Illusionist/Comedian Penn Jillette Says:

“You can’t know anything about truth until you know all about deception.” Jillette is an interesting guy who says and does interesting things. And his comment about truth and deception is interesting. It would seem to follow that the Bush administration knows a lot about truth since it knows everything about deception. I don’t know why I even bother to philosophize about the Bush administration and its relationship with truth and deception. Except that it’s so easy to say that politicians don’t know what truth is. But politicians do know what truth is. And the ones who lie and deceive make a conscious choice to lie and deceive. Politicians who are troubled with their mendacity tell themselves they lie for the best possible reasons: To keep America safe; to protect the weak; to safeguard our secrets from spies. And all those rationales for lying are bullshit. Liars tell lies to make themselves look better than they are. Liars tell lies to get something they couldn’t get by telling the truth. Liars tell lies when the truth is unpleasant. And liars tell lies because it’s fun. Don’t get me wrong. I do not think the truth must be told all the time about everything. I don’t think it would benefit the world for the truth to be told about Moses, Muhammad, Jesus Christ, the Christian religion or the Roman Catholic Church. We need our religions. Religions are based on myth. Religion and total truth cannot co-exist. Most marriages could not survive the practice of telling the truth under all circumstances. And governments would collapse under the weight of the whole truth and nothing but the truth twenty-four-seven. But why has the Bush administration chosen to lie and deceive all the time about everything, when reasonable men and women and most governments and religions lie and deceive only part of the time? Penn Jillette may have answered that question in an interview he did a few years ago on AskMen.com. “Well of course, the fact is,” Jillette said, “if we (Penn and Teller) really did have magical powers, what we would do is get world peace and cure AIDS, we would not make birds appear out of our ass.” The Bush administration doesn’t believe it can do anything good and decent in the world and it has opted for illusions. But what real illusionists know is that people realize their act is fake. The White House has come to believe its illusions. And worst of all, it believes we believe its illusions.