Like Jefferson, I believe that truth, honesty, and transparency are critical values in both personal and public realms.  Lying is wrong.  Lying is destructive.  Liars cannot be trusted.  A habit of lying and deception reveals a corrupt character and a twisted soul.  In the public life of the United States, we see pleny of lying, corruption, and twisted souls, I'm afraid.

 Lying has become a big part of politics, a part I consider evil, as I wrote recently.  Untruth has so corrupted public education that I urge responsible parents not to trust their children to public schools, especially Christians.  The media, that used to seek and defend the truth, uncover deception, and expose liars, now willingly repeats and makes its own lies.  I hate to admit that I have become cynical about American culture, but politics, now the arena of hypocrites, is merely the most obvious indication that “everyone lies.”  Lying seems to define American culture.

That brings me to the latest “Big Lie,” one that has created a stir.  I had heard fragments of the story, but I had missed the original controversy completely.  In catching up on some of my reading on-line, I learned what all the fuss was about.

Rush Limbaugh is undoubtedly a controversial figure; but, love him or hate him, no one can deny his single-handed creation of talk radio’s popularity and of AM radio’s profitability.  Rush, like it or not, is an American original, and those attacking him are foolish and unprofessional.  On the one hand, the brazen deception by those attacking him, of late, is shameful, reprehensible, and wholly inappropriate to the dignity that should characterize those holding high offices in our American republic.  On the other, I don’t see how his adversaries can possibly come out ahead in this because, as they say, “Cheaters never prosper.”

I appreciate Tim Allen’s Home Improvement TV series because he does a great job of showing the realities of marriage and family in a basically positive light, without being moralistic.  In more than one episode, however, I have disagreed when Tim and wife Jill tried to work out when it was and was not acceptable to lie to people.  That’s the problem; we want to live in a world where we can lie but expect others to tell the truth.  We try to parse lies into good and bad categories, ignoring what Jefferson knew, that lies are corrupt the liar.

Lying is always wrong but it is especially egregious in politics.  How often do liars condemn others for lying?  How many of us believe those who affirm the positions we like and doubt or condemn those who hold views we oppose?  Nobody gains much by supporting liars, regardless of their professed ideology or the promises they make.  Trusting a liar is simply stupid!  You can’t trust a hypocrite, regardless of his party or positions.

I find dishonesty in science deeply troubling, especially when it is married to a social agenda and political aspirations.  A case in point, the Nobel Committee has given Al Gore the 2007 Peace Prize for his “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”  I have no idea what this has to do with peace, except in the minds of “one-world” socialists.  I enjoyed hearing the news in conjunction with the story about a British judge who “ruled that Gore's apocalyptic movie on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, should come with a warning that it promotes ‘partisan political views’ and is riddled with errors.”  So, “There!” Al Gore, Nobel nuts, and kooky environmentalists!  It’s just too bad that facts don’t matter when it comes to indoctrinating kids or robbing American citizens.

Finally, thank God for those who do speak honestly.  This time it was Ann Coulter who said, when asked, that America “would look like New York City during the Republican National Convention. In fact, that's what I think heaven is going to look like.”  When pressed, she was clear:  “People were happy.  They're Christian.  They're tolerant.  They defend America."  Awful, huh?  To illustrate the speed at which the adversarial media can morph a straightforward, an Adweek article writes, “Ann Coulter suggested that the U.S. would be a better place if there weren't any Jewish people—and that they should ‘perfect’ themselves into Christians.”  The real conversation, of course, never quite said that.  Coulter’s remarks were basically standard Christian theology, just not politically correct enough for her prickly host or the politically correct bloggers.