Never get caught out in a lie, my Dad taught. Never get caught
out in a draft, my Mom taught. Poor Bill Richardson forgot those
parental lessons, and now he has been caught lying about the
draft.
Richardson, Governor of New Mexico, has been including in every
bio and resume for the last 40 years the fact that as a young
pitching prospect, he had been drafted by the Kansas City (now
Oakland) Athletics. With his name being bandied as a potential
Democratic Presidential candidate, the Albuquerque Journal
investigated and found the baseball claim
baseless. Confronted, Bill announced that he “came to the
conclusion that I was not drafted by the A’s.”
Nor would anyone presume to doubt his veracity. Readers of this
publication will recall that Mr. Richardson, then Ambassador to the
United Nations, was accused by Monica Lewinsky of offering her a job
without a real interview for the purpose of purging her from Ken
Starr’s purlieu. Richardson denied, denied and denied, despite
phone records showing two calls to his office precisely when Monica
said they were made.
Okay, let’s be honest. You and I know that Richardson is lying
through his teeth now as then. He lied about being drafted like his
former boss, Bill Clinton, lied about not being drafted. But if he
loses the nomination over this, we may be plunged into an
insufferable new era of indiscriminate truth-telling. Folks, truth
is turning into an epidemic and we had better watch our backs.
Every day on the radio we are bombarded by ads for
1-800-DNA-TEST. All this scoping of nucleic acid is corroding the
nuclear family. Better not to look backwards and find that the true
Dad was a pal in their home. (Yes, I know that at three letters
“Dad” is not much of a palindrome. Try this one: “Did Dad? Dad
did.” Or perhaps he didn’t.)
Then we learn that an MRI can identify lying by tracking brain
activity, and talk has begun about solving crimes by getting inside
people’s heads. “If the brain clicked, you must convict.” We may be
antebellum of the cerebellum upping the ante for detection.
On top of this, folks were nitpicking Mike Brown’s pre-FEMA
resume by saying that his job in Oklahoma from
1975-78 described by him as “overseeing emergency services
divisions” really meant making coffee for firemen and polishing
that pole they slide down. This gripe violates the longstanding
social compact that if you’re willing to be in charge of paper
clips for two years you get to write that you were “director of
intra-corporate logistics.”
Imagine that we declare National Truth Day. Every husband will
tell his secretary that his wife does understand him. In fact,
having nursed him through various ailments and depressions, she
understands him much better than you ever could sitting behind your
desk with a People magazine.
Employees will turn to their bosses to explain that the big file
they’re always carrying across the office to the copy room is
actually a dummy filled with blank paper, and that under the copy
machine is a small shelf which a group of ten workers stock with
donuts on a rotating basis.
Students will turn to professors to admit that the term paper
about lowering crime by aborting black babies which was graded
“chillingly racist but refreshingly irreverent” was bought for 100
dollars on the Internet and originally written by Bill Bennett as
an undergraduate. (Just kidding, Bill.)
Melania Trump will say to her husband: “Donald, your comb-over
may be marginally better than Ted Koppel’s, but I married you for
money.” And he will respond: “When I said that I married you for
your IQ, that was true; as a man of the people, I love the fact
that you are at the exact national average of 96. And I thought it
was kind of clever how you figured that out by adding 36 and 24 and
36.”
All of America, liberals and conservatives both, will finally
tell David Brock and Arianna Huffington: “We find you totally
despicable.”
And I will explain to my editors that when I said that I had a
doctorate in Economics from University of Chicago, I neglected to
mention that for reasons of security I did my course work under an
alias: Milton Friedman.
Scary stuff. It’s enough to make one yearn for the days of Bill
Clinton, a President who could always manufacture a good lie —
except on the golf course. A big lie could get you sent to the big
house but white lies often landed a fellow in the White House.
My advice to Bill Richardson is to accept responsibility and
announce that he will not actively seek the Presidential nomination
of the Democratic Party. He will, however, accept a draft.
