Crossing Nebraska

“A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” Supposedly Twain said this, or maybe it was Churchill, or perhaps neither. Maybe it’s simply a truism passed down in various forms since who knows when. The Quote Investigator notes that, before Twain or Churchill were even born, Jonathan Swift is known to have said in 1710 that “falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” Yes, lies seem to have a certain power all their own. A truth meter Our POTUS and his supporters have harnessed this very human reality to great effect. No amount of fact-checking, countervailing arguments, outraged responses, shame, or, um…, truth seems to make any difference. Lies work. Lies sway opinion. Lies help their unethical, unscrupulous, and immoral purveyors to gain and maintain power. Keep in mind, though, that the real power of lies resides in the frequency with which they are told. A single lie might not be so difficult to rebut. Multiple lies, however, tol...

If you’re inclined to believe in evil as a supernatural force that’s been unleashed upon this world, you’ll not have to look very hard. Everywhere we look these days we see evidence of its existence: self-serving executive leadership that appears constitutionally incapable of telling the truth, that uses the levers of power to reward friends and punish political foes instead of improving peoples’ lives, that celebrates people losing their jobs, healthcare, and food assistance; a government that enables and empowers such leadership contrary to our constitution and the needs of the people, that allows the murder of children to continue in mass shooting after mass shooting, that revels in the suffering and abuse of immigrants at the hands of masked agents seemingly accountable to no one; and a populace that cheers all this on, perhaps even engaging in violent action to take their leaders’ talking points to their suggestive conclusions or, at the very least, enabling the whole evil mess wi...

We’ve entered a new season of gun violence of late. Each time a mass shooting takes place, we now rush to read the tea leaves for evidence of the shooter being from the Left or Right. And each time a shooter is found to have been politically motivated in some way, those on the other side stand ready with narratives prepared. And, oh, how the disingenuous self-righteousness then oozes forth! In fact, violence is committed by individuals all along the political spectrum. It serves no productive purpose to pretend otherwise. However, it’s also a fact that the majority of politically motivated murders committed in the U.S. are perpetrated by right-wing idealogues. It’s not even close. There are five right-wing motivated murders to every left-wing one . And, no, that’s not coming from some left-wing source. Those statistics were compiled by the right-leaning Cato Institute . Regardless, it doesn’t do any of us any good to dive into our respective narrative thickets each time a shooting ta...