2003 Column Archives
Can't Admit
By John Sammon
Jun 8, 2003, 15:08

What do you do with a government that can’t admit when it’s wrong? They lie and they lie, and then they lie that they lie.

I’ve got to give it to old John F. Kennedy. He fooled around with women, but it took real courage and character for him to admit that the Bay of Pigs fiasco was a failure, and then to take responsibility for it when the plan had been created before his tenure. Nevertheless, it was he who signed off on it, gave the go-ahead, and he took responsibility.

Those days are long gone boy.

Today, we have leaders who say the sun didn’t come up yesterday. If you point out that you saw it come up with your own eyes, they’ll say it didn’t come up. It was simply a repositioning side-movement caused by the earth tilting on its axis in a certain way, giving you the impression that the sun came up.

They lie, and if they ever find themselves telling the truth, they lie more just to keep their hands in it. This is a world where up is down, down is up, wrong is right. I think there’s too many attorneys or ex-attorneys in Washington D.C. running the government. To them, there truthfully is no truth, only shades of gray. Everything can be appealed.

The world is not what is, but what I say it is------goddamn it!

I have an acquaintance like this; I mean his mind works the same way as the current president’s. He believes what he wants to believe. He gets mad real quick and starts shouting if you have an opinion that runs counter to his (after all, he gets all his information after watching a good deal of television). He is also a religious fanatic, which always helps if you’re going to be intolerant of ideas.

He is what you might call a “functioning illiterate.”

It’s easy to strip the rights away from people like this. All you have to do is get ‘em so worked up they’re ready to lynch somebody, then wind up their spring and let them hobble like a little robot doll right off the cliff.

If you make a valid point to a person like this, just before he dismisses it with a wave of his hand, he’ll tell you that you’re disloyal. If you’re not with us, you’re against us.

The government can’t admit it’s wrong, or it made a mistake. That’s not allowed, especially in an election year. A top government official the other day described criticism of the government’s handling of matters as “outrageous.”

You bet it is. The truth is hell. But deny deny deny.