We all enter this world buck naked – and with our integrity fully intact. Soon enough though, we’ll stop being naked. As for our integrity, that’s a whole other matter. What is integrity? It’s our word being our bond. Our trustworthiness. How reliable a friend, a lover, a teammate, a leader are we? Can others rely on us both in a pinch and when nothing’s at stake?
The essential thing about integrity is – and it’s the thing few people grasp about their integrity – it’s not up to any one of us whether we have or don’t have it. It’s up to everyone else. Only they can judge whether our word and our bond are the same. We’re biased obviously.
In that way, integrity is like beauty: it exists solely in the eye of the beholder. Racism works the same way, too. What’s the point in asking a racist if they’re a racist? Even if they could answer honestly, it’s not up to them!
Whether or not they’re racist – or bigoted or misogynistic or in any other way small-minded – is up to the people the racist, bigoted, small-minded misogynist harmed via their racist, bigoted, misogynistic, small-mindedness. They’re the only ones with the proper perspective.
The Republican Party has always sold itself as the adults in the room – even when they knew damned well they weren’t any such thing. What would we expect from a political party with zero integrity?
It wasn’t always this way. The normal rough and tumble of retail politics aside, most of us still think of Republican Presidents like Dwight Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt as having had integrity. Richard Nixon OTOH, walked in the door an integrity-free crook. Then he preceded to exercise even less integrity while covering up the Watergate break-in.
I vaguely recall thinking Gerald Ford had integrity – until he pardoned Nixon. And, now, Gerald Ford – in history’s mind – has no integrity.
That’s the other thing most people, our news media in particular, fail to grasp. As iron solid a thing as our integrity must be, it’s composed of gossamer. And, once that gossamer is compromised, so, too, is our integrity.
Ever meet anyone who you thought had ninety-nine percent of their integrity? Probably not (I sure hope not!). That’s because losing even just one percent of it means you’ve lost the full Monty. Being 99% trustworthy is as good as being zero percent trustworthy. Because you’re no longer entirely trustworthy.
It really is an all or nothing proposition.
You’d think our news media – of everyone – would appreciate that. Yet they repeatedly see integrity where none exists anymore (if it ever actually existed there in the first place).
The Washington Post famously started counting Donald Trump’s lies. They counted more than 30,000 before they were done. Now, seeing it from the reporter’s perspective, I can appreciate how that very first lie might disarm you. Take, for example “Mexicans are rapists”. That’s a lie. They aren’t.
Yet, in essence, Trump’s lie stands because no one in the news media really pushed back. No one dug in their heels (journalistic or otherwise) and insisted Trump produce some receipts to back up such contentious bullshit.
But, that’s not the worst of it. Trump lied to the press and the press knew he had lied to them. They knew Trump had zero integrity. Yet, they reassigned Trump his lost integrity the moment he began spewing again. In fact, our news media, rather than pillorying Trump for his lies and lying, cut him all the slack and plausible deniability he needed.
And in so doing that, they normalized his lying and baked it into the architecture.
The fact that such a thing as “The Big Lie” exists shouts volumes about the GOP’s total loss of integrity. It ain’t called “the Big Lie” for nothing, ya know! Has an emperor ever been more naked (and nakedly corrupt) than Donald Trump?
Imagine if the news media treated the integrity-free more honestly. For starters, they’d never again take Trump or any Republican at their word. “Back it up or it’s bullshit” – that should be the news media’s mantra every time Trump or any Republican opens their lie hole.
Got receipts? Put em on the table. Otherwise – STFU.