Indeed.

When you profess your fealty to unfettered free markets and profit off those practices (due to legislators too timid to adequately restrain those practices) and do so only through the largesse of Keynesian economics, you lie.

When you say those markets should determine the fate of auto companies because they have failed to meet market demands yet decry the fate of insurance companies (who do nothing but skim money between patients and healthcare providers) under the specter of Universal Healthcare, you lie.

Likewise, when you point to the healthcare systems of the UK, Canada, Israel (or any number of industrialized nations who provide healthcare for their citizens) as massive failures, even though, as democracies, those countries could well vote away those systems should they so choose, you lie.

When you say you oppose cap-and-trade because it would negatively affect free trade, even though it’s shown that those policies would lead to the development of new markets, new jobs, would break the dependence on foreign oil and would (God forbid) improve the environment, you lie.

When you put your principles of unregulated free markets before the financial health of the country yet claim you’re more-patriotic-than-thou, you lie.

And if you say that the boorish frat boy antics of Joe Wilson had no roots in a racist rejection of President Obama or that much of the negative reaction to the President is not racist —

Such as this.

Or this.

And this.

And in any number of signs seen at the 9/12 march ...

You lie.

The problem is, lies don’t go very far in the grand scheme of political fortunes. Just as Hitler built his Reich on the tissue of lies, the various leaders of the Soviet Union could not sustain their empire on sustained lies, just as every tin-pot dictator eventually gets buried and forgotten under the weight of their lies, so will go the lie that our country is a white, Christian nation, so will go the lies that we cannot provide healthcare to every citizen but we must prop up the meretricious practices of bankers and insurance executives, if you say that we must forsake the least of us for the profit of those making the most —

You lie.

jim@pagosasun.com