They Can’t Handle The Truth
Back in 1992, we all felt our hearts race as that pivotal A Few Good Men line rang out like thunder from Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Nathan Jessup to Tom Cruise’s military lawyer Daniel Kaffee. “You can’t handle the truth!”
That line, that line of thinking, was at the heart of the plot. That lying was ok, righteous even, if done to protect some greater, believed-to-be-noble endeavor.
Obviously, it was total bullshit in a movie, and even more of a bovine bowel movement in real life. Lying helps no one, with the possible exception of someone planning a surprise party. Actions taken in service of a lie are even worse.
Yet we live with them daily. For years we have been disabused of the naïve notion that our leaders, our legislators have even a passing acquaintance with the truth. Hell, we just survived an administration led by the personification of grift, graft, subterfuge, mistruths, half truths, misinformation, no information. A man who was chronicled to have flat out lied to the American public 30,000+ times over the course of his four years in office.
For Donald Trump, lying is like breathing. He has zero use for the truth. Hell, given the intellectual wasteland that is the space between his ears, he does not have the mental capacity to grasp the truth. Not about international affairs, diplomacy, COVID, aid, hell, even hurricanes escape that great thinker: “Let’s nuke ‘em!”
We have lost 500,190 people as of this morning because of lies. Unable to handle the truth himself, or how it may make him look, he chose to lie over and over and over again to the American people. Even when he contracted it himself, it did not temper his need for verbal malfeasance. He simply availed himself of treatments out of the reach of ordinary citizens, recovered, and went on lying.
500,190 people gone. Among them hundreds of thousands who listened to the lies, who refused to wear masks because he didn’t, refused up to their last ventilator assisted breath to even believe COVID is real. Because that is the power of lying.
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” In truth, in this age of technology, it can travel all the way around the world. A study done back in 2018 and published in the journal Science showed that lies and false rumors on Twitter travel six times faster than the truth, and those tweets also reach more people.
We saw it over and over and over during the 2016 campaign and during Trump’s reign of terror. His entire Twitter account was nothing but a bastion of lies, videos of FOX empty heads lying to their audience, and misspelled memes rife with untruths. FOX and OANN and Newsmax aided and abetted the liar-in-thief by spreading his lies like butter on warm bread. Facebook became a safe haven for group after group to spring up dedicated to the Qanon vault of whoppers. Qanon was born to harvest the already conspiracy loving crowd who were 9/11 Truthers, Sandy Hook hoaxers, Parkland false flaggers and on and on.
All people who couldn’t handle the truth lying to hordes of people who cannot handle the truth. The election was stolen. Children are being kept in the basement of a Pizza Parlor. Tom Hanks drinks the blood of children. Hilary Clinton eats children. COVID is a hoax! Vaccines cause autism! The COVID vaccine will implant a Bill Gates monitoring chip in your body. Joe Biden is senile! Joe Biden is actually a body double controlled by Jill Biden! (Not kidding)
The truth is seldom pretty, often boring, and many times difficult to understand. The truth is not sexy, doesn’t get your heart pumping, or make you feel like you are in an uber secret group and only YOU know the real truth.
The truth is also not profitable.
That’s where the likes of Trump and his cabal come in. It’s how banshees/professional liars like Rush Limbaugh (rest in piss, asshole), Glenn Beck, Alex Jones and their ilk rake in millions of dollars by pandering to the rubes who need to be lied to. And in order to keep the rubes feasting at the falsehood trough and buying irradiated seed farms, survival gear, and colloidal silver snake oil, the lies must get bigger, bolder, more outlandish, see: gay frogs. Not kidding — entertain Satan with that one, Rush.
We saw the culmination of Trump’s big lie on January 6th when his minions stormed the Capital and people died. Unable to handle the truth that he lost, that the majority of America told him “You’re fired,” Trump built the lie fire, stoked it, mounded it with fresh kindling, and repeatedly drizzled it with gasoline. The election was stolen. Millions of dead people voted. Ballots were stolen. Ballots were printed in foreign countries and shipped here. Mail in ballots were stolen from mailboxes. Voting machines switched votes from him to Biden. Millions of illegal people voted. Millions voted more than once.
All lies. And his insane clown posse of supporters, unable to handle the truth, lapped them up. After all, they had boat parades. They had big rallies. They had fourteen flags on their pick up trucks.
Those lies were supported by henchmen like Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham. FOX and OANN and Breitbart and Newsmax and The Federalist reinforced the lies in their broadcasts, on their websites. Parler was created solely for those who could not handle the truth by those who could not handle the truth.
Hell, Twitter couldn’t handle the truth for YEARS, instead allowing Trump to spread his lies hundreds of times a day. When they finally cut him off, we watched as lie junkies lost their minds — their mainline of Trump heroin suddenly gone — they, cut off cold turkey.
Handling the truth means accepting that it often won’t make you look good. Inherent in a truth is the fact that someone, something is accountable. And the GQP avoids that at all costs.
