Posted by
VBushmills on Thursday, August 07, 2008 9:29:04 AM
GREATAMERICANZEROES.com
YOU
LIE, WE HANG YOU
In the 1970’s I
came up with a great title with an idea for a book about the “great” Americans who
had done harm to the American Indians. It was called Great American (Z)Heroes
then. Custer was up there, as was Rev Spaulding, Andy By-God Jackson,
Chivington, the whole town of Tucson, Kinzua Dam, a lot of people you never
heard of, and yes, several members of Congress.
But such a
volume would still have been thin, and the list never grew for many years, so I
looked beyond forked tongues with Indians to the palace of forked tongues in general,
Washington. Into the late 1990s I had only added John Glenn to my list, who, as
a statue the size of Rushmore when it comes to heroes, had allowed such tiny
people (the Clintons) to chisel him down to their size by selling out some of
our national interests in exchange for a second trip into space. Some of the
hero-worshipping kid in me died then.
So I decided that
while screwing Indians might be too narrow a subject, Washington politics was just
too broad to spotlight the Great American Zero. It would be like trying to
publish a list of all the people in hell, when the far easier job would to
become friends with Gabriel and obtain a list of those who weren’t.
I pocketed the concept…until this past
July 4th, when two friends called me about a recent Townhall.com post
about how individual citizens can begin taking back their government. My short
answer was that citizens should begin firing anyone who lied in public.
So, after thirty
years I’ve come full circle, and have decided to open a website that does just
that one thing and that one thing only…call
out public liars. It’s called GREATAMERICANZEROES.com
and it will be headed up by our station chief in Virginia, St George
Frederick.
The single purpose at GREAT AMERICAN ZEROES.com
will be to inform and encourage direct
political involvement by citizens to let their elected and appointed public
officials know they will not tolerate lies, above all other things. A few
reporters, newscasters, lawyers and jurists, entertainers, athletes,
scientists, and others who aren’t but stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last
night, need to be reminded as well.
* * *
After discussion
with our ethicists I found this wasn’t such an easy matter, as there are all
sorts of lies out there, not to mention liars. And sorting out the lie from a
mistake of fact or other causes for uttering untruths is more difficult in these
politically charged days. And in recent years lying had been carried to such
terrifyingly new heights, and become so routine as to become a standard part of
the nation’s political arsenal. In the past we’ve pointed out the social impact
of the Lie directed toward the Left in general, but it seems to have crossed
over to the other side of late. (This happens when the river that divides Good
and Evil, liberty and servitude, democracy and socialism, etc, etc, etc, is
dammed high up in the mountains so that downstream it becomes a trickle so
narrow one can step across easily without even getting his feet wet. We’re
going after the dam builders.)
Worse, the Lie has been insinuated into the
culture. As the culture goes, so goes the Constitution and this wonderful
American experiment, so you can appreciate our sense of foreboding.
For you cynics,
time will prove us not to be an anti-Democrat Party site, or even an anti-Left
site…on the few things they can be honest about. It will just seem that way,
for reasons which may require a trip to your closet to sort out. We will find
liars in the lairs they made for themselves. So if Glenn Beck lies, we’ll treat
him the same as we would Harry Reid.
* * *
GreatAmericanZeroes.com will be built
mostly by the efforts of citizens around the country, as they (you) can submit a
Complaint and evidence of the lie and the liar in your hometown or state…and after
a fair trial, we’ll hang the Guilty Varmint. Well, some of them, at least. Our
standards will be stricter than many of you will want them to be, but hopefully
you’ll find a common sense wisdom in how we judge lies that you may even want
to pass on to your kids, as the young seem most susceptible to the notion of the
self-revealed truth.
GreatAmericanZeroes.com will be built
with humor (liars hate being mocked) but also with dead seriousness, as it is
no accident that public lying has reached new highs just as public decency and
morality have reached new lows.
Despite the cute
dotcom title you will find we are a serious single-issue group, mining each and
every facet of the public lie and the role it plays in debasing and diminishing
a free people in their house, the community, the nation, and civilization.
There will also
be a hint of sociology in our site, as I am sure, since Travelgate, many have
asked the searing question: What do politicians fear most, being outed as
incompetents, or being outed as liars? GreatAmericanZeroes.com
may answer that.
As for the meat
and potatoes of the site, a brief framework is included below, with a 30 day
period for comment and suggestions. We invite any suggestion or criticism. An
Attaboy wouldn’t hurt, as this will be a paycheck-to-paycheck affair for a bit.
