Warning: Don’t trust in politicians; they’re always going to disappoint

By David McElroy · March 3, 2012

I was checking out at a store Friday when I handed the cashier a box containing individual items that she needed to count in order to charge me for. I told her there were six of them and she rang it up without checking.

“Well, if you’re going to take my word for it without looking, there were really only two,” I jokingly said to her.

“Oh, you wouldn’t lie to me,” she said quite seriously and confidently. “I can tell. Most people would, but you wouldn’t.”

My first reaction was to be grateful that someone could see my sterling character all the way through the fat and ugly exterior. It’s kind of nice to be trusted, isn’t it? And to be honest, this is something I’ve heard strangers say to me all my life. I seem to have a trustworthy-looking face.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that her reaction wasn’t really that great. In fact, it’s the sort of poor judgment people use all the time when they turn their lives over to politicians who they’ve decided they can trust.

Have you ever heard someone say — of a politician or actor or someone else they’ve never met — “I really like him”? We all seem to make instant, intuitive judgments about people, and we’re oddly sure that our judgments are correct, even if it’s absurd for other people to make such silly snap judgments.

People jump to conclusions about politicians and they’re eager to turn their lives and futures over to such quick judgments. If there’s one thing that my two decades of working closely with politicians taught me, it’s that voters tend to trust the wrong people.

I’ve worked for candidates who I didn’t really even trust and heard voters talk about how trustworthy those candidates are. They weren’t necessarily stupid people, but they were inclined to believe surface-level indicators that didn’t necessarily mean a lot.

Polls show that most people have little trust for politicians in general or for Congress or just about any political body you can think of, but they’re oddly trusting of their own representatives, especially if they’ve ever voted for the person. The odd reasoning seems to be that politicians aren’t to be trusted, but their representative is different. He’s the rare trustworthy “statesman” who’s only serving for the good of the people. Yes, a large proportion of people honestly believe this.

Even if you’re silly enough to still favor any politician (or any government), remember that you’re likely to be a victim of the same thing. No matter how much you think of a politician, remember that he’s human and that you’re seeing what you want to see in him — at least to some extent.

I suggest that you don’t trust any politician or any government, but if you’re going to stick with the majoritarian system, at least remember that the people you trust are going to betray and disappoint you. They can’t help it. They’re human beings.

I’d prefer you walk away from a system that hands the power to some to wield over others. If you insist on choosing someone to favor, though, at least check out every single thing the person says — so you’ll know more quickly when you’ve been had.

Just remember that if a politician tells you it’s raining, go to the window and see for yourself — and be sure to ask yourself what motivation he might have to be lying. Despite that trusthworthy face and confident grin, you’re probably dealing with a psychopathic liar.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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