Think not? Look south, my friends. Texas is freezing, people are dying, but Republicans cannot handle the truth, so they are lying fast and furious about why.
Blaming the New Green Deal — which does not exist as anything binding yet, and has zero to do with the Texas choice to have their own power grids and rely predominantly on fossil fuels. Blaming wind turbines that have frozen up. Solar panels that have failed. The truth there is that because it is Texas, where temps are more likely to be sweltering than frigid, the grid, the turbines, the panels were not outfitted for this weather. That was a financial choice. Texas is suffering because it is governed by GQPers who do not understand science, have disdain for investing in green technologies to help the planet and their citizens, and because money trumps everything.
Three months ago, Texas talk was about threatening to secede from the United States. Now, proving that the leadership is all asshat and no cattle, they are extending their frostbit fingers towards DC for federal aid. Lead hypocrite, Ted Cruz, was on TV today doing his best everyman impression, costumed in jeans and a ballcap, trying to lie and harp about government assistance being slow. His ass was handed to him to wear as a ballcap replacement as he was reminded how he voted against aid for the people in the northeast after Hurricane Sandy devastated so many lives. Watch. I love this song.
That time Ted Cruz got called out when he voted against hurricane Sandy aid because it hit “blue” states.
Now Texas needs federal aid.
This you @tedcruz ? pic.twitter.com/C0C3bi2E0r
— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) February 17, 2021
I have two children in Texas. One in Dallas, one in Austin. They are freezing.
The daughter in Austin has had no gas since Sunday — that means no heat, no warm water, no stove, no oven, no fireplace. Electricity comes for minutes and goes for hours or an entire day and night. She and her fiancé are holed up in their smaller guest room with their cat, dog, and a tiny space heater. They are running low on food and cannot get to the store because the roads are covered in sleet. The estimate for natural gas being fixed for her subdivision is now Friday or Saturday. Crews simply cannot get on the roads to access the problems.
The daughter in Dallas lives in an apartment and has been without power for most of the past four days. Her heat is electric, so no power, no heat, no hot water, no range or oven. They are keeping refrigerator items out on their balcony. Electricity has come on for minutes here and there. Like her sibling in Austin, they run to use the microwave and charge their phones and laptops when the electric springs to life. They managed to walk to a bakery and a gas station yesterday that were actually open and buy some things to eat.
They are uncomfortable and worried. But they are alive. They are not burning their furniture, dying in their cars from carbon monoxide poisoning, shitting into plastic bags because the pipes are frozen in their homes, freezing outdoors because they have nowhere to go. But many are. Texas hospitals are receiving entire families suffering carbon monoxide poisoning from trying to stay warm and not understanding the implications of their choices. Homeless people are freezing to death outside as warming stations are filled to capacity across the state.
This is not because of AOC or liberal policies as FOX is lying to their viewers. This is not about solar panels or wind turbines shutting down as Texas Governor Greg Abbott lied to FOX last night. As detailed in WaPo this morning, The governor’s arguments were contradicted by his own energy department, which outlined how most of Texas’s energy losses came from failures to winterize the power-generating systems, including fossil fuel pipelines.
Texas, with the exception of the El Paso area, relies on its own power grid. Wholly separate from the nation’s power grids, and because there has been a complete lack of investment in them by Texas, they simply cannot handle the demand of a huge state suddenly trapped under snow, sleet, and freezing cold temperatures. Hell, I lived in Texas for almost 20 years in various cities, and the state cannot even handle a light snowfall. Like most southern, typically warm climes, they do not allocate funds for road cleaning equipment. And now has come home to roost that they do not invest in handling a polar vortex either.
THAT is the truth. The truth they cannot handle themselves because it makes them culpable, responsible, complicit in every moment of suffering, in every death that takes place. Texas loves grabbing its belt buckle, raising its gun and shooting the idea of regulations dead in the face. That is the truth of what is taking place, why the state is without power, heat, running water.
From WaPo: Although renewable energy sources did partially fail, they only contributed to 13 percent of the power outages, while providing about a quarter of the state’s energy in winter. Thermal sources, including coal, gas and nuclear, lost almost twice as many gigawatts of power because of the cold, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s electric grid operator. Critics have also noted that wind turbines can operate in climates as cold as Greenland if they’re properly prepared for the weather.
But they lie. And because they cannot handle the truth, they insure you cannot handle it either.
The result is outrage with no answers, finger pointing with no resolution, further division with no evidence, and more deaths with no accountability.
Colonel Jessop had his comeuppance. These GQP buffoons will, too. Perhaps now is the time for everyone to face it, to handle the truth, to stop loving the lies, and to begin making the changes that are necessary in both leadership and infrastructure. Because if you don’t like pooping into an old Walmart bag, burning your favorite chairs, or freezing to death in Texas today — the truth is the only thing that will set you free (and keep you alive and warm) in the tomorrows to come.
Oh, and Tom Hanks is not eating babies. Idiots.
