Another Day, Another Lie

So, here is how my life has been going lately. It seems like almost everyone and almost everything is lying to me. It’s hard to get used to, but once you do, it’s easy to ignore the big liar in the White House and all the little liars around him.

Sound paranoid? Well, it all started a few days ago when my old, out-of-date, no longer supported Safari search engine vanished from my computer desktop.

Now my computer is a little old - five years in computer terms is about 80 years in human years - but I was happy with it. All the sites I wanted to go to were bookmarked, I could search for a lot of things without annoying pop-up ads, and - most important to this blog - all I had to do was click on “blog” and up it came.

Then, one morning, it was gone.

                                                      So, What To Do?

I tried three other search engines, and none of them would let me connect to my own blog. One came close, but asked me for a password I had long forgotten. No problem, it offered to text a code to  me, but I needed another password for that.

Still no problem, it would send the access code to my cell phone. But the number hint it gave - 13 were the last numbers on the phone, the hint said - did not match my cell phone, our land line,  my wife’s cell, my tech-savvy daughters cells or any other familiar number.

So, I gave up pretending to be a Luddite, dug into the file that stored all the apps on my computer, and simply lifted Safari to the appropriate dock. Presto. The lie that it was gone was, well, gone.

So, then I heard about Paul Manafort being charged by the FBI with lying and breaking his plea agreement. Then I heard from the President that we used a “very mild” form of tear gas to protect our troops from babies in diapers on the Mexican border - turns out the troops only have one kind of tear gas, the regular kind - and then my cell phone rang.

Now I hate unsolicited advertising when I am called at home. I like it even less when I am driving and my phone is on speaker. And a recorded voice told me not to hang up, that it was not an ad, and that I qualified to get a $100 credit card, apparently just for being me.

So I hung up. Didn’t get into a traffic accident. Didn’t get a ticket. And did get another call, telling me how much I could save on my insurance.

And I remembered some politician in Washington telling me that the government does not have the power to regulate those kinds of calls, and the wireless networks telling me they can’t legally block those calls, and some other politician telling me I have to be a smarter shopper, ignoring the fact that phone contracts have shelf lives a lot longer than bananas or bottles of milk in the refrigerator.  

                            And Just Who Is Keeping Those Calls Coming?                                

And, hey, forget about all those contributions from the tech sector that go to the politicians who could change the rules and eliminate those nuisance calls almost overnight, but somehow don’t get around to it.

Then I heard that auto factories around the country are going to close and cost tens of thousands of jobs, and that the national debt is growing faster than ever before, and that those barefoot immigrants are headed to Mississippi to vote illegally for Democrats. Trump and Fox News said those things were betrayals, and that it was all the fault of the Federal Reserve Chairman, who Trump had appointed before finding out just how bad he was.

But, good news, the immigrants have no money and can’t walk that fast. What they should do, the President said, is just wait and come into the country legally. Do it the right way. Lots of people are saying that.

Then some news reporter said the government was processing a hundred amnesty applications a week, and that there were 5,000 people waiting to come into the United States from that border hot spot. So, I did the math in my head, and if nobody else joins the crowd, it will take almost a year for them all to get in, assuming that they all qualify.

So, who will feed them and house them and cloth them and take care of their medical needs? After all, many fled from the terror of their home country with just the clothes on their backs.

Well, let’s see? Could it be Mexico? I wonder why that nation isn’t cooperating with our border patrols as well as it could.

But, it is. Donald Trump told me so. That was a few days after Mitch McConnell told me that our Congress should work to be more bipartisan next year, reaching across the aisle and cooperating. That was right after he said there was still time to approve a few more Republican judges before Congress adjourns.

See how easy it is to live with liars?