Stop spreading lies: Truth, fairness and integrity still ought to matter

By David McElroy · November 12, 2012

Have you seen this chart being posted by various people in the last week? It purports to show that Barack Obama has issued more than 900 executive orders during his first term, which is said to be wildly out of proportion to every other president who’s used them.

The point is to show that Obama is ruling by fiat. He’s going around Congress and ruling more like a king. It looks pretty scary. The only problem is that it’s a lie. Everything about it is made up.

Here’s a look at the real numbers. Obama has actually issued 138 executive orders. George W. Bush had 173 during his first term, by comparison. Various other presidents have issued hundreds of them. Franklin Roosevelt actually issued more than 3,000 during his four terms, instead of the 11 that the chart gives him credit for.

As you know, I don’t care for Obama or any other president. You can imagine how happy I am about any executive order. But the facts of what Obama and other presidents have done is bad enough. There’s no reason to make things up. When people make up lies to support their attacks on politicians, they’re only hurting themselves in the long run.

When you make up lies such as this and spread it to your friends, you will certainly have some people rush to spread the lie — because people want to believe something negative is true about people they don’t like. But anybody who takes 10 seconds to do a search will find out that none of it is true. This makes the people who spread it look foolish, and it also damages the credibility of those who are legitimately attacking the politician.

When we make honest charges against Obama, those who support him can remember this case (and plenty of others like it) in which a search for the facts proved that the charge was false. That makes them tend to automatically reject evidence against the president, because they’ve seen that the people in the opposition have no respect for the truth.

There’s another kind of nutty lie going around right now, but it’s of a different kind. Some people are claiming that 15 states have filed petitions to withdraw from the United States. Although I would be thrilled if secession were really a serious possibility, nothing could be further from the truth. The only thing that’s going on is that random individuals in 15 states have started petitions at the White House petition website asking that their states be allowed to secede. The state governments themselves have nothing to do with these petitions. These are just random activists typing in their pajamas. They mean absolutely nothing. (See the bottom of this article for a graphic going around which purports to prove that 15 states are trying to secede.)

Truth matters. Being fair to your opponents should matter. More than anything, your integrity ought to matter. Quit spreading these sorts of lies. Protect your credibility and be fair to the people you oppose. Being honest helps all of us in the long run.

Hold yourself accountable for being honest and fair — and hold your allies accountable, too. It’s the credible thing to do. There’s enough to attack your opponents for without resorting to lies.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

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?

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