Liar’s Poker
Trump is engaged in a criminal trial in New York, which stems from a 2016 $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about an alleged affair. It is one of many politically motivated judicial attacks on an easily unlikeable Trump. [As an aside, how many millions are being spent to criminalize/defend what is otherwise a modest expenditure?]
We are told that Trump’s actions are somehow fundamentally different from Joe Biden’s laughable and insincere denials concerning Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election. Trump sought to disassociate himself from a person of ill-repute. Biden sought to distance himself from his influence peddling son.
Trump’s alleged association is personally embarrassing in a sometimes puritanical nation. However, we are supposed to believe that the $11 million funneled to and through Hunter Biden from a Ukrainian interest in an industry, in which the junior Biden has no appreciable expertise or experience, is entirely unrelated to the present U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s war with Russia.
Trump used his companies to aggregate the hush money payment. Biden mobilized a complicit media machine to protect his interests and to promote the Biden brand.
Yes, Trump is a liar, cad, charlatan, and carnival barker. However, Trump is a particularly bad liar, in that everyone knows that he is lying. In contrast, we are told that we should support Biden because he is a better liar. Biden’s lies are no less prolific, but they are exceedingly more insidious. Biden, who is also an unconvincing liar, learned from some of the best liars: the Clintons — Slick Willy and HRC — and Bidens’ mentor Obama.
What is the real difference? The refrain keeps echoing in my head:
MY lying, morally-fluid, and narcissistic egomaniac is better than YOUR lying, morally-fluid, and narcissistic egomaniac, because mine does for ME and mine, as opposed to YOU and yours.
There is no voting for the “Common Good” and “General Welfare,” because the sought after “good” is not common to all. Policies and programs, which advance the “welfare” of some are not generally applicable to all. The supposed “ideals,” which are embraced by one party and espoused by favored persons, are certain to be seen as abusive, oppressive, and tyrannical by disfavored “others.”
The mistaken belief is that government can always provide a win-win solution, but that is not the case. Those who benefit from government’s largess are oftentimes not among the classes, which must bear the costs and suffer the sacrifices. Using the compulsory authority of the state and the coercive powers of government, would-be beneficiaries are content to advance their own interests to the detriment of parties unrelated and persons far removed.
Neither voters nor political minions are motivated regularly or routinely by selflessness or altruism. Like nearly all organisms, our species is motivated by self-protection, self-advancement, and self-propagation. Rare individuals demonstrate altruism and morality on levels, which deserve admiration and which serve as the bases of legend (or mythology). However, their rarified examples are unlikely to be emulated. Persons respond most readily to the baser traits of our bestial species: jealousy, envy, covetousness, and greed.
The fix does not come in having the “right” person in a specific office. The fix comes in making the office of President so relatively impotent that no one has reason to care who holds the office at a particular point in time. The solution is not in making government omnipotent and then hoping against hope that inevitably flawed human beings will not succumb to the irresistibly corrupting influence of unrestrained power.
James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers:
It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
In November, no one will be voting FOR the better man. Neither Biden nor Trump is likely to be mistaken for a “Philosopher King.” Both Biden and Trump are laughably incompetent and incapable of fulfilling the role as an Imperial President (as if any who might aspire to the position is worthy or capable).
As is almost inevitably the case, parties will vote in response to the often unstated question: “What’s in it for me?” Voters will look at Trump and Biden, and they will make a determination which of the two liars is most likely to advance the voters’ personal interests (or less likely to represent an impediment or detriment to those interests). Politics is not so difficult to understand.
