Tonight on CNN, Anderson Cooper said some stuff about how
negative political ads from the presidential election currently are. Then he
referenced a claim from one of the campaigns about how they were not going
negative, and then he said: “But keeping them honest…” (And then he showed
statistics proving they were lying.)
Um, has it ever occurred to anyone how dishonest of a phrase this is: “Keeping them honest”?
Look, just because you expose someone else’s lie, that does
not “keep them honest”; it instead proves
they are dishonest.
See what I mean here? And you can hardly keep someone honest when they are
actively lying, right? Unless they themselves admit they were lying, and then
tell the truth, you’re not “keeping them honest”, but rather, you’re proving
they’re liars. And that’s a very different thing, right there. (You caught them
in a lie: how does this make them honest? And by claiming to make them honest,
you are being dishonest yourself. Get it?)
So CNN (and especially Anderson Cooper), how about ending
the use of your dishonest line: “And keeping them honest”, and replacing it
with: “And proving they’re lying scumbags…” Maybe then it might embarrass them
enough to finally start telling the truth. (But probably not.)
(So CNN: Maybe you’re afraid you wouldn’t get the politicians on
your network if you called them liars out front like that? But politicians
are egomaniacs who love to be on TV, so they will always come back, like a fly
to poop: they can’t help themselves! So the least you could do is try to force
them to be honest, rather than crediting yourself with doing so when you’re
not.)
