The White Oliphant Commission

If information is power, the ability to distort and control information will be used more often than not to preserve and perpetuate that power. David Wise in " The Politics of Lying"

I'm not sure which is more disheartening. Watching another fourteen million dollars of taxpayer money flushed down the drain in the Oliphant (White Elephant) Commission debacle or watching Mulroney twist and spin his way though another day.
It got me thinking - Is lying just a way of life in politics ? Is this something we should just come to expect ? You know, just another day at the office, deceived one or two, screwed a few and on we go. I mean we have had enough of it.
Bill Clinton - I did not have sex with that woman
George Bush - Iraq poses imminent danger and weapons of mass destruction
The Liberal Party - cashed stuffed in brown envelopes
Mulroney - its all just a business deal
and even here in Saskatchewan, the NDP expects us to believe that 1100 phony memberships were just the work of one
over zealous volunteer and not the fraud that many believe it to be. No harm, no foul !
Is this the norm ? One only needs to look at the Soviet Union to know the danger of lying in politics. Here was a government so adept at lying that even they seemed to forget what the truth really was. Soviet society was built one fiction upon another until it almost became comical. Can we really be that far behind ?
Does Brian Mulroney think the Canadian public will really think that three hundred thousand dollars in cash and then stashed away in a safe unreported was just a normal way of doing business. Does the Saskatchewan New Democratic Party actually think that Saskatchewan people will accept that this was just the work of one person, who signed up 1100 members, got it all paid for in small cash amounts and was just being over zealous? It makes me think that politicians need to be more honest about their lying. Or do they ? Do we just take everything they say at face value.
Two things bother me about these lies.
1) These lies are completely insulting and
2) Perhaps even more insulting is the belief of the politicians that they can get away with it.
But even worse than that is the sobering and humiliating fact that we indeed are letting them get away with it.