Shocker, Polls can be rigged!

What’s the penalty for Google to rig news stories? What is the penalty to create a phony FISA document? What is the penalty for news anchors creating stories about people to hurt them? What is the penalty Donna Brazile to feed debate questions to candidate Clinton ahead of a debate? What is the penalty for rigged investigations or “fact” finding missions leading the public to alter its opinions?

But now we have a news story about the possibility that former Trump aid, Michael Cohen paid a tech company to skew the results of an on-line popularity poll in favor of Donald Trump prior to his entering the race. What this should clearly reveal is a few things, the obvious is that polls can be and are rigged in order to sway or even create public opinion on any issue or candidate for public office.

The second is that we must question each day that what we are seeing, hearing or reading about is real at all. People lie, whether they are the check-out person at the grocery store, a member of a news organization, a doctor, a police officer, a justice of the law, a public servant, or even the President of the United States. People lie, they lie to one another, and worst of all, people they lie to themselves.

The third and less obvious revelation from this story should be a loud reminder of what our founders warned us about when they created this great American experiment of self-governance, that our liberties are tied to our virtue which is connected to our faith and without virtue this great experiment will inevitably fail.