The Odor of Mendacity

In Tennessee Williams’ play Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Big Daddy says to Brick:

“What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it, Brick? Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room? There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity. You can smell it. It smells like death.”

Cat on A Hot Tin Roof – Tennessee Williams

Mendacity is lying. Big Daddy calls out Brick for lying about his troubles, and lying “smells like death.”

There is a lot of mendacity roiling around in American politics these days, and the majority of it is coming from politicians and activists on the left. They’re lying about our troubles and about the source of our troubles.

Most recently Senator Mark Kelly, a Navy veteran and someone who should know better, Representative Elise Slotkin, and others have encouraged currently serving members of the armed forces to disobey “illegal orders” from the Commander in Chief. When asked which orders specifically were illegal Kelly said that well, those types of orders hadn’t happened yet, but he wanted soldiers to know that they could disobey if they thought an order was illegal. Slotkin backpedaled and said she didn’t know of any that were illegal.

Here’s the catch with those calls for disobedience and the backpedaling: just because someone doesn’t like an order, or thinks it may be illegal, doesn’t make it illegal. Feelings have no place at all in deciding whether an order is legal or not. Encouraging soldiers to disobey legal orders is walking the line of sedition. Sedition is defined as incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority (Merriam Webster). Again, please note, just because you don’t like Donald Trump as president, that does not make his actions illegal. Let me say that again for those in the back:

YOUR FEELINGS REGARDING THE POWERS OF THE PRESIDENCY, AND/OR THE USE OF THOSE POWERS BY ANY PARTICULAR PRESIDENT, ARE COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT IN DECIDING IF THE ACTIONS OF A PRESIDENT ARE LAWFUL OR NOT.

Got it? The only thing that matters here is the legality of the order and the issuing authority. And guess what? No orders issued to date have been illegal (which explains why Kelly and Slotkin can’t find anything to point to). And encouraging soldiers to look for orders they don’t like, (like say, going into a city and restoring order… 101^st Airborne in Little Rock anyone?) is treading the line of sedition. And treading that line is why Senator Kelly is being investigated.

Kelly seems to believe that he can justify disobedience on the possibility of a criminal order being issued a pre-crime if you will. And although this shouldn’t have to be said, there’s no such thing as a “pre-crime” – thinking that another person might do something because “That’s how they are” or “did you hear what s/he said the other day?” Pre-crime is an invention of Hollywood and the movie Minority Report. That was a work of fiction, and I’d like to keep it that way. Believing that soldiers need some sort of “warning” because you don’t like the Commander-in-Chief and in your mind someone as rude, crude, and socially unacceptable as Donald J. Trump might possibly, maybe, issue an illegal order is ridiculous and treading the line of sedition.

There’s that odor of mendacity again. U.S. Representatives and Senators encouraging soldiers to engage in insubordination and being mendacious. They are lying about the existence of illegal order (there are none in effect or planned, and the politicians in question cannot come up with any specific examples), and they are lying about the consequences to the soldiers about refusing direct orders (of course, the politicians face zero consequences if a soldier defies an order). Trump reminding those senators and reps about the idea of sedition and the sanctions for engaging in sedition, is pointing out the “find out” part of FAFO and reminding everyone that sedition is a real thing under our Constitution, and engaging in it has consequences.

The reaction to ICE arresting and deporting those immigrants who entered the country illegally or overstayed their visas, is another example of the odor of mendacity pervading politics today.

The left dearly loves to conflate all immigration into one big happy group of individuals simply trying to find a better life for themselves and their families. I’d argue that a better life for themselves is most emphatically NOT the goal of Tren de Aragua or other criminal organizations. And those who arrive without proper paperwork (e.g. a passport and a valid visa), or who overstay a once-valid visa, are in fact engaging in a criminal activity and therefore are subject to arrest and deportation (the entire world knows you need at least a passport to get into a country, and the visa says right on it that overstaying is a crime and you will be subject to arrest and deportation… right there in your own language). The left has been screaming that only “brown and black” people are being arrested and deported. In fact, a large number of Romanians, Bulgarians, Poles, and others have been arrested as well. But the left really only cares about an appearance (created by them) of racism. If you’re worried about children without proper paperwork, consider that their parents have a responsibility to acquire that for the kids. Have people been mistakenly taken into custody? Yes, it happens. However, once proof of citizenship or valid green card is produced, that person is released. While the odor of mendacity would have you believe otherwise, it is mendacious.

The Biden Administration allowed something like 30 million undocumented immigrants (illegally here by any definition) to literally swarm across the border from Mexico. Those immigrants came from all over the world because they knew they could easily get into the U.S. Then the Biden Administration took a hands-off approach and simply abandoned all those immigrants whose rights the administration was claiming to protect. Ask yourself what happened to the almost half a million unaccompanied children who came across the border in that time frame. Did the Biden Administration do anything for them? When a system has failed as badly as our border has, the clean up process is going to be long and ugly. But the politicians and activists on the left dive deep into their mendacity and argue that vetting immigrants is somehow racist and they slander anyone who disagrees.

The deep, unreasoning hatred of Trump and his administration displayed by so many Democratic politicians is creating a dark cloud of mendacity over everything and it smells like death.

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