The Truth About the Fraud Called Politics

Theodore H. White, the legendary presidential campaign journalist, was also a legendary sycophant. In his Making of the President, 1960, White wrote:

I owe two general acknowledgments:

First, to the politicians of America — men whom I have found over the long years the pleasantest, shrewdest and generally the most honorable of companions …

Second, I must thank my comrades of the press — whose reporting at every level of America politics purifies, protects and refreshes our system from year to year.

At the same time, White wrote to a friend:

…it is all fraudulent, all of it, everywhere, up and down, East and West. The movies, radio and state and books and TV — all of them are fraudulent; and the foundations and universities and scholars, they are all fraudulent too; and the executives and the financiers … and the Commissars and the Krushchevs and the Mao Tze-tungs, they are fraudulent equally; it is all a great game; and there are two dangers in this great game: first, the fraudulent people come to believe their own lies, they come to have faith in their fraud; and second, underneath it all, because people are fundamentally good, they come to realize that we live in lies and the people get angrier and angrier and they may explode.

The scenery of politics is ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. Yet I must report all this as serious. This is the strain on me. That I must be serious, and I must exhaust myself trying to find out what is true and what is fraud and yet, even after I know, I must take them both seriously and write of them both as if I did not know the true distinctions between them.

(Thanks to Drew Owen and The Intercept)

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