Our gallows, (the Galleries and the Lie-Brary) won’t open for about 60 days
while we search for technical assistance in indexing and cross referencing out
inmates and their dossiers.
Contact numbers
can be found below (no phone calls for the time being, until a dedicated line
can be established).
Their immediate
duties will be to hang some rogues from History, including recent history, so
that the Gallery will open with several men and women already hanging. That
would be seemly, I think. But they will also have to handle the submissions
from around the country, which could prove a handful as we pick up steam. We
hope this will be our growth division. (While picking on known nationally known
liars may seem like more fun, the chances they’ll be removed from office
because of anything we do at GreatAmericanZeroes.com
is remote. We believe our value will be in the long-term impact it will have on
local and state-wide office holders. Remove the lie from their ammo belt and we
believe the trickle-up effect can be dramatic.)
Our fact-checking
process is in place, but it takes a few hours (we’d like to get it down to 3-4)
to fully vet a Complaint before rendering a verdict. Fairness requires notice
to the accused and a chance to respond or defend. By our accounting, one case
worker can only manage 10-15 claims a week. Hell, we probably need one full
time Hangman for Nevada alone.
The good news is
that as we grow, there should be a reverse effect in public lying. Moses Sands
told me he had known Soros, and always believed that one could remove his ideas
from their perch for only a fraction of what he spent to get them there. He
called them the “house odds”. Our plan is to put ourselves out of business,
more or less, within 6-8 years. “When you’re working for the wrong side, you
should never over-estimate the power of money. Soros has. That’s his biggest
weakness.”
Framework:
In my
accompanying article, “Public Lying
Should be a Hanging Offense, and We Mean to Oblige” (posted here, our home
website TheSandsInstitute.org, and
on my Townhall.com blog, Your House and
The US Constitution) we
associate having one’s photo placed in one of our Galleries as a public
hanging. We will also maintain easy-to-access and index dossiers, national and
state-by-state, on individuals and factoids about lies and lying in our Lie-brary. We will post notices of
pending cases, as well as acquittals, new hangings, a state-by-state register. We
will also post essays on a whole range of issues about lies, and have enlisted
the support of a science ethicist who will treat the myriad of issues about
science-based lies, such as surround and shroud the global warming debate. His
specialty is Darwin, so get ready. A blog site will probably be included as our
ethicists are looking forward to “debating” lies in general as well as how
we’ve applied our rules to the poor schmuck in Sioux who spit in some local
citizen’s Cheerios. I wish we could afford the services of some of the folks at
The Onion, who write splendidly, but
we do hope to have some guest RN (real name) writers who will add a comment
from time to time. St George is a very good, witty writer.
The heart of GREATAMERICANHEROES.com will be the Complaint,
which anyone can file, along with supporting corroboration. A picture would be
nice, which we can doctor here, in the interests of justice of course. Speed
will be of the essence, especially in local cases where a Lie can lose its legs
more quickly. We will try to adjudicate a claim within 7 days, including
opportunities by the Accused, to deny,
explain, revise and amend, CHA (Cover His/Her Arse) or apologize.
The Accused may
be acquitted, or be rolled over into a pending file, or be convicted and
sentenced to be hung in one of our galleries, as a Guilty Varmint. As of this
writing we have not decided whether to publish the name of an Accused until convicted,
but for instructional purposes, we do plan to publish some written opinions as
to why a Complaint was rejected.
We anticipate
more than one Gallery since, as Mark
Twain said, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” And there will be
wings, such as a Duranty Gallery for journalists. There are also mistakes of
fact, stupidity, and these days, self-delusion, which, even though a lie (to
one’s self) we’re having debates as to whether it is a defense to the crime of the
damned lie or another category altogether. Nor are we sure yet where to place
the flip-flop, the broken campaign promise, the open-mic/congressional hearing
lie, the obfuscation, the dissimilation, the gratuitous lie, so we’ve moved
beyond Twain to Aquinas and the science of ethics to help sort out these rather
ubiquitous handshakes with untruth that no one really pays attention to but
quite frankly, degrade the culture. The commonplace Lie is like skin cancer, it
too can kill.
These deserve
mention but perhaps in a lesser gallery, sort of a minor league
waiting-to-be-called-up-to-the-Bigs gallery, not the Big Lewinsky (one name put forward for our main gallery), but
perhaps a Little Lewinsky. Whattaya
think?
