"Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them." Al Franken was not exaggerating.

In early 2003, Al Franken published his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. As a fan of Franken's, I read the book with great interest, assuming it would be a biting, hilarious satire.  To my surprise, while the book was biting and often funny, it was a well-documented piece of non-fiction.  The title, which I had assumed was hyperbole, turned out to be a deadly accurate summary of the actual state of play in American politics.

The book destabilized my assumptions about political discourse.  I always figured that people would spin the facts to favor their own conclusions, but, in the United States, I thought that prominent figures would not stoop to straight-out lying on important matters -- if only because they knew they would get caught and would suffer adverse consequences.  But Franken showed that the most prominent right-wingers lied repeatedly to advance their interests, and got away with it.

Still, I hoped that this "ends justify the means" approach had not gone beyond the best-known commentators and politicos.  Later in the year, however, I learned that it was the modus operandi of the hard right, at least when it came to the cultural struggle over sexual orientation.  As chair of the Citizens Advisory Committee on Family Life and Human Development, appointed by the Montgomery County (Maryland) Board of Education, I presided over discussions about the inclusion in the secondary school health education curriculum of material on sexual orientation.  The Committee included some people who were very conservative, including one who repeatedly presented "information" which was demonstrably false.  This advocate did not simply look at the facts through a different prism, but rather presented as fact things that had long been rejected by every mainstream American medical and mental health professional association.

Throughout 2003 and well into 2004, I spent countless hours examining the "studies" which purported to conclude that being gay was a disease, that it was caused by abuse, that people could choose to change their sexual orientation, and that gay people could not possibly have healthy and happy lives.  At every turn, I discovered (often with the help of medical professionals on the Committee) that these studies had no scientific validity and that they almost invariably were funded by right-wing religious groups which decided, as a matter of theology, that these things were true.  When the facts did not fit their theories -- which was constantly -- they simply ignored the facts, the realities of actual people's actual lives. At every turn, I was able to show this to my fellow Committee members, and the Committee votes were overwhelmingly in favor of presenting the facts as found by our mainstream medical professionals.  And after a long struggle -- which included an ambush lawsuit and later a second lawsuit for which we were prepared and resoundingly won, as well as foot-dragging by people within the school system who admitted to us that we were right, but were afraid to challenge the small group of right-wingers  -- we finally succeeded in securing a good health education program.  A fuller account of the history of this successful struggle may be found here.

What we have seen with Donald Trump, those who serve him, and, it turns out, at least one person he wishes to put on the Supreme Court, is the triumph of lies over facts.  Not "alternative facts," as Kellyanne Conway posited, but lies.  Not spin, but falsehood.  Brett Kavanaugh demonstrably lied about his relationship with alcohol and the kind of person it turned him into -- facts relevant to the question of whether he, in fact, sexually assaulted Christine Blasey. See here. The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last Thursday, and the sworn statements of multiple high school and college contemporaries of Kavanaugh's (statements the FBI chose to ignore), I believe made it clear to anyone who would choose to be open minded that Kavanaugh was lying.  But lying has become the coin of the realm in American politics -- at least on the Republican side.  What I witnessed and dealt with on a local level in Montgomery County in the beginning of this century was the approach that the Corporate and Social Warrior Right Wing used to achieve power a decade later. 

Turning this around will be hard, but we owe it to ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren to try as hard as we can.