To the editor:
How many lies are the leaders of the American Right going to be allowed to tell or enable before people finally realize just what lengths the Right will go to in its quest to regain power?
But perhaps even more importantly, how is it so many Americans are so gullible and easily duped?
During the heated debate over health care reform, a concept I strongly supported even if I am now less than pleased with the final product, Sarah Palin lied when she told the American people that "Obama-care" would result in the formation of government-overseen "death panels" with the authority to decide who lives and who dies.
She went so far, shamefully in my opinion, to suggest that her own toddler son, Trig, an adorable kid born with Down syndrome, could be ordered euthanized by such a "death panel" because he and people like him would be deemed not cost effective, given their unique health care needs.
It was not just fiction, it was an outright lie. But millions of Americans, especially in the then-emerging Tea Party movement, accepted Sister Sarah's whopper as gospel.
Sister Sarah's partner in lies and distortions of truth, Minnesota's own Eva Peron, aka Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, ran around her state and the country lying to people about the 2010 Census. She urged Americans not to fill out the Census because it was all a plot by the Obama-maniacs to identify political opponents of our socialist, Muslim, not-really-born-in-the-USA president so that, at a later date, they could be rounded up and shipped off to the secret concentration camps being built around the country.
Like the "death panels" lie, the "Census" lie was utterly bogus. Yet millions of Americans bought it, hook, line, and sinker.
Funny thing though; after one of her staff clued her in on the fact that the Census is a key tool in determining how congressional districts are formed, Minnesota's Eva Peron became a born-again Census believer.
The list of these kinds of lies told by the leaders of the American Right goes on:
Anyone who watched Glenn Beck's "I Have a Scheme" rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial the last weekend in August saw Beck preach about the need to restore "honor" and "integrity" to America.
But I couldn't help but sit up and take notice when Beck, while talking about George Washington, claimed he had recently held in his hands Washington's handwritten, first inaugural address housed at the National Archives, and what an "inspiring" experience it was.
It was a bold-faced lie, and I knew it. No one, except highly trained curators and preservationists, ever gets to touch such precious historical documents. Finally, a spokesperson for the National Archives, speaking on background, acknowledged, thanks to the influence of a powerful GOP member of Congress, that Beck was given a VIP tour of the facility and that he "viewed" Washington's handwritten inaugural address but that, at no time, did he even touch the document, let alone hold it in his hands.
Ah, the lies the Right will tell in its pursuit of power. It might be truly funny, if so many Americans weren't so bloody gullible and so easily duped.
MICHAEL COOK
Gloucester
