Whatever happened to the truth?

Our current political leadership, including the Executive and Legislative branches of government, is currently reeling so badly due to lies, cover-ups and deceptions, that their very ability to govern has been brought into question. Looking back historically, few, if any, administrations have been so cavalier with not being forthright with the American people as this one.

It all began, obviously, with the President's questioned victory in 2000. One of the few times in American history when a President who got fewer actual votes than his opponent won the election. The key state in that election was Florida and their infamous chad ballots.

Then came the Iraqi war and the presence of weapons of mass destruction to justify the war. As we now all know, no WMDs were ever found and experts at the time questioned their existence. One of the great failings of the human condition is that people tend to see only what they want to see. We tend to look only for evidence that supports our already arrived at conclusions and simply ignore any evidence that points to the contrary. That appears to be what the current administration did in attempting to convince Americans that this war had to be fought.

After the war began, the Administration was desperate to convince the American people that this war was justified. There was significant opposition to the war from the very beginning and that opposition continued to increase as American casualties and deaths were incurred. To make sure that we only received the kinds of pictures of the war that they wanted us to see, the Pentagon began to stage-manage the words and images surrounding the war. All of us remember the Jessica Lynch saga, the 19 year old female private from Palestine, West Virginia who the Pentagon said had received stab wounds, and bullet wounds singled-handedly defending herself after her fellow soldiers had been killed during an insurgent ambush in which the vehicle she was riding wrecked. The Pentagon tale was that she fought the enemy until her gun was empty, receiving the aforementioned wounds in the process, and was then captured and taken to a hospital where she was slapped around during tough interrogations. She was eventually rescued by the heroic acts of Army Rangers and Navy Seals who stormed the hospital she was in, in the heart of enemy territory and whisked her away.

Of course, none of this actually happened. The only injuries Lynch received were injuries related to the accident of her vehicle. Lynch herself said that she was knocked unconscious when the accident occurred and, consequently, was in no position to defend herself or fire her weapon. The stage-managed rescue occurred after the insurgents had fled the hospital. The rescue team met no resistance at all because there was no resistance there. But the Pentagon didn't tell us any of this.

Then came the truth about the death of Pat Tillman, a professional football player with the Arizona Cardinals, who walked out on a $3.6 million contract with the team to defend his country. He was killed in action, defending his country, according to the Pentagon. It was only months later that the truth emerged that he was, in fact, killed by friendly fire, and was not engaging the enemy. His father, Patrick Tillman, was quoted as saying that "they blew up their own poster boy," and that high-ranking Army officials told "outright lies" because they were more concerned with using Tillman's death to support their cause than they were in telling the truth.

There are many other instances of this kind of behavior. The problem should be obvious. Our government has gotten into the habit of lying to us, either to put a better face on whatever situation they're facing or because a lie is always easier than the truth. And the problem with this should be obvious.

When anyone lies to you, even once, how can you ever know in the future when they're telling the truth? One lie puts a thought in our mind that the next story or alibi or explanation might be a lie as well. And when we find ourselves in that situation, trust is gone.

Lies damage personal relationships, often beyond repair, because we find ourselves questioning everything the other person says to us. It works the same way when our government does it too. How can we believe anything they say when it's apparently so easy for them to lie?

Do the American people understand what's going on or are they oblivious? Or worse, do they not even care? A recent Gallup poll suggests we do know and we do care.

Even though the public perception, because of the news media primarily, is that the President is a "popular" leader or even a "very popular" leader. The most recent poll, however, suggests otherwise. His approval rating has plunged to the lowest level of any president since World War II at this particular point in his second term.

All other presidents who served a second term had approval ratings well above 50 percent in the months following their election. Bush's current approval rating is 45 percent, well below the next lowest rating of 56 percent with Ronald Reagan in 1985.

These people are our leaders. We expect the truth from them. We all know that there is secret information they can't tell us about or that they need to color a certain way.

But when they use elective and appointive office to run nothing more than a public relations campaign that puts them in the best light and they only way they can do that is by lying to the American people, then that goes beyond the pale. Americans deserve better from their leaders.

Pat Tillman's dad said that the path to true patriotism is confronting your government when it lies.