Echo ~ About lies and those who tell lies

It's highly likely that everybody lies. 

Indeed, anyone who claims they never lie are, well, lying.

Most people justify lying because they consider it a “white lie,” maybe done to spare someone’s feelings — “Oh, you look just fine” when a friend is looking rather haggard — or to avoid a lunch with someone you don’t want to eat with — “I’m sorry, but I have a conflict and just can’t make it.”The Hawk Eye
Longtime courts and crime reporter Andy Hoffman, who covered dozens of murder cases in the Kansas City area and now covers that beat for The Hawk Eye, (Iowa) is fond of saying, “Of course we report lies in . Everyone does.”

Ouch. Except he’s absolutely right. People lie to their spouses, to their children, to their parents, to their doctor and to their lawyer. So why wouldn’t they lie to a reporter? After all, reporters ask sources questions and then report what those sources tell them.

It’s also true, however, that journalists have built-in “smell tests” that raise red flags and often point them in a different direction to check out someone’s claim so they don’t publish lies if they can possibly help it. The old saying in journalism circles is, “If your mother says she loves you, find a way to confirm it.”

Lawyers, doctors, school teachers and ministers lie, but our current president has taken lying to a whole new level. 

Donald Trump lies about as often as he breathes, and he’s been a serial liar nearly his entire life. It’s his modus operandi.

Social scientist Bella DePaulo wrote an article headlined “I study liars. I’ve never seen one like Donald Trump,” for The Washington Post last December that was reprinted in the Chicago Tribune, both of which I assume Trump includes on his list of “fake news” sources.

DePaulo studied lies and liars for more than 20 years, and categorized lies as either self-serving to protect the liar from blame or some other undesired outcome, and kind, told to advantage, flatter or protect someone else.

She noted in the piece that according to the Post’s Fact Checker process, the president made 1,628 false or misleading claims, or outright flip-flops, in his first 298 days in office for an average of six per day. She noted that those are only the public comments he made, so if he also lies in private conversations that number could be far higher.

But she argues “the flood of deceit isn’t the most surprising finding about Trump.”

She cites a study of anonymous college students and community members who logged their lies and then broke them down as to whether they were self-serving or kind. 

By using that methodology, she wrote that 64 percent of Trump’s lies were self-serving, while under 10 percent of his lies were kind, told to advantage, flatter or protect someone else.

“Trump told 6.6 times as many self-serving lies as kind ones. That’s a much higher ratio than we found for our study participants, who told about double the number of self-centered lies compared with kind ones,” she wrote.

“The most stunning way Trump differed from our participants, though, was in their cruelty. An astonishing 50 percent of Trump’s lies were hurtful or disparaging.”

And yet 75 percent of white evangelical Christians, those people who claim to be “values voters,” still support this president, according to a recent poll by Public Religion Research Institute.

In an interview with Salon, religion author Reza Aslan, who wrote the bestselling “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” — which is a very interesting read, by the way — attempted to answer the big question: Why do those people continue to support a clearly racist, sexist, lecherous, pathologically lying facist?

Aslan has the bonafides to explain it. He holds a divinity degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara. It’s a bit complicated, but it makes sense.

With apologies to the author, I’m going to paraphrase his explanation: It’s partly because of fear in the white community that within two decades America will become the first nation on Earth to be a “majority minority.” In other words, white America will also be a minority, along with all the other races, ethnicities and religions in this great melting pot. That’s scary to many people with light skin tones and they’re looking for scapegoats, someone to blame. And along comes Trump, who plays to those fears and provides those scapegoats.

So it’s partly because of racism among white evangelical Christians, and it’s also partly because of the influence of the “prosperity gospel” of many evangelicals, ala Joel Osteen, who preaches material prosperity is a sign of God’s blessings and favor.

“This is the single most anti-scriptural version of Christianity you could ever come up with,” Aslan said. “Nothing could be further from what Jesus actually preached than ‘God wants you to be rich’.”

So some of that support is based on the fact that Trump is rich, so he must be blessed by God, right?

And here’s Aslan’s kicker: “There is nothing extraordinary or unique or permanent about the American system. It is hanging by a thread right now.”

Randy Miller is a retired city editor for The Hawk Eye. Readers can reach him at rmilleronmain@gmail.com.