Could it be something in the water?  Maybe someone is putting a new drug into our beer?  Could it be microwaves beamed into our brains?  I’m open to suggestions.  Anyway, here’s the problem: I think we’ve become coddled.  Unfortunately, I don’t mean that metaphorically.  At some point, our brains have congealed like overcooked eggs.  It’s like we start every morning with a clean slate.  On the plus side, there’s the eternal sunshine of our spotless minds.  On the minus side, we never learn new stuff.

The problem is the liars.  It took them a while, but I think every liar in existence has learned that it’s open season.  They’ve stopped even pretending.

I didn’t think it was that tough to decode.  If someone lies to you, even once, they’re a liar.  Maybe they had a good reason, and they won’t do it again, but probably not.  We’ll see what happens next.  But if they lie to you a second time, you have a confirmed liar who’s highly likely to lie to you again.  So they’re burned.  You don’t trust them with important things, and you don’t take anything they say unless they show you objective proof.  Anything that starts with “Trust me…” ends right there.  Sure, admitting someone is a liar is unpleasant – nobody wants to know that about someone – but the rest is simple.

Then the sun goes down, and when it rises again, we blink innocently.  Pay me back Tuesday for a hamburger today?  Uh… sure?  I guess you’ve got an honest face.

Maybe they ate too much fiber this week.  Does that clog your mind?

On October 2^nd, Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, where they killed him.  Within minutes, Turkish officials told everyone that Khashoggi was tortured, killed and dismembered.  They gave us the details about the special team Saudi Arabia sent that morning to do that job.

And the Saudis lied about Khashoggi’s death for the next two weeks, fielding one laughable excuse after another.  Oh no, he left out the back door.  Maybe he was dodging his wedding?  It as a rogue actor in our consulate who nobody noticed.  And now they swear on their honor that it was an accidental, the result of an unexplained fistfight between Khashoggi, a Saudi critic who only wanted some paperwork, and fifteen young, fit, trained security professionals who’d just flown in hours before.  Oh, and they brought their best drinking buddy, a prominent forensic pathologist.  Who brought his bone saw.  Shame nobody noticed the screaming until now.

And the media dutifully reported the new story as if it wasn’t a laughable lie, and pretending that the people saying this hadn’t just lied to us several times in a row.  What, they’re not allowed to remember any of that?

Hey, I live in the new post-truth America.  Trump lies to all of us, every day.  Then he lies some more.  If his tee-time gets delayed, Trump might lie a few more times, just to keep in shape.  His indifference to the truth is legendary.

And every day, ABC, the Washington Post, NBC, the New York Times, CNN, Fox, the Wall Street Journal, CBS, and all the rest report each new lie in the same way: repeat the lie, whole and complete, get the attribution right, and then mildly compare each new claim against the available evidence for that specific lie.  It doesn’t matter if the source has lied to you fifteen times in a row this week, the media will studiously pretend that this source has never said anything before that might influence this statement.  They shake off any hint of any prior reputation as if it was flypaper stuck to their fingers.

Maybe there are complex isotopes in the printing ink that tangle neural proteins?

As stultifying as it is to watch the daily stumbles over Trump, it’s just as bad for almost everything else.  Every major media center admit that they handled the last election poorly.  (Well, all of ‘em except Fox, Sinclair, and maybe the Daily Stormer.)  Forget the false equivalences between Hillary Clinton’s email and Trump’s racism, or Hillary’s reticence about her health and Trump’s white supremacist declarations.  For now, you should even forget about the screaming and yet oddly unexamined misogyny.  One of the biggest mistakes, everyone agrees, was that we allowed known lies to pass, unchallenged.  We didn’t challenge anything.  It didn’t matter if the lies were from people or ‘bots who paid in rubles, we gave it all a pass.  The media grumpily complained it wasn’t their job to fact-check.

Um, ‘reporting the truth’ kinda describes journalism.  Missed that day in J-School?  And yet, here are some New York Times headlines today:

Saudi Arabia Says Journalist Jamal Khashoggi Is Dead; 18 Are Arrested

Mr. Khashoggi was strangled after a fistfight, officials said, and the deputy director of Saudi intelligence and other high-ranking officials had been dismissed.

Followed by:

President Trump said that the announcement was a “good first steps” but that he would consider “some form of sanction.”

Trump: Saudi Arrests in Khashoggi Death a ‘Good First Step’

President Donald Trump on Friday called Saudi Arabia’s announcement that suspects are in custody in the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi a “good first step” and said he would work with Congress on a U.S. response.

Uh, what?  Maybe the Washington Post was more thorough.

Saudi Arabia says Khashoggi was killed in fight at consulate

Officials back away from initial claim that journalist left Istanbul mission alive

I swear, it’s like the last two weeks never happened.  I hope it feels better for them because it’s annoying the crap out of me.