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 4^th, 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.

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      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.

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      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.