The Liar

Political Cartoon from thefederalistpapers.org

The closer we come to the November elections here in the United States, the more my News Feed on Facebook is exploding with political rhetoric. Frequently I ignore the more ostentatious claims about one candidate or another, but every now and then one catches my eye. I can't even tell you how totally irritated I become if I end up having to spend hours out of my day researching fact vs. fiction about a certain claim, so that by the time I get to the truth, no matter what it is, I'm already hoppin' mad at time wasted uncovering a pack of lies. This is not, in fact, much different from how I feel in general about liars and finding out the truths one way or another, that they've been spouting. Sooner or later, the truth always comes out. And the older I get, the less tolerance I have for even one lie told to me by someone I believed I could trust. This is true even if I love that person tremendously, which has been the case before. If I don't tolerate lies from people I love, you can be absolutely certain I wouldn't tolerate it from a total stranger.

 I don't need a whole lot of fancy political smoke and mirrors to determine the character of someone I may potentially vote for. People always have their tells that are impossible to hide (myself included, although lying isn't one of them in my case...nobody's perfect). As far as Presidential candidate Clinton is concerned, I knew all I needed to know about her when she lied, lied, lied and denied her personal e-mail server issue until there was too much evidence to dispute her claims. Then she pulled a "my bad, sorry about it" card and that was the end of that for me. People who do this for their own gains, or any reason really, are not people I would vote for, tolerate in my life, or trust in any way, shape, form or fashion. Period. Ever. While there are, perhaps, many other transgressions one could associate with her, I'm a "one and done" kind of girl.

Do I expect our candidates for office to be perfect? Absolutely not (...again, see my above comments about my own lack of perfection). Even though a "lying politician" has become a political joke and almost a given does not mean I accept it, nor do I think it's amusing. If you want to represent the "people", you don't have to be flawless, but to my mind, you do have to be genuine and have the moral character of a "decent human being". Liar automatically disqualifies you for the job.