Different words of deception carry varying levels of gravity. A fib is when you tell your parents you have finished your homework when in fact you only finished by closing the school books. You will live with the consequences the next day in class. This writer fibbed his way through the early years, and had a tough reformation in high school. Morally, I feel admonished but not condemned. Hyperbole is simply an adult’s fib where one exaggerates the scope of a likely outcome by such a degree that everyone sees it for what it is; untrue but suggestive of either better or worse times or outcomes. And finally lie is to say something you know contradicts the truth, but has been presented as truth to improve your own estate. Lies are morally wrong. Hyperbole can be morally wrong if one calculates the listener is not prepared to discern the difference between truth and hyperbole. One can only conclude that is what our current national leadership thinks of the American people; too uninformed to sort out the truth from a firehose of hyperbole. Keep watering down the American people with hyperbole and soon they will be too soaked the discern the lie beneath the exaggerations.

Politicians should not be allowed to exploit ignorance. That said we, the American people have the obligation to continue our education into adulthood. Simply because so many people trade education for entertainment as they clear their schooling doesn’t mean our leaders have the moral license to lie through disingenuous hyperbole. But that, sadly, is the approach of the current administration. We may entertained ourselves into an autocracy but that does not excuse leadership’s exploitation of our cultural misstep. 

A Modest Proposal for Good

This one is not complicated. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me”. Fool us 1,000 or so times and that 17th century proverb stands dumbfounded. It is pretty hard to understand how low, we the electorate, must hold ourselves in our own estimation. The modest proposal for good is this. Political leadership’s first obligation is to provide the voters with the truth based on integrity. Hyperbole is to be cautiously reserved for those who can recognize the extent of the exaggeration. When it comes to this country’s complex economy and complex system of balances that is practically nobody. When a politician says something is ‘greater’ than it is you can assume a lie. Good is recognizing the Bully Pulpit is a sacred pedestal for education and not a stool with a megaphone for deception and petty retribution. As for us, the marks for this self-serving game, we must continue and extend our educations as best we can to learn and discern the difference between truth, hyperbole, and simple lie. That would be good. Fibbing, as we parents know, is for the children entering and learning from the morale universes of consequence.