The Bottomless Pit
There are always moments that leave me speechless. As much as I am able to throw more than enough words on a page, I struggle to speak when someone does something so brazen that it defies explanation. The right makes up stuff all the time, so that really shouldn’t be a shock, but I still find a way to come away surprised at how low they are willing to go.
Nevada happens to be the place we are talking about today. A unassuming elementary teacher passed away in 2017, but was never removed from the voting rolls. That became a problem when she somehow cast a ballot in the 2020 election.
Fox News does what Fox News does. This seemingly isolated case became proof that the election was stolen. Now, we probably shouldn’t talk about the mental gymnastics necessary to take one case and somehow extrapolate widespread fraud out of it. Hyper-partisan hacks will certainly take logical leaps in the interest of a good story. Heck, they’ll even make conclusions without all of the evidence.
That’s not the part that gets me. The part that gets me is how they put on the husband to talk about how peculiar it was that his wife’s absentee ballot was submitted. He went on talking about how it proves there is fraud. He should know about that because he’s the one that submitted it. After all, he is seen looking dead into the camera expressing how dumbfounded he is that someone would do this.
I suppose we tell ourselves lies all the time. It’s all a part of the mental gymnastics it takes to get through the day. Sure, I’ve only had one cup of coffee. Sure, it wasn’t me that ate the last of the cookies. Sure, I’m going to work out today to work off some of these extra calories. We might even speak those lies out loud to our loved ones.
What we don’t do is go on television and offer bald-faced lies in the interest of a national narrative. The makers of South Park have always had ways of stripping down our malarkey and leaving us naked before the world. They poked fun at families that did this when some of them are probably guilty of murder. Those people blamed it on a random Puerto Rican guy. It’s the same concept. It’s not enough to say I didn’t do it. They had to actively point the finger at someone else.
One can hardly blame right wing blowhards for jumping on something before getting all the facts. Sure, their explanations defy logic, but we’ve done that before. Maybe we haven’t broadcasted those assumptions to the world, but most of us don’t have that opportunity. What’s unfathomable is being the guilty party and being brazen enough to go on camera and point the finger at someone else. I’d be doing good to find a bunker and stay put until everything blows over. I guess some people are more shameless liars than others.