The Republican Primary is a fact checkers paradise. Donald Trump lies about people in Jersey City celebrating after 9/11. Ben Carson can't get the facts straight about his past. Carly Fiorina lies about Planned Parenthood. Marco Rubio can't balance his checkbook and the list goes on and on. When they are confronted about their lives by regular and social media fact checkers they deny they've lied in the first place and blame the media. For most of these liars, their poll numbers go up.
Now all of this makes for good theater on the campaign trail and in that fake theater of life one can say there is no harm done. Now what happens if one of them becomes President and keeps on with that pathological lying. At that point the lies have real life consequences. What if one of them is negotiating with Putin and fudges the truth. If newspaper fact checkers can find out the lies now, one can just wonder what Russian intelligence can do. Lies with Putin or other world leaders will be disastrous to international diplomacy and endanger any chance of accords being reached. This will leave us living in a much more anThere are real consequences to electing unrepentant liars to the Presidency.
The President also has to negotiate numerous deals with Congress. They range from the budget to the most obscure pieces of legislation. To get anything done in Washington the President needs to be trustworthy. As the self-proclaimed master of the deal, one would hope Donald Trump would understand this or perhaps he made his fortune by deceit.
It is said that candidates campaign in poetry and then govern in prose. The meaning of this is that on the campaign trail candidates offer great speeches that lift our hopes and often fall short on delivering on them when they have to take on the day to day business of governing. In the Republican race this year the speeches don'e lift us up, they drag us down to the gutter of insult and innuendo. If one of these liars should be elected we can only hope that they govern with a prose that will be nothing like the harmful poetry of their campaigns.
Now it's said you can't trust a politician. This usually means they won't live up their promises. WIth the current crop of Republicans their straight out lies with no basis in fact mean you can trust nothing they say. Can we elect any of them? Fuggedaboutit!!