Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
Abraham Lincoln
Oh, the fibs are flying these days! Brian Williams commits the journalist’s version of “Stolen Valor;” Lance Armstrong drives drunk, crashes and says his girlfriend was at the wheel; and Tom Brady has nooooo idea what happened to his footballs. Really……… REALLY??
Of course not… which makes these lies all the more embarrassing. People, according to Lincoln, are not stupid. At least not all at the same time. It is so easy these days to get to the truth of some matters, with video clips, audio recordings, photos and eyewitnesses, not to mention good old-fashioned common sense.
The temptation to lie seems to be rooted in an instinct to make a person look better, in some way. It might not even matter to others, but to the liar, it’s important. My professor at The New School cautioned our class on plagiarizing, saying that it’s better to hand in nothing at all, rather than a paper that’s been plagiarized. The software to detect it is sophisticated, and she had caught one of her students trying to pass off a paper that wasn’t his. He was expelled from the school.
In the case of a known liar like Lance Armstrong, the hits just keep on coming! He got himself into trouble when he drove his car into some parked cars (“Lance had a little bit to drink”) and then sent his girlfriend scurrying in the snow wearing 6” heels to apologize to the owners of the cars. She said it was all her fault, they would pay for repairs, and then she and Lance took off. The police quickly got to the bottom of things and announced that it was Lance who was the drunk driver. What a guy.
Tell the truth, as best you can, and as often as you can. It’s easier. It’s classier. If you can’t do that, then remember what George Washington said: “It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”