October 29, 2014 09:09 AM UTC

The Year of the Lie

• 12 Comments
• by: Jason Bane

Republican Cory Gardner’s campaign for Senate often refers to 2014 as an “historic” election year, for reasons that are as vague as Gardner’s policy positions. Normally I might scoff at the very idea of ascribing such a lofty adjective to this election cycle – after all, 2014 will not be the first year that the United States re-arranges its makeup of white dudes in Congress – but the more I consider the label, the more considerable I find the history. I believe Gardner is correct when he says this is an historic election, but not for reasons that have anything to do with Senate majorities and minorities.

Anyone who engages in politics as career or hobby is destined to feel cynical about the whole process at some point; I recognize this, but it’s not cynicism that has skewed my perception of this election. No, this is about deception. This is dishonesty, fraud, and sham on a level I have personally never encountered before – and from what I read and hear, I am not alone.

I cannot recall another time when candidates so brazenly dismissed their own past and bulldozed their own words with such disregard. I hate to use the word, “lie,” because it has become so cliché to declare that our politicians are a bunch of fibbers, but there’s no other word that is more appropriate here. The lies have been suffocating in their consistency, from candidates who will lie about anything, to anyone, at any time.
GEORGE WASHINGTON HAS LEFT THE BUILDING

The United States Congress is already the most disliked and distrusted organization that has ever been measured by public surveys. The current Congress has worked less and achieved less than any prior body before. The 2014 election has helped illustrate the problem: How could anyone expect to negotiate with the likes of Gardner when you quite literally have no idea in what he actually believes? You can only guess at the real answer on any subject other than the career ascendency of Cory Gardner. Yet now, here we are, potentially sending a man to the U.S. Senate to represent Colorado even though we really haven’t a clue what he’ll do if he gets there.

I like to think of myself as a generally optimistic person, yet I am confronted with a magnitude of lies that I hadn’t though possible outside of novels and North Korea. I take some relief, I suppose, in knowing that I’m not alone. Kansas City Star columnist Barbara Shelly recently wrote a blistering rebuke of Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, who is seeking re-election by any means necessary. Here’s the lede to that column:

All politicians spin. They exaggerate and make selective use of facts and data. These are the tricks of the trade.

But I have never seen a public official lie as easily and as relentlessly as Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback. [emphasis mine] 

That sounds harsh, and it is possible that Brownback actually believes his own mythology. But much of what he has told the citizens of Kansas is flat out wrong.

Shelly continues by listing a page of whoppers that Brownback repeats as gospel. It doesn’t matter that most of Brownback’s lies have been debunked a dozen times over—he keeps repeating them, because he knows that there are still plenty of people who want to believe that their elected officials are guided by an actual belief in something.

It’s important to remember that these aren’t opinions we’re discussing. Gardner and Brownback lie confidently about established facts – the kind that Siri or Google could answer in about 20 seconds. Brownback likes to say that there was just $876 in the state treasury when he took over as Governor in 2011. In fact, he has repeated this line in three different state-of-the-state addresses. Shelly says that the story is “complete hokum,” and that Kansas had $251 million in its bank account when Brownback took charge. This information is public record – anybody can look it up.

This is not to discredit politicians in general. I know many elected officials, on both sides of the aisle, who are genuine people with examined positions on important issues. But increasingly we are seeing elected officials the likes of Brownback and Gardner, for whom words are merely a vessel to deliver them to their chosen destinations. These are men who solve a Rubik’s Cube by removing the stickers. They don’t seek the satisfaction of solving a difficult puzzle; their just want you to believe that they solved it.

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE PERSONHOOD

Gardner has proven to be an adept liar on many subjects, but he takes lying to a new level when it comes to the Personhood issue. When Gardner smiles smugly and tells reporters, “there is no federal personhood bill,” he speaks with such conviction that you begin to wonder if he is unaware that, a) there really is a federal personhood bill, and b) Gardner is a co-sponsor of that very legislation.

Gardner’s penchant for lies has long since reached the point where mainstream journalists are becoming visibly irritated. In a now-infamous interview with Fox 31 in Denver, reporter Eli Stokols repeatedly asks Gardner about why he remains a co-sponsor of the federal “Life at Conception Act.” Gardner continually interrupts Stokols with the same talking points:

“The facts are, Eli, that there is no federal personhood bill.

“There is no federal personhood bill.”

Stokols eventually begins to ask – before being interrupted again – if Gardner thinks he can make the issue go away just by saying, “there is no federal personhood bill,” over and over again. It would all be comical if it weren’t so disconcerting. Gardner looks you right in the eye, stretches his smile as wide as possible, and then says…words.

Truth? Fiction? Who cares? Did you like the answer?

A few weeks later, in a debate aired by 9News in Denver, moderators Brandon Rittiman and Kyle Clark had no intention of listening to Gardner lie to them. Clark, in fact, gained some national attention for refusing to let Gardner dictate the Q&A session:

“We are not going to debate [the federal personhood bill] here tonight because it’s fact. It would seem that a charitable interpretation would be that you have a difficult time admitting when you’re wrong and a less charitable interpretation is that you’re not telling us the truth.

“Which is it?”

This time, Gardner responded to Clark with a different lie. Co-sponsoring the federal “Life at Conception Act,” said Gardner, is “simply a statement that I support life.” Sure. And when President George W. Bush said that Iraq was hiding “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” he merely meant it as a metaphor.

It seems there is no issue where Gardner won’t ignore the truth altogether. In one of his earlier TV ads this fall, Gardner smiles on TV while calling himself a champion of Renewable Energy. “I co-wrote the law to launch our state’s green energy industry,” he says while smiling to the camera. The Associated Press looked into the legislation that Gardner referenced. No words were minced:

GOP Senate candidate Cory Gardner, framed by sunflowers and wind turbines, tells voters in a campaign ad this week that he co-wrote a law to launch Colorado’s green-energy economy. He leaves out that the law was repealed five years later, deemed useless for not enabling a single project.

Whoops! Big mistake, right? Not when you have no intention of telling the truth anyway. Not only did Gardner’s campaign leave that ad on the air…they later produced a second ad touting his clean energy bonafides.

Perhaps Gardner really is a proponent of cleaner forms of energy. I don’t know that he knows, or that he cares either way. Did you believe the ads? Did they make you want to vote for Gardner? That’s the only point here.

AND HOW ARE WE FEELING TODAY?

Former President Bill Clinton was famous for his “I feel your pain” moments on the stump. Gardner is more of an, “Are you in pain?” kind of politician. It is a question that is meant to convey emotion – to show that he cares. Jack-o-lanterns aren’t this hollow.

There was a particularly disgusting example of this in March, when Politico reporter Manu Raju was following Gardner on the stump. This really happened:

A woman on a breathing tube made clear that she was relying on Medicaid to survive.

“I was on my death bed, literally,” she told Gardner. “It kept me alive.”

“We got to protect Medicaid,” Gardner told her.

Asked about that episode later, Gardner made clear he opposed Colorado’s move to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. [emphasis mine] “I don’t know how Colorado is going to pay for it,” he said.

I’ve often wondered if that woman remembers this conversation or has any idea that Gardner didn’t mean what he said. She was not identified by name in the story.
HISTORY IN THE MAKING?

When Cory Gardner’s campaign says that 2014 is an historic election, I am inclined to agree. If Gardner and a handful of other fantastic fibbers around the country end up winning on Election Day, it will validate this strategy of blatant dishonesty. It will show other politicians, current and future, that it is possible to win election to the highest offices in the land by lying about everything. Why stretch the truth when you can just obliterate it altogether?

If it happens in 2014, it will happen again, and again, and again. You’re kidding yourself if you don’t think there are future politicians watching Gardner and telling themselves, “I could do that for six months if it gets me elected.”

It’s probably fair to say that most Americans don’t expect much from politicians…but can’t we expect more from them as people?

I will always remember 2014 as the Year of the Lie.

I hope I will also remember it as a failed experiment.

Jason Bane is the founder of ColoradoPols.com. Sometimes he writes in the first-person perspective.