Unli lies

The election campaign period has started, and it is time to suffer the barrage of materials designed to seduce us into voting for the hopefuls.

With alternative facts, fake news, and click farms from the last election still fresh in my mind, the thought of more fictionalized histories, disinformation, and even lies from the candidates is enough to make the most steadfast hearts quail. What can civil society do to discourage fake propaganda, and allow only truth to inform voters?

The tricky part is always navigating the constitutional freedoms of speech and of the press. Muzzling the writers and imposing a truth test might result in allowing one person's version of the truth to prevail over another's. The marketplace of ideas supposedly allows different stories, versions, and narratives to compete, and from there, the truth is supposedly revealed, ready to free mankind.

Fat chance of that happening. Instead, the winners of the showdown often boil down to either who can tell the most sensational story, or which storyteller is the most seductive. Sometimes, it's even which storyteller can predict what the audience wants to hear, and so the story gets packaged into delightful bits of garbage.

We've known this for a long time. Sensational headlines sell. Sultry faux reporters with barely-there clothes (now known as influencers) sell. Comic books where the hero from the masses wins the lottery sell. Except with the rise of social media, they've just become more dangerous and more effective.

Given this ability to magnify to dangerous magnitude, it's important to impose consequences on liars. Liars must be called out and brought to account. Painful punishment must be imposed on liars so that others who are inclined to follow that path are convinced that they too will suffer dire consequences. No sparing the rod, flail them to an inch of their lives!

So looking over at the shores of the now-dysfunctional America, now suffering its longest shutdown in history, our country, nay, the world, needs to see the father of lies, the former TV show host called Donald Trump, punished for his incorrigible, unstoppable lying.

Tracked by truth tellers and fact checkers every day, the painful truth is that Trump managed to lie to his citizenry thousands of times during his presidency. Not to be outdone, his faithless apostles such as Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Huckabee ape their master, likewise dispensing fibs left and right to deflect accountability from their lord.

(The latest: whereas before Giuliani used to say that the Trump campaign was not ever involved in dealing with the Russians for that stupid tower, now, he's saying that if the Trump campaign had dealings with Russia, then Trump certainly didn't). How we bend over backwards!

Another liar, his former lawyer Cohen, has testified he lied for Trump. However, his previous lies count against him, for as the Trump defenders point out, how do we know that the boy who cried wolf is telling the truth now? The search for other witnesses and more evidence is on (hopefully already collected by Special Counsel Robert Mueller), so that every detail of Trump's criminal acts, his tax evasion, his conspiracy to defraud, his obstruction of justice; all those deep, dark, and dirty lies are fully exposed.

If Mueller prevails, and the ridiculous charlatan loses his wealth, that would be even better comeuppance for Trump than just being impeached. Trump doesn't care about the stain on his name - there's always a spin ready to be spun anyway. But make him lose his wealth, forfeit his ill-gotten gains, strip him of the strappings of privilege and power, and a better chastisement we could not have devised.

Trump will finally be a poster boy, something he's unceasingly sought to promote via his magazine covers, both real and fake. Except this time, the poster will proclaim the triumph of truth.