Those were the words uttered by Hillary Clinton when asked about details of the attack on our embassy in Benghazi, Lybia in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were killed. That entire fiasco is now a closed case even though many aspects are still shrouded in mystery.

There was even a short-lived conspiracy theory floating which held that the raid was actually a pre-staged attack with the purpose of the ambassador being taken hostage and later traded for the release of Omar Abdul Rahman, the Blind Sheikh. Such was the reason, as the story goes, that rescuers were told to stand down but the plot went south when the two CIA assets disobeyed the stand down orders.

My aim here is not to rehash the Benghazi incident but, rather, to go to a greater truth, the existence or non existence of truth itself.

It is well known that a person taking a polygraph test will pass if he or she believes what they are saying is true, regardless of the factual value of what they are saying. The takeaway here is that truth can be relative depending on one’s belief system.

But does it go deeper than that? Joseph Goebbels famously said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating, people will eventually believe it.”

Usually omitted is the rest of his statement, “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by the extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

It is irrefutable that we have entered into an era in which relaxed accuracy standards are the new norm. Nothing can be taken on face value and fact checking is a growth industry. The Kennedy assassination is still debated as if more information awaits discovery. 9-11 has its “Truthers,” and we now have a country evenly divided over a presidential election.

Lies and politics are conjoined twins, sharing one brain and one nervous system and in a two party system such as ours the challenge is to convince enough people on the other side that our lies hold more value for the country than theirs, giving them a reason to switch sides.

Unfortunately we have abandoned most, if not all, of the elements that guarantee an expectation of truth, such things as ethics, morals, a sense of fair play, devotion to duty and any commitment to actually keeping the promises implied by an oath of office.

What is missing but sorely needed is an Absolute Truth, one not based on the perceptions of one side or the other but one accepted as immutable by all sides.

There are 535 members in the combined houses of Congress, 9 Supreme Court justices, 1 President, 1 Vice President and thousands of people in appointed offices. I challenge you to name ten that you would trust with the safety and well being of your family.

The burning question is have we traveled so far down the pathway of mendacity that we have passed the point of no return? Can we ever again live in a nation guided by concepts other than the supreme authority of man having replaced the founders belief in a nation guided by the moral codes of a Supreme Being.

The United States of America is a sick land. We are a place where gender is decided not by biology but by whim. Where abortion, including postpartum abortion, is legal. Where pedophilia is being normalized. We allow criminals to profit from their crimes depending on their status. The governance of the country has devolved to a game of who can steal, cheat and lie the most effectively and the players are not limited to any one political party, it is an equal opportunity game.

If we collectively don’t get “woke” from being “woke” the sickness will become a terminal illness, an incurable virus of the soul.

We must turn back to Praying for America and away from Preying on America.