In Politics, The Truth Doesn't Count

Before the days of internet, when people used candles to read by after dark, Mark Twain said, "“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

When being interviewed by Anderson Cooper on CNN, Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said, “I think we know that just within a day or so the president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day. He’s taking 2,000 people with him. He’ll be renting over 870 rooms in India, and these are five-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending.”

That was a lie that got all the way around the world, and was repeated by Right-wing commentators again and again. Not a word of it is true. A similar trip by Bill Clinton cost just over $5 million a day, and the war in Afghanistan costs less than $200 million a day.

It is too bad that elected officials repeat lies, but it does make you realize why they vote against the interests of working families time and time again, they don't know the facts and they don't care to check; they benefit from lies and a "good lie" can't be wasted by the truth.

Full article on this topic "Too Good to Check" by Thomas L. Friedman

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/opinion/17friedman.html?src=me&ref=general

As Upton Sinclair might have said, It is difficult to get a member of congress to understand the facts when their campaign contributions depend on their not understanding." Lying in politics is considered part of the game but when the stakes are your future, your income, and your security, lying is not a game, it is class warfare.

(What Sinclair actually said)

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Upton Sinclair, Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968), was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author who wrote over 90 books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the 20th century, acquiring particular fame for his 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle. It exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair