For way longer than I suspect most likely people have been engaging in spin and manipulation of language for the purpose of deception. Here we have the president’s spokesperson obviously lying, answering questions that weren’t asked, dodging questions, making statements instead of giving answers, etc. And all thoughtful people are dutifully confounded by how this is allowed to happen much less continue to happen as long as it has in this shared, nightmarish, national farce of ours.

However those same pretentiously thoughtful people should examine the kind of bullshit they’ve tolerated, endorsed, sanctioned, reprinted, published, syndicated, aired, or even produced themselves.

When one opens the door to deceit the game is over. Or I should say rather that the game is just beginning. Because what you have in that case sadly is merely a game, a poor substitute for the sincere pursuit of truth; a game that we see like those on television where the only kind of cheating that isn’t vigorously encouraged is the kind that gets you caught. In other words cheating is absolutely okay; it’s the getting caught that is wrong. The former is called “playing hard”. The latter is called “cheating”.

So for every conservative idiot who holds her nose while Sarah Huckabee Sanders says two plus two equals five I would say that the door that is now widely ajar was first opened by the likes of Frank Luntz, Richard Nixon, Newt Gingrich, and way earlier than that. But I’m just talking about this country right now and this era. When you start to trade the truth for mere victory, however insignificant it might seem at the time, you then breach the dam and it becomes only a matter of time until the value of truth is lost entirely and all gravity is gone.