So reads a popular T shirt in South Carolina. I don’t know who coined the phrase, but it appeared after an unbelievable series of political events raised the collective eyebrows of the nation.
There have been many episodes in the Palmetto state. The most recent was the election of Mark Sanford to fill the unexpired congressional term of Tim Scott who was appointed by South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley to the Senate seat vacated by Jim DeMint so he could take the leadership position in the Heritage Foundation.
What happened to the law about not taking a job as a lobbyist directly after leaving Congress? Not that Mr. DeMint would use his position to influence his former colleagues! Just that alone vindicates the veracity of the state motto.
I don’t read a lot of blogs, but here is one that says a lot. It was posted by Andy Borowitz. Even though it is an ironic/sarcastic offering it hits awfully close to the mark.
CHARLESTON, S.C. (The Borowitz Report)—Former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s stunning upset in a special congressional election on Tuesday served as an inspiration to liars across the state and beyond, prominent members of the lying community said tonight.
“In America, liars are always made to feel bad about ourselves, as if what we’re doing is wrong,” said Harland Dorrinson, fifty-seven, a liar from suburban Charleston. “Mark Sanford’s victory tonight is a victory for the lying lifestyle.”
Carol Foyler, thirty-six, a liar from Myrtle Beach, echoed those sentiments: “For the millions of dishonest children across America, tonight Mark Sanford has given them hope that someday, they can be somebody.”
At his victory rally in Charleston, the former governor acknowledged the liars in the audience and said that his victory sent an important message: “Every lie, no matter how big or small, has value.”
“As your Governor, I abused your trust. And as God is my witness, as your congressman, I will abuse it again,” he said, to thunderous applause.
Mr. Sanford, who had been behind in the polls in the waning weeks of the race, owed much of his last-minute surge to the support of the lying community, exit polls showed.
According to those exit polls, Mr. Sanford held a three-to-one lead among voters who described themselves as liars, cheaters, or sleazebags.
Furthermore, the polls showed, those same voters felt that Mr. Sanford’s opponent, Elizabeth Colbert Busch, did not have the lying experience necessary to serve in Congress.
Get the Borowitz Report delivered to your inbox.
Unfortunately, none of this is new nor is it localized to South Carolina, but seldom is it so blatant. In the 1930s Gene Talmadge proudly proclaimed in south Georgia, “Of course I steal! But I do it for YOU!” Huey Long in Louisiana was no better. Ancient history, one might say, but who can ignore Johnson, Nixon and Clinton, all of whom overcame years of lying to fight another day.
In Virginia we are facing a gubernatorial campaign in which the blurring between fact and fiction is becoming worse by the day, particularly in the relationship of gifts to bribes. It appears to prove the quote of Mark Twain: “Gather the facts quickly and then distort them at your leisure.”
To cite another great author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said, “In American life there are no second acts.” Check out the current movie release, The Great Gatsby, and see if that statement rings true. In the movie, it might, but in real life Mark Sanford doesn’t believe it.
Even if lying is ubiquitous that doesn’t make it right. When I was teaching in the city jail, one of the lessons was about lying. I pointed out that there were many gradations of lying and that everyone, at some point, lied. One of the prisoners looked me straight in the eye and said, “Naw! That ain’t right. The Chaplain . . . she don’t never lie.”
I wonder if we could get her to run for public office.
– Hayden Hollingsworth
Theroanokestar.com
679 words
May 13, 2013
