Shakespeare assured us long ago
In federal court in New Jersey, where two former top aides to Gov. Chris Christie are on trial in connection with a conspiracy to shut down access lanes to the George Washington Bridge three years ago, prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed on one thing as the trial opened: Christie was aware of the plot to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, who had declined to support him for re-election, as it unfolded.
This directly contradicted Christie’s longstanding denial of any involvement, a denial that was implausible from the beginning. For one thing, the Christie administration was known to be tightly controlled by the governor himself, so it always seemed highly unlikely that rogue aides would cook up and execute such a plan without his knowledge. And the context of the effort was Christie’s budding presidential aspirations: He was seeking to show broad bipartisan support in his home state that could translate to the national stage. In the end, of course, Christie’s presidential campaign collapsed and he became chief cheerleader and stooge for his rival Donald Trump. When last seen, he was openly lying on national television in regard to Trump’s culpability in the Obama birther conspiracy, as we noted last week.
Another fiction exposed as such during the past week is that Republicans pushing voter ID laws across the nation are motivated by genuine concern about voter fraud. A review by The New York Times demonstrated that on numerous occasions in recent years, Republican operatives have been remarkably candid in acknowledging that the point of these efforts is to suppress participation by constituencies that tend to vote Democratic. Two examples among several cited in the article give the flavor. A Republican Party county precinct chairman in North Carolina told an interviewer in 2013 that the state’s voter ID law would “kick the Democrats in the butt.” And in Wisconsin, a staff aide to a Republican state legislator quit last year after he witnessed the following: “I was in the closed Senate Republican Caucus when the final round of multiple Voter ID bills were being discussed. A handful of the GOP Senators were giddy about the ramifications and literally singled out the prospects of suppressing minority and college voters.”
Given that documented instances of individual voter fraud are very rare, it really comes as no surprise that these laws are actually aimed at disenfranchising young and minority voters. What is surprising is that Republicans have succeeded in convincing so many Americans — nearly half in a recent poll — that voter fraud is rampant. Fortunately, federal courts in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Texas have not been so easily fooled, overturning voter ID laws in those states completely or in part.
A third unsurprising revelation was contained in a report by The Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity that detailed how the invisible hand of the pharmaceutical industry has derailed efforts to rein in the rampant abuse of highly addictive opioid painkillers, from which drug makers have profited so handsomely. It has long been known that marketing efforts by drug companies helped shift use of these powerful drugs that were once reserved for severe pain resulting from surgery and cancer to more common ailments such as chronic pain. Then in 2012, as concern about abuse of the drugs grew, a shadowy industry-backed group called the Pain Care Forum began promoting a recent report describing pain in America as “a crisis of epidemic proportions,” citing a doubtful statistic that 40 percent of adults suffered from chronic pain. That report was written with the aid of experts working for the industry, the AP found, as part of a larger effort to keep opioids widely available despite the wave of overdose deaths sweeping the country. In light of this cynical manipulation, we invite readers to decide for themselves which is more morally culpable: the addict who is dealing prescription drugs on the street to support his own habit, or the companies who manufacture and market those painkillers to support their bottom line.
It is often not so easy as this to sort out truth from falsehood, but these cases do serve to remind that what seems improbable on the face of it often turns out to be so when the truth finally comes out.