Richard Wolfe: Revisiting liars in the Golden Age of Lying

We are smack in the age of the normalization of lying.

Not of lies. Of lying.

Lying as a strategy, lying as an ethos. Lying because lying as a modus operandi can reap benefits, even if tainted. Benefits ranging from monetary gain to sexual gratification to power and influence.

Everyone tells lies but only some people are liars. The distinction is important.

The comedian Jon Lovitz used to have a schtick on "Saturday Night Live" wherein he played Tommy Flanagan aka The Pathological Liar. He’d tell an initial lie and then try to authenticate it by telling subsequent lies, each more absurd than the last. After each lie came out, he’d say out loud what his inner mind was thinking, e.g., “yeah, yeah. That’s it. That’s right.”

He was audience testing. In those in-between moments Lovitz was trying to drag his listeners with him to a conclusion not even he yet knew, along a meandering path that had no clear objective other than holding people’s attention and satisfying his pitiful need to be accepted. Today, you can find similar audience testing in play on cable programming offered by a network whose name rhymes with "Sox Lose."

But Lovitz’ monologue was a comedy bit. It worked because the notion of ceaseless, unrelenting lying as means to an end was viewed as caricature. The virtuoso serial lying of Lovitz’ character was satire, meant to mock perhaps less blatant but nevertheless still contemptible lying.

Enter California Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy, a liar also but a dismally inept one. The kingdom of Flanagandom is denied him because he, McCarthy, often begins by telling the truth. He regains his feet, however, when the perils of his truth saying are realized and he then lies about what he’d said. And then he floats another lie. Repeat ad nauseum.

Impurity of process notwithstanding, Tommy would still beam with admiration.

McCarthy’s schtick has a history. In the run-up to the 2016 election and on live television he admitted the Benghazi hearings — remember those? — were intended to smear Hillary Clinton. Oops. In the days following he "revisited" his remarks to insist there was nothing political about the hearings.

But, darn it, there was that pesky TV clip. Proof of truth. In modern parlance that’s known as "having receipts."

On Jan. 13, 2021, one week after the Capitol riot, McCarthy, from the floor of the House, said, “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.”

Two weeks later he flew down to Mar-a-Lago, most certainly "revisiting" his floor speech. [Ol’ Kev insisted he didn’t know he was posing for the clearly posed photo. Sad!]

Nonetheless, as regards his original truth, there was, again, the pesky video.

Of most recent vintage, there are those pesky phone call recordings.

The principled text and measured tone of McCarthy’s messages to his leadership and his caucus was yet another profile in courage, another essential truth, doomed by his spinelessness. Once the recordings emerged McCarthy’s desperate need for the acceptance of the disgraced and discarded former president had him pathetically scrambling to make amends. To lie about what he had incontrovertibly said.

Fortunately for Kevin, he, like almost every Republican politician (candidate or incumbent), has a co-conspiratorial media conglomerate ready to fire up a response, a narrative of lies in support. Luckily, everybody involved in the conspiracy knows the mere repetition of a lie can make the lie seem true. More … normal.

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The (non-news) program hosts at FOX News are liars. Period. Full stop.

The tainted power of (non-news) program hosts is a fusion of advertising dollars, shameless bullying, and twisting of facts. Power not earned by dint of investigatory prowess or journalistic honesty. Not gained from either editorial propriety or any sense of corporate morality.

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Ask Shepard Smith. Ask Chris Wallace. Ask Leland Vittert.

Throngs of believers hook up with FOX (non-news) every day but not to know truth. Their interest is in having their prejudices echoed back to them, with added dollops of specious validation. Some scanning the Fox site every day, copying and pasting Fox (non-news) bile into emails and sending them forth, destined for countless Spam folders.

Sad liars all. Lying with purpose. Like Tucker, "revisiting" replacement theory.

— Community Columnist Richard Wolfe is a resident of Park Township. Contact him at wolf86681346@gmail.com. 

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Richard Wolfe: Revisiting liars in the Golden Age of Lying