QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 12:35 P.M. ET:   The brilliant Thomas Sowell examines 2015 and finds it the year of the lie.  And he singles out one in particular.  From Townhall: 

More than anything else, 2015 has been the year of the big lie. There have been lies in other years, and some of them pretty big, but even so 2015 has set new highs -- or new lows.

This is the year when we learned, from Hillary Clinton's own e-mails, after three long years of stalling, stone-walling and evasions, that Secretary of State Clinton lied, and so did President Barack Obama and others under him, when they all told us in 2012 that the terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed the American ambassador and three other Americans was not a terrorist attack, but a protest demonstration that got out of hand.

"What difference, at this point, does it make?" as Mrs. Clinton later melodramatically cried out, at a Congressional committee hearing investigating that episode.

First of all, it made enough of a difference for some of the highest officials of American government to concoct a false story that they knew at the time was false.

It mattered enough that, if the truth had come out, on the eve of a presidential election, it could have destroyed Barack Obama's happy tale of how he had dealt a crippling blow to terrorists by killing Usama bin Laden (with an assist from the Navy's SEALS).

Had Obama's lies about his triumph over terrorism been exposed on the eve of the election, that could have ended his stay in the White House. And that could have spared us and the world many of Obama's disasters in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. That is why it matters, and will continue to matter in the future.

Lying, by itself, is obviously not new. What is new is the growing acceptance of lying as "no big deal" by smug sophisticates, so long as these are lies that advance their political causes. Many in the media greeted the exposure of Hillary Clinton's lies by admiring how well she handled herself.

COMMENT:  So true.  And yes, the only reaction that many in the media had to Clinton's testimony before Congress on Benghazi was to comment on her fine style. 

Lying has indeed become accepted by the chattering classes.  And why not?  In college these days students are taught that each culture has its own "validity," and that a lie isn't a lie, but another "narrative."  And, after all, who are we to question it?

December 29,  2015