To the Editor:

A small, bespectacled journalist and commentator with a lifelong history of Democratic affiliation, Mark Shields, had a pet expression about his own party,

“Democrats can’t organize a three car funeral.”

It had a self-deprecating humor but he said it with a certain pride. The implicit reference was to how there wasn’t any pressure within his party to vote other than as a member saw fit. There was no taste for lock-step voting if it meant a conflict with what was seen personally as just or truthful.

His quip couldn’t be more relevant than it is now as much of the political right wing has come to view power seeking as prevailing over any concerns of personal integrity. “Control by any means” effectively summarizes today’s right wing political ethics and nowhere has this become clearer than with that beacon of light (red only) — FOX News.

Revealed through private memos and sworn testimony, FOX News sources have admitted that behind the scenes they believed the last Presidential election was free, fair and not stolen from Donald Trump.

This was in stark contrast to their broadcast opinions which were designed to appease a zealous right wing viewership that threatened to bolt if not told results that they wanted to hear. This would, gasp, lower stock values.

The only way to not call that outright lying is to hold hands with Kellyanne Conway and pronounce FOX’s two-faced reporting as the mysterious “alternative facts.”

Since that crowd-inflating debacle on Inauguration Day of the Trump Presidency it’s been open season on truth and the cumulative effect has led to ever deeper dumpster diving for the Republican Party. This has recently culminated in the election and seating of the completely bogus George Santos in the U.S. House and the antics of Marjorie Taylor Green wherever she appears.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is so flummoxed trying to tell everyone what they want to hear that he’s taken to just saying he’s not heard about the topic they’re referring to and then dashing off to another hiding place.

Reality is what it is and truth describes it but offers no guarantee we’ll like what we hear. When we try to customize our take on reality to please ourselves or our audience we end up standing on our head trying to make sense of the end product.

But profitability dies hard.

The latest effort to tailor reality is a collaboration between previous offenders. Kevin McCarthy has given all the Capitol surveillance footage from January 6th exclusively to FOX’s Tucker Carlson for the purpose of determining if the insurrection was indeed as violent as we all witnessed.

Not surprisingly, Carlson, who blasphemed by saying he personally disliked Trump, is trying for a popularity comeback by providing “photographic evidence” of peaceful bystanders on the Hill that day. He has edited that footage to have them stand in for hordes of marauding offenders that swarmed over and vandalized our Capitol, terrorizing members of Congress and police resulting in a total of five deaths.

His proposal is only for a party that has learned to swallow hard.

Everyone wants to win, but by playing games with truth to gain an advantage, we ultimately advance nothing and rob ourselves of mutual trust and the practicality of common ground for bipartisan problem solving.

Mark Shields hoped for every man to stand up for truth as he saw it and let the chips fall as they may.

We should all be so wise.

Gasconade County Democrats

gasconadedems.org