http://www.nationalreview.com/node/428918/print Habitual Liar Lies Habitually
By Kevin D. Williamson — December 22, 2015
The proposition that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a committed liar hardly need be litigated in the fact-check columns. It is as plain as her surname. It is practically syllogistic: All Clintons are liars, Herself is a Clinton, ergo . . .
The specific lie here is Herself’s claim that Donald Trump’s boobish pronouncements are used in ISIS recruiting videos. This isn’t true. Even Trump, a habitual liar who wouldn’t know the truth if it were printed in gigantic gilt letters across a second-rate hotel tower in Las Vegas, knows that this isn’t true. So: Habitual liar lies habitually about habitual liar, who demands apology. Not the most edifying spectacle in American public life, but what the hell do you expect from an encounter between these two great hemorrhoids on the body politic?
Here’s the thing, though: You can’t tell lies. Even about a lying cretin like Donald Trump.
Never mind the question of personal character: Judging a Clinton–Trump conflict on character grounds is like judging the Iran–Iraq war on human-rights grounds — one wants both sides to lose. Never mind what this says about Herself’s fitness for the presidency: We all know that she is morally, ethically, and intellectually unfit for the job. She’s unfit to manage a Walmart in Muleshoe, Texas. She’s unfit to have a route delivering the Buck County Courier Times. From cattle futures to bimbo eruptions to Internet auteurs inspiring terror attacks in Benghazi, anybody who is paying any attention understands that Herself’s relationship with the truth is a lot like her relationship with the Big Creep: all politics, a marriage of convenience.
This isn’t about Herself. This is about democracy.
Democracy is not our form of government; it is an aspect of our form of government, and an important one. A republic without representative processes and democratic norms is no republic at all. Those democratic norms do not require that the capital-P People prevail — in fact, the best aspects of our constitutional order, such as the Bill of Rights, ensure that the People do not prevail when the People do not deserve to, e.g. when the People are having a bout of buffoonery. (The Bill of Rights: Top Ten Things You Idiots Don’t Get to Vote on.) But democratic norms do require that the People have a meaningful say in the debate, and there is no meaningful debate without at least a few agreed-upon facts. Debates have to take account of the real world.
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