Lying about Your Past - and Elena Kagan

Connecticut Democrat Senate candidate Dick Blumenthal has been exposed as a consistent liar about having ‘served in Vietnam’ as part of his military service. As the sitting Attorney General of Connecticut—charged with matters of law and order, which relate directly to matters of truth and deceit—one hopes the people of Connecticut would be sufficiently upset with Blumenthal’s lying to pressure him to resign as Attorney General, and withdraw his candidacy for the Senate. But of course Blumenthal is a Democrat, and therefore can count on media allies to speak of the need for compassion, of the ‘everyone-does-it’ defense, of ‘the past is past’ defense, and the ‘what does it really matter?’ defense.

This is just one more example of the hopelessly out of touch media, and the godless vacuity of the intellectual left. There is something about lying about the past that disturbs the common sense and decency of most Americans. If the subject isn’t important, then why lie about it? If someone will lie about unimportant issues, why would anyone believe that same someone wouldn’t lie about important issues? If you think you need to lie to get the job, you must think the truth of your qualifications isn’t adequate for the job.

Then there’s Adam Wheeler, the Harvard ‘student’ who has recently been found to have lied about many elements of his past, including bogus recommendations from professors, bogus claims of awards and scholarships, plagiarized essays, false transcripts and SAT scores, and on and on. He’s now been indicted for defrauding Harvard to the tune of around $100,000.

Wheeler’s trail of deceit is far more convoluted than Blumenthal’s, but both spring from the simple unwillingness to rely on the truth as sufficient to advance in life, or maybe some desire to be something they are not. In either case, people of common sense don’t typically hold up the Blumenthals and Wheelers as life examples to emulate, and they definitely don’t vote for them to hold public office.

Which brings us to Elena Kagan, a person who wants one of nine positions on the United States Supreme Court. Personal integrity ought to be considered as important a qualification as there is for such a position. Philosophical differences among Court nominees is to be expected; lack of personal integrity is not. Yet Kagan and the Obama administration, in their never-endingly wrong assessment of American public opinion, have made the decision that lying about her homosexual lifestyle is less risky to her confirmation than being honest about it and then arguing sexual behavior is irrelevant to judging qualifications.

Sooner or later, someone with more visibility than Brushfires of Freedom will draw the comparison of Blumenthal and Wheeler with Kagan, and the result may throw an unpredictable monkey wrench into her nomination. The irony is that Kagan’s nomination likely would have sailed through had she been open and honest, and then dared anyone in elected Washington to oppose her. But choosing to lie opens the usual questions: if it isn’t important why lie about it? If she’ll lie about something so central to how she identifies herself, why should anyone trust the honesty of her answers to other questions? Has personal integrity been rendered irrelevant as a qualification for the United States Supreme Court?

The hope of the Obama administration is of course that the lie will hold long enough to get the confirmation hearings concluded. The backup strategy no doubt is that if the lie doesn’t hold and she is forced into some tearful admission, the Pravda media will go into overdrive to blame the whole scene on evil and heartless Republicans, and whip up a ‘compassion poll’ that proves the American people want her confirmed more than ever as a result.

We’re not at all sure the White House scheming is going to work. They have set Kagan up to engage in personal dishonesty. After leftists’ decades-long pounding of public opinion as to the normalcy and legitimacy of homosexual behavior, they have decided the propaganda hasn’t worked and it is better to lie about it. We think they have underestimated their own impact on the Political Elite. There is not one US Senator, Democrat or Republican, who would rise to even comment on, much less denounce Kagan for her homosexual behavior. But a Senator might ask, “Have you or the White House made any public statements about you, your background or your qualifications that you know to be dishonest?”

We’d guess she would dutifully answer ‘no’. But if, as so often happens in confirmation hearings, ‘the truth will out’, it will be a strange dynamic indeed to hear why such a lie is not evidence of personal dishonesty. The only defense will boil down to ‘justifiable dishonesty’ due to the bigoted, homophobic nature of the ‘bitter clinger’ American people.

We’re not sure that defense will generate compassion; in fact, the whole Axelrod PR plan for Kagan might just collapse into confusion. But of course, on the issue of confirmation, none of this will matter. Kagan will almost certainly be confirmed, because Democrats will still vote in lockstep, and they have proven they do not in any case care about the opinion of the American people. But in acting to confirm someone who is personally dishonest about who she is, and supporting a President who has been personally dishonest about who he was and is, the Democrats will be adding immeasurable fuel to the fire that is coming their way in the next election cycles.

Paul Gable

May 18, 2010