Lies, Damned Lies & Opinions

Whenever I read someone’s opinion, I first look to see who is paying them to opine. Rarely do I read the opinion of some idiot like me who does it for grins. Usually somebody with money is footing the bill, whether the opinion comes from the left or the right.

We all know the adage: “There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics.” Most of us believe that Samuel Clemens coined that phrase, but as it turns out an Englishman by the name of Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke came up with it first. Since there is even some disagreement about who wrote it the adage, you can guess where the rest of this is going.

Anybody can say just about anything, for any reason and claim to have God herself to back up the claim, and it is then up to the rest of us to figure out that it ain’t necessarily so. Now that we have the internet, we can surf scores of diametrically opposed views on every subject from the wisdom of childhood vaccinations, or not, to why birds are descended from pterodactyls, or not.

And so, it becomes deceptively easy to espouse or to support an opinion, based on some crap that made it onto The Google. My ramblings are a case in point. I get a lot of my data from the internet and, truth be told, I filter out the whackadoo stuff I don’t want to read.

Thus, I do not spend a great deal of time surfing sites that claim President Obama was secretly born on Neptune, or watching You Tube videos of the latest extraterrestrial (again, Obama!) visitor. I do dwell on cute-doggie videos, because I am currently dog-less and I never pass up a chance to remind my lovely wife of that fact. When I seek a factual basis for my opinion, I lean liberal, but mainstream. And sometimes I learn that my heartfelt opinion in grounded more in visceral reaction than in actual empirical fact. And that sucks for me, because I hate to be wrong, even in my viscerals.

I look to back upon my life-experience for perspective, and then do research enough to see if I am on target, sort of kind of correct, or full of hot air. I consider my life experience invaluable, because I did spend a few of those 19 years in school actually paying attention and maintained the necessary “jack-of-all-trades” degree, to defend over 5,000 indigent folks who were accused of every crime you can imagine under the sun.

And so I actually know something about illegal immigrants, because I defended hundreds and hundreds of them. I owe my partial fluency in Spanglish to these folks. From my undocumented clients I also gained a better understanding of their value as individual human beings and individual reasons why they left their families and traveled and worked and hid and screwed up in a hostile foreign land. And so, when I spout off about the abysmal way Americans are treating the latest wave of immigrants, it is not just from a position as an Italian-American who was mistreated as a child, but as someone who has also walked a more recent mile or two with my brown brothers from the South.

I don’t have a lot of respect for those who proudly display disparaging opinions of “those people,” when their only experiences with “those people” comes from hotels, restaurants, and “those people” putting a new roof on their house. I call these opinions “armchair opinions,” because they are usually based almost entirely upon prior ingrained bigotry, and supported only by the occasional anecdote which involves no more than fleeting cursory contact with the subjects in question. Actual facts are quite often optional for these opiners.

I am not saying that you have to be an expert on a subject, in order to have an opinion. Heck, The Google would be out of business, if we required that. I am allegedly an expert in one specific sub-field of Colorado law and I can say with full authority, that I have probably forgotten more of that law than I have retained.

It is that knowledge that keeps me humble and reticent to offer my individual opinion on any subject, unless I have lived it, researched it, or both. And, in light of “lies, damned lies, etc.,” I could still be wrong. I don’t write a disclaimer before any of my posts, but perhaps I should. And, even when I am double-damn sure that I am correct on an issue, I have to concede that I may hurt someone’s feelings with my clumsy, inartful prose.

But, what about when we trust someone who holds himself out as “expert” and therefore “in the know” on a subject, but then we find out later that he just made up facts not in evidence because it made a better case for his side? If one of us legal types does that, we could lose our license to practice law. It is not just unfair to the other party. It goes against everything lawyers are supposed to stand for.

People trust (and judges demand) us to advocate for a position on one side or another, but within a firm framework of the truth. Them’s the rules. Lying demeans our relationship with our clients, with the Court, and our profession. A lawyer who lies can create actual real-life dire consequences, like when a prosecutor lies in a capital murder case and some poor slob gets the three-shot-cocktail when he didn’t do it. The lying lawyer deserves to be disbarred and I am fine with that.  

United States Senator Jon Kyl, GOP, Arizona, has been a lawyer since 1966. Phi Beta Kappa. He currently chairs the United States Senate Subcommittee on Healthcare. He doesn’t like abortion. And Planned Parenthood does perform a small number of abortions. Jon Kyl knows this. They are not allowed to use federal dollars to perform abortions, and Jon Kyl knows this too. But they do receive federal dollars, so that they can provide low/no cost breast cancer and cervical cancer screenings, and contraception and a host of other health services for millions of women, who otherwise would have to go without. And Jon Kyl knows this as well. But Jon Kyl believes that the money the government gives to Planned Parenthood for non-abortion-related health services allows them to subsidize abortions, even though this is against the law, and Jon Kyl knows that too.

Jon Kyl knows all of the above, because we pay the Senator to know it and because he is not stupid, and because he chairs the committee that deals with it and because we trust him to know all that stuff.. But a few days ago, he stood on the floor of the United States Senate and told the American people that everybody knows that “well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does is perform abortions.” His ostensible reason for saying this was to support his case for de-funding Planned Parenthood. But there had to have been other reasons.

Jon Kyl is a good public speaker and lots of like-minded folks were really impressed at his speech. A few were not so impressed because they believed that Jon Kyl was lying. The damage had been done in front of millions of Americans who looked to Jon Kyl for the truth and he just lied…because it sounded better. Millions of unsuspecting people didn’t know he was lying because it just sounded better than the truth and went to bed that night thinking that over 90% of what their local Planned Parenthood did was perform abortions. It was not until somebody did a quick check of the actual facts that we learned only 3% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion-related. Not over 90%...3%.

Considering all of the psychotic nut-jobs out there, and especially the psychotic nut-jobs in Jon Kyl’s home state of Arizona, you would think that Senator Kyl might not want to deliberately incite one of those nut-jobs to shoot another abortion doctor or maybe a nurse, or file clerk, or janitor, or property manager, or gardener, all the while thinking that there was over a 90% chance of taking out someone who helped with an abortion.

When the media tried to contact Senator Kyl to find out why he lied in front of millions of Americans, his office replied that “it was not intended to be a factual statement.” Oh, I get it. It was only an opinion! And the Phi Beta Kappa, attorney, senator, Chair of the United States Senate Subcommittee on Healthcare, didn’t even have the balls to respond in person. Jon Kyl is not only a mendacious piece of trash--he is a man who wants blood on his hands. Nobody with his pedigree would act with such reckless disregard for the truth just to suck up to some Tea-politicians. He knew that he was lying, and he had to have known the effect it would have on the radical fringe of his cheering section.

In America, no one has the right to make any statement, even in the form of an opinion, which is designed to cause imminent physical harm to another. Yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater is just one example of prohibited speech that we learned about in law school. I am happy with that proscription. No one has the right to use speech to incite others toward violence against an individual or particular group of people. This is called “hate” speech. Jon Kyl not only lied, he used “hate” speech, which was specifically designed to give a green light to the radical anti-abortionists. For this, Jon Kyl should be disbarred; for this, Jon Kyl should be impeached by the House and tried by the Senate. And when one of those nut-jobs uses that lie told by Jon Kyl as a justification for murder, Jon Kyl ought to be prosecuted as a complicitor. That is my opinion.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo