By Derek Franklin
“People ask me, why is it so hard to trust the government? The real question is, why is it so hard for the government to tell the truth.” (Anonymous)
President Biden has had to endure a seemingly unending string of criticisms for the decision to end the US military occupation in Afghanistan after 20 long years. To be fair, some of the criticisms are accurate and some are not.
However, the criticisms, from the left and the right, obscure a more prominent issue. The issue being the lies the government told about the war’s progress.
On December 9, 2019, The Washington Post published, “The Afghanistan Papers.” The long-form literary piece provided a detailed account of how senior government officials lied about the military’s progress in the war in Afghanistan.
They took what is most precious to this country – its “blood and treasure” – and wasted it in an unwinnable conflict.
But this should come as no surprise. For the government routinely lies about a great many things because it has no regard or respect for its citizens.
To the government, we’re pawns to be sacrificed on the chessboard of life to protect the “king.” We’re no better than human batteries to be used up and discarded. If not that, then we’re cannon fodder to be sent halfway around the world to help politicians present themselves as tough guys while defense contractors get rich.
1. Education
Take education. Since the creation of the Department of Education under the Carter administration, the nation’s educational progress has gone in the wrong direction. Major urban cities lead the way downward.
Take Chicago, which is typical of educational levels across the urban US. The National Educational Assessment of Progress (the nation’s report card) details chilling statistics. As of the 2019 school year, 69% of Chicago fourth graders scored below Proficient in Mathematics while 76% score below Proficient in Reading.
“Proficient” basically means performing at grade level. Eighth graders fared worse with 73% testing below Proficient in Mathematics and 77% testing below Proficient in Reading.
Yet too many Americans are focused on banning Critical Race Theory from public school curriculums. Rather, they should be paying attention to the lies told by politicians and the teacher’s unions. Lies like that public schools are actually educating its students, preparing them to function in the world at large.
Because of the lockdowns many parents are finally waking up to the failures of the public school system because they were able to hear, in real time, the complete nonsense their kids were being taught.
2. COVID-19
Consider COVID-19. The government, especially at the federal level, completely botched the handling of the pandemic.
In email correspondence in February 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease said, “Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading [an] infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infraction.”
Later, Fauci admitted to lying about masks when he said, “We were concerned about the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people, namely, the healthcare workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in harm’s way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected.”
Information about the vaccines mirrored that of masks. First it was ‘take the vaccine and you won’t get COVID-19.’ Then it became ‘take the vaccine because, if you catch the virus, your symptoms will be less severe.’ Next it was ‘the effectiveness of the vaccine only lasts about 7 or 8 months.’
More so, the Johnson & Johnson and Moderna COVID vaccines have only been granted emergency use authorization. However, they’re largely sold as having full FDA approval by healthcare workers administering the shots and the corporate media who polly-parrot CDC talking points.
3. Obamacare
Consider Obamacare. The healthcare bill, passed in March 2010, was President Obama’s signature legislation. However, Obama won PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year” award for 2013 for his “If you like your healthcare, you can keep it” lie.
Moreover, in October 2013 a video showed the principal architect of Obamacare, MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, admitting he essentially lied to ensure the healthcare legislation passed. A Chicago Tribune op-ed entitled “Obamacare was sold on a pack of lies” stated that Obamacare “constitutes the ultimate vindication of the charge that Obamacare was sold on a pack of lies.”
Gruber went on to admit that Obamacare would lead to a massive wealth transfer, which had to be hidden from the American people. He added, “if you had a law which…made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.”
4. Afghanistan
And this brings us to the war in Afghanistan. So many lies surround this war it would take an encyclopedia volume to include them all.
In 2015, Douglas Lutte, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan czar during the Bush and Obama administrations said, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan – we didn’t know what we were doing.”
He went on to say, “if the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction…2,400 lives lost.” Of course, Lutte passed the buck by blaming US military failures on bureaucratic red tape between Congress, the Pentagon, and the State Department.
Furthermore, “The Afghanistan Papers” detail a long history of US Presidents, military commanders, and diplomats lying to the American people by assuring them our military was making progress in the war.
Military officials routinely and deliberately misled the public by distorting statistics to make it look like the US was winning the war when we weren’t. Bob Crowley was an Army Colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to US military commanders in 2013 and 2014. He said, “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
Since the beginning of the war about 800,000 troops have deployed to Afghanistan with some deploying multiple times. More than 2,300 soldiers perished there and about 21,000 were wounded in action according to Defense Department figures.
Moreover, the cost of the war is shocking. Since the beginning of the conflict in 2001, the US government has spent some $2 trillion dollars. That’s $274 million dollars per day. That equates to someone hitting the lottery power ball every day for 20 years straight.
Our politicians and military officials take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. However, they routinely break that oath by lying to the people they’re supposed to serve and protect.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we have to conclude that the biggest enemy of the American people is the government.
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