In my accompanying article, “Public Lying Should be a Hanging Offense,
and We Mean to Oblige” you will be able to see where we place our emphasis
on lying and the public impact of lying. The bald-faced lie is actually rare
among national politicians. What is more common is the stating and restating of
an opinion as fact, which is a damned lie in our opinion for it is attached to
the sins of vanity, arrogance and usually, avarice. The same goes for the
taking of scientific evidence, statistics, theories, etc (since we know how
scientists report “facts”) and turning those theories into stated truths. These are all damned lies and are all hanging
offenses. And we plan to publish every one
we run across. (The internet is a funny place…it never seems to run out of
ink or shelf space.) Finally there are some lies of omission which may seem
redundant, or cumulative, but in our eyes are separate offenses, as when a
politician shouts out the truth of a fact not yet proved, then suddenly falls
silent and cowers in his closet when the “fact” was later shown to be untrue
and the obvious duty would have been to than oblige us with a mea culpa. (After the genocide in Cambodia,
and the boat people, remember Joan Baez calling on some of her fellow
chanteuses and actresses…Hanoi Jane, et al…to recant for having been wrong
about the virtues of Hanoi and Pol Pot, even if they had been right about the
evils of America?)
Imagine how many laws around the country
have been enacted based on that single United Nations report that was taken and
(in our opinion, intentionally) misshaped by politicians from the day it was
issued to prove a non-existing danger about second hand smoke. That’s the kind
of lie we’re talking about. These are damned lies because they are not only
attached to the sin of vanity, but cowardice. We hope to hang every one before
we’re done.
Beyond the Lie,
we take no particular stand on other standards for public service, such as
incompetence, theft of funds public or private, infidelity with a secretary,
waitress or in a water fountain with a stripper, narcissism, nepotism,
cronyism, pimping, coveting, treason, craven cowardice, acts of omission, and a
myriad of other sins, except to say we’re against them all. We just leave those
to others to disclose and crow about.
We believe that
a public made aware of lies as lies,
and not as something benign and less dangerous, will become annoyed, and less
inclined to support a sitting official in the future…since citizens hate having
their noses rubbed in their own mistakes in judgment in electing the b*****d in
the first place.
Likewise, we
know that persons in the both the public and private sector spotlight hate
having their foibles made public and will move mountains to prevent such
revelations from happening. Local police and fireman’s benefit fund cups
runneth over with donations from notable citizens wishing to keep their names
out of the local Thunderstorm. This
may be a marriage made in heaven, for lying, like VD, has only one 100% sure-fire
preventative. Abstinence. We want them to stop. And if they stop, a lot of
other things will just take care of themselves. We believe a public hanging can
make abstinence more appetizing.
As to vitae: In
the interests of full disclosure all our principals work under aliases here, a
practice started by Moses Sands a few years ago to protect his name (and mine)
with our client base overseas. This has its advantages, it turns out, for a lot
of reasons that will reveal themselves as we go along.
St George Frederick is 40, has a degree in
law, BA in history (Russian area) and Middle Eastern studies. He has worked
with me in the third world since 1998 and has a killer intellect and has passed
all exams concerning the Constitution. He is the next generation of true
Protector.
I am 61, a former Army JAGC and former senior manager
with a Fortune 500 company. Since 1989 I have owned and managed my own
consultancy specializing, in Moses Sands’ words, covert free market operations
in the developing world. We’d worked with a number of other consultants, some
of which you’ll see on this site, and who have come in from the cold as least
part of the time.
Bernard Chumm is
in Oregon, a historian, ethicist and financial planner, also over 60, advanced
degrees, and dabbles (with a group of younger contributors) in internet
scatology. (They’re against it.) Merv Donnelly is an Atlanta-based 38 year old
graduate naturalist/zoologist, and science ethicist. You’ll hear from him
often. Finally, Natasha Ivanova is our 35 year old émigré from Kharkov, Ukraine.
She knows something about just about everything, and has a wealth of
perspectives about life under “imperial communism”. She is also very easy on
the eyes. All are Protectors.
GreatAmericanZeroes.com is organized
under the auspices of The Sands Institute for the Constitution and Common Man,
a 501 (3)(c) non-profit organization (in progress), so you won’t be bothered by
banner ads for Viagra or home mortgage loans while searching out the latest quotes
from Al Gore.
St George has
asked for a skeleton staff of four and he’s lined up a nice inexpensive office
site above a pesticide company. Public obscurity is all but guaranteed. If
you’d like to see a copy of our working plan and profile for GreatAmericanZeroes.com just let StGF or
me know and we’ll send a copy as it stands today. It is a work in progress.
You can contact us at Vbushmills@thesandsinstitute.org, StG@greatamericanzeroes.com, fax:
866-253-0016, or GAZH, PO Box 3916, Chester VA 23831.