By Rick Manning
Is it okay to lie?
Is it justified if it leads to the conclusion you hope to achieve?
Senator Harry Reid provided a startling answer to a question about his own veracity when quizzed about his Senate floor charge against Republican 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney where he smeared, “Let him prove that he has paid taxes, because he hasn’t.”
Pressed in an interview on CNN to explain his attack, Reid simply smirked, “Romney didn’t win did he?”
In five words, Harry Reid summed up the entire political philosophy of the left — the end justifies the means.
It doesn’t matter if a claim is accurate or not, it only matters that it does damage to your competition. Reid and his merry band of Democrats support consumer protection from soap sellers through federal truth in advertising laws, yet those laws don’t apply to a Senate Leader relishing the impact his lie had on the election for the presidency.
But lying is not just Reid’s purview; everyone knows that this Administration sanctioned the big lie that you can keep your health insurance if you like your health insurance during the Obamacare fight. Health care law architect Jonathan Gruber even bragged that the people couldn’t be allowed to know what was in the law or else it would never have passed.
We also know now that the Administration’s immediate response to the death of four Americans at the American consulate in Benghazi was a deliberate lie, as the claim that the attack by al Qaeda was the result of a spontaneous uprising in response to an obscure Internet video depiction of Mohammed has fallen apart. The work of Judicial Watch exposed that this was a calculated fiction, and worse, that the since-promoted Susan Rice willfully perpetuated it on the Sunday news shows rather than admit that Obama’s Libyan foreign policy “success” was a failure of massive proportions.
In fact, time after time, this Administration has been given the initial benefit of the doubt by a trusting media only to find that it was engaged in deliberate deception.
So is it any surprise that Reid felt no compunction against defiling the institution of the Senate by engaging in crass and inaccurate political attacks against the Republican nominee? After all, as he smugly noted, it worked.
While political lying is not exactly man bites dog, during this Holy Week, it does remind of the infamous Governor of Judea’s quote to Jesus.
Under questioning, Jesus has the following fateful conversation with Pontius Pilate as found in the Bible’s Book of John, Chapter 18, verses 37-8.
“Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.’
“‘What is truth?’ retorted Pilate.”
In Pilate’s world, truth was whatever the force of the Roman legions could enforce. Jesus turns that on its head by declaring that there is an absolute, unalterable truth that not even a Roman legion can change.
In Reid’s world, truth is fungible, where so long as a lie can be sustained and become enough people’s reality, the lie can become ‘truth.’
Whether it is Pilate’s ‘truth’ enforced by the sword, or Reid’s ‘truth’ enforced by a politically correct Twitter mob, they are both the exact kind of situational ethics that has been used to justify evil throughout history.
The question that remains is will America embrace the whatever-is-expedient approach to politics and life, or will the people choose to live by a fixed plumb line of absolute truth, and demand that standard of their elected officials?
What is truth? A 2,000-year dilemma that is no less relevant today than when Pilate uttered the words that ultimately condemned him.
Happy Easter.
The author is president of Americans for Limited Government.
