Pants on Fire
Everything you are about to read is 100% true.
It will be overwritten and under-edited. It will try too hard to be clever at times.
But it will be honest.
Which is important because I want to talk about liars and their filthy, filthy lies.
Not long ago, my wife and I “enjoyed” a sort of dirtbag double feature.
First, we watched the very excellent She Said, a film about Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey, the two female journalists who broke the Harvey Weinstein story for The New York Times back in 2017.
We followed that up with the Netflix documentary series, MADOFF: The Monster of Wall Street.
My hot take: white men drunk on greed and power are the worst.
Who would have guessed?
But I was genuinely shocked by the extent and endurance of their bullshit. Harvey and Bernie did horrible things and tried to bury their crimes under piles and piles of lies.
And it worked. For DECADES.
Their lies weren’t necessarily brilliant, but they were both lucky enough to be surrounded by people who weren’t interested in looking too hard for the truth.
Greed has a habit of fogging up our morality glasses.
Folks in the Weinstein & Madoff inner (and outer) circles had money and movies to make. Those people got rich and famous and looked every other way except the right way.
Look, I understand how lies work. Once you start, you just can’t stop. Momentum builds. A web is woven.
But it’s like these two guys kept hitting the snooze button on a time bomb.
Eventually, there’s going to be an explosion. Shit WILL hit the fan.
Lies are flimsy and dangerous. So building an empire/legacy on top of them makes about as much sense as using Jenga blocks for the legs of your fancy beach house.
They HAD to know they would get caught.
Waking up every morning wondering if today would be the day? Speed walking in a zigzag pattern everywhere hoping to dodge the return trips of all those bullshit boomerangs? Flinching every time the phone rings? That’s a horrible way to live.
Dishonesty takes a toll.
Just look at the face of George Santos.
The controversial U.S. Representative from New York has been on a whopper of a BS bender for a while now. When he isn’t running away from cameras and questions, he just marinates in his own awkwardness with a pained expression like he’s had a pants-related accident.
I don’t understand how his make-believe resumé held up enough to get him elected, but I know for sure why he hasn’t been run out of the House in a hurry.
Because Santos is great for Republicans in particular and politicians in general.
Everybody knows he’s going down, it’s just a matter of when. But in the meantime, the longer he stays, the more cover he provides for the hundreds of more discreet, career liars around him.
Don’t worry, when the Santos story shifts into full “public shaming” mode, politicians will be ready with stones in hand.
George Santos will be branded an all-caps LIAR. A ridiculous fabricator. A fraud and a clown. He will be savaged by wild packs of talking heads and “tsked” by ordinary, hard-working folks everywhere.
And then politicians will line up to show us THEIR diplomas, invite us to THEIR churches and distribute PowerPoint presentations of notarized documents proving THEY would never, ever lie about where they went to school, who they worked for or what sports they are good at.
They will ask, “What kind of MONSTER distorts the truth like that?”
They will cross their hearts and hope to die. They will swear on their children’s lives.
They will look us dead in the eyes when they say, “Honesty is the best policy.”
And we’ll believe them.
