton was born, that also was an effortless deception, because to her, truth has value only when it is helpful. We see in leftism this casual prevarication over and over again. Lois Lerner tells us – and expects us to believe – that her emails were erased with no intent to cover up wrongdoing, just as Mrs. Clinton tells us that the vast number of government records (State Department emails) were destroyed because all the records destroyed had to do with personal matters. Ironically, Mrs. Clinton herself coined a phrase that conservatives should repeat again and again as long as she remains the Democrat frontrunner and she used that phrase in her interrogation of General Petraeus at the end of the Bush presidency, when she told the general that his statements to the Senate committee required “a willing suspension of disbelief.”

Isn’t that the perfect expression of what the spoiled and lazy minds of leftist politicians in America today demand of us? When listening to Obama’s press secretary, how many times in a single answer does he simply lie to us? When the former Senate majority leader on the floor of the Senate stated that Mitt Romney paid no taxes at all, did Reid show any contrition at all? No, none. When Bill Clinton angrily stared into the television camera and explicitly denied any sexual relations with Monica, did that grotesque lie drive him out of public life? Hardly – his wife, who blamed the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy,” was, until recently, considered a lock on the Democrat nomination. Who will be the nominee if not her? No one believes that Bernie Sanders can be the nominee. (His honest embrace of Marxist silliness is too...well, honest.) Joe Biden, the man whose presidential bid imploded when he was caught plagiarizing a British Labor Party leader? Elizabeth Warren, who claimed to be Native America to get into Ivy League colleges? John Kerry, who recalled his 1968 Christmas in Cambodia, when Nixon was president (arrogantly ignorant in his lies to the fact that his Swift Boat comrades said that they were never in Cambodia and the fact that Nixon was not president in 1968)? The grim reality is that dishonesty is so fundamental to leftism today that while all politicians connive with the facts a bit if they think that there is no chance of getting caught, the pathological liars of establishment leftism more and more resemble the Stalinist Lillian Hellman, about whom Mary McCarthy famously wrote: “Every word [she] writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” The establishment media, like entrenched government bureaucracies and corrupt academia, long since stopped caring about intellectual integrity. All of these organs care only about either advancing an ideological agenda or protecting their comfortable perches and perks. Over the last fifty years or so, there has been virtually no governor or check upon the most outrageous frauds. Most of us as children are caught fibbing and punished. We learn, in the real world, that deceit has costs. This is simply not true for leftists. Why in the world should we be surprised that Hillary, who has never in her adult life faced the consequences of fibbing and faking and fabricating, finds herself today caught in a spiral of endless lies upon lies? Why would a woman married to a serial philanderer and a brutal stalker of helpless women, who today portrays herself as a champion of women, be even able to rise above the sort of Orwellian doublethink that passes as serious leftist policy pronouncements? So when we hear the latest ridiculous explanation from Hillary Clinton or Lois Lerner or some other debris of leftist corruption, we ought to have, always, a “willing suspension of disbelief.” These broken souls and dead consciences are addicted to falsehoods. They live on lies.