The point here is not to tut-tut about political, journalistic, and homiletical liars. The more profound question is why they get away with it. When President Nixon was found to have lied about his role in the Watergate affair, he faced an almost certainly successful impeachment. He resigned in disgrace in August, 1974. Americans were scandalized. Today people seem more or less unfazed by such lies. I keep asking myself, how is that, in an age when everything is on video and available on YouTube after a momentary search, a public figure such as president Obama or Brian Williams can look at America and tell lies?

By now you know that anchor of the NBC evening newscast, a position once held by the likes of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley,¹ has admitted fabricating stories about his experiences reporting from Iraq. He is under investigation by his network. When this sort of thing happens in print journalism, a writer’s stories are normally thoroughly vetted in the same way a public official’s (e.g., a police officer, a prosecutor) court testimony comes under review when he is found to have committed perjury.

When Jayson Blair was found to have “fabricated” stories, all his work came under scrutiny. One of the more remarkable public lies in my lifetime was the wholesale appropriation by then Senator Biden of another man’s biography. You read that correctly. As a candidate for president, in 1987, Biden lifted not only a few lines from a speech by English Labour Politician Neil Kinnock, but indeed he portrayed Kinnock’s life as his own. That error in judgment forced him to retire from the race. As it turns out, that episode was part of a longer pattern of plagiarism. One might have thought that it would have cost him his political career.

At the time I thought so but I was wrong. Biden went on to serve two terms as Vice President of the United States.  Hillary Clinton claimed to have come under sniper fire in Bosnia, in 1988, but according to Sharyl Atkisson, who was on the plane with the then First Lady, that story is false. Her husband, President Bill Clinton, looked directly into the camera and declared to the American people, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

That lie nearly cost him his presidency as he became only the second president in the history of the republic to be impeached. Today, however, all seems to have been forgotten and he is said to be most popular Democrat politician in America. It may be that brazen presidential lies are becoming more common. The current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue looked into the camera more than two dozen times to say, “If you like your plan you can keep it.”

After the revelations from Mr. Gruber, we know now those claims were never true. Nevertheless, Biden, the Clintons, and our current president do not seem to be suffering for their public and rather obvious deviations from the truth. On the playground we used to say “winners never cheat and cheaters never win.” Apparently that axiom is also wrong.

Lies and plagiarisms are not isolated to journalists and politicians. If your pedestrian pastor has suddenly become remarkably eloquent, it may be that he has hired a service to write his sermons for him or worse, he may be plagiarizing someone else’s sermons. I have had conversations about a remarkable number of cases where pastors have been caught preaching sermons, which they have not written which they nevertheless represent to the congregation as their own.²  There are also remarkable cases of plagiarism by well-known religious writers who style themselves defenders of the moral law.

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