Prevaricating, Blatantly

SOMETIMES YOU ARE AMAZED at the blatant lies people tell, and the number of people who choose, without reason, to believe them. The greatest case in point is the big election lie of "honest Don" Trump, and the tens of millions of Americans who still believe it, or tell us that they do. I would never even bother to tell such an outrageous lie, assuming that nobody would believe me. Almost ceratinly they would not. But, they would, and do, believe Donald Trump, who for years has been well known as an habitual liar. Go figure. Watergate shocked my parents, who claimed that they had never before been so aware that their own government could and would lie so blatantly to them. It had the same impact on me. People prefer to think that the government of their country, whether monarchy or democratic, is looking after their best interests, and telling the truth. Often, this is simply not the case. All autocrats,all authoritarian rulers, convince themselves that they are indispensible, that their people simply cannot live without them. That, of course, is always a lie. The recent presidential "election" in Russia, which was so obviously rigged by Putin to elect Putin, was so obviously a scam and a sham that you might wonder why they even bothered to conduct it. Why not merely delcare Mr. Putin absolute ruler for life, and leave it at that? Plausable deniability, the same technique used by Trump and most chronic liars to wiggle out of accountability. Simply leave anough wiggle room to allow for reasonable doubt, so we will question whether it is really a lie, and choose to believe the lie. The big lie, told often and loudly. It bears remembering that people generally prefer stable,solid, authoritarian government to democracy, which requires effort by us the governned, is very unwieldy and messy, and can be frustrating, such as is the case in these United States at present. My mother and I laughed years ago when Saddam Hussein held an "election" in Iraq, running himself, as the icmbant candidate. He had no oppostiion. the ballot consisted of a square piece of paper, with Saddam's name on it, and next to it, a box in which to put a checkmark. He get ninety nine percent of the vote. Almost amazingly, Mr. Putin, it is reported, enjoys widespread popularity in Russia. Its hard to imagine why. He has wrecked the Russian economy and killed hundreds of thousands of his own people with his useless, insane war in Ukraine. He falsely, laughably, describes his war as a sort of holy crusade, to rid Ukraine of fascists, to liberate its people so they will be free to enjoy being Russian citizens; all nonsense, obvious lies. Two weeks before the terrorist attack in Moscow the United States warned Putin that it was imminent, and that it would be Islamic terrorists responsible. When the attack failed to mainfest,Putin accused the United States of "fear mongering", as if America was playing a dirty trick on Russia. After the attack, Putin immediately placed the blame for it on Ukraine, rather than the actual criminals, the Islamic State. Convenient for him, but, again an obvious, blatant lie. Whatever it takes ot prop up support for his disastrous, failed war of aggression, and to distract from the fact that the warning from the U.S. was, it turned out, quite accurate. The American people were lied to about the reasons for dropping the atom bomb on Japan, about the reasons for American involvment in Viet Nam, and about the reasons for America's wars in the Middle East, from 1991 on. People enjoy, prefer being lied to, if the lies conform to their personal perferences and biases. Such is human nature. The truth is that if you live on this planet, and are living in a country which has a govenment, chances are, you have been and are being lied to.