By Peter Lemiska

Let’s face it. The human species is a deceptive lot — at least more deceptive than any other species you can think of. We’re all capable of bending the truth under the right circumstances. It’s an innate defense mechanism that shows up early in life, the first time we utter those three little words, “It wasn’t me.”

While parents do their best to mold our character, to teach us the importance of honesty and integrity, throughout life, most of us find ourselves stretching the truth or fabricating stories to extract ourselves from difficult situations. “The dog ate my homework” has become a classic, used at one time or another by every kid in school. And how many times have we indignantly protested to that traffic cop, “I wasn’t speeding,” while we were actually thinking, “I really need to get a radar detector”?

Of course, lies come in various shades, ranging from white to black. White lies are harmless and are usually intended to spare someone’s feelings. On the other end of the deception spectrum are the filthy, self-serving lies usually intended to cause pain to others.

Lying isn’t a new character flaw that just appeared in our society. It’s been said that the Greek philosopher Diogenes spent his life searching for an honest man. The Bible tells us that lies have been around since the dawn of man. The first one was told to Adam and Eve by a deceitful serpent.

Regardless of how it started, it’s pretty clear today that bamboozling is in our blood.

Generally, we find the best liars today in politics. Politicians usually lie to get elected. Once elected, they lie to pass their agendas. When their plans prove disastrous, they explain it away with more lies. Then they lie to get reelected. They hire and appoint likeminded people to lie for them. They live by the adage, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS.”

With all these lies swirling around, it’s easy to shrug our shoulders when another one is exposed. And while it may be true that “everyone does it,” some do it better, more frequently, and with more catastrophic effects.

The Biden administration is in a class by itself. Biden and his team seem to have a special knack. They lie enthusiastically, compulsively, and wantonly. For some reason, everyone in this administration seems more than willing — in fact, eager — to sacrifice his or her personal integrity for the sake of the party.

When DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stared resolutely into the camera and declared, “The border is closed,” he was utterly convincing — to anyone who hadn’t seen the images of those kids packed like sardines in CBP facilities or who read the mind-blowing statistics. Then there’s White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who seems genuinely proud of her ability to evade and distort the truth. She’s become so sure of herself that she no longer needs even a kernel of truth around which to weave her political doubletalk. We saw that when she confidently explained that those hordes of illegal aliens swarming into our country don’t need COVID vaccinations because “They’re not intending to stay here for a lengthy period of time.”

The distortion of reality is just another way of lying. Those same people tell us that the chaos on the border was merely a “challenge.” They say that the disastrous retreat from Afghanistan was an unparalleled success. Then there’s their favorite one — the one they used to justify President Trump’s second impeachment. What common sense tells us was something more than a disturbance but less than a riot Democrats call an “insurrection” — an actual attempt to overthrow the government by Trump supporters.

And they’re still using the “it wasn’t me” defense to explain their catastrophic failures. They blame OPEC for the surge in gas prices, even though America was energy independent when they took office. The blame President Trump for the border chaos, even though Trump handed them a secure border. They blame FedEx for the supply chain backup, another calamity caused by Biden’s response to COVID.

But there’s another lie, a particularly audacious and outrageous lie that Democrats just can’t stop repeating. It’s a filthy lie, deliberately crafted to tear the country apart: America is a systemically racist country.

That lie is the basis for so many other lies and for deep anti-American sentiment. It feeds the defund-police movement and Critical Race Theory. It equates voting integrity with voter suppression, and it brands political opponents as racists.

Nine years ago, Vice President Biden told an African American audience that Republicans would put them all back in chains. Today he’s telling us that America is a systemically racist country. His lies as vice president are no different than his presidential lies. They’re inflammatory and deeply divisive. Today, he and other race-baiters use cherry-picked statistics, rare, aberrant incidents of police brutality, and relentless propaganda to fabricate the illusion of systemic racism. Unfortunately, as we saw during the Obama/Biden administration, that poisonous rhetoric has one predictable effect. It divides the country.

America can never be united as long as Joe Biden and the Democrats continue to sow the insidious seeds of division. During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden vowed to unite the country.

That, too, was a lie.

Peter Lemiska served in the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Secret Service. Following his retirement from the Secret Service, he spent several years as a volunteer for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.