The traditional courtroom oath used to require the witness to state "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God."  To emphasize God's role in this oath, the witness would place his hand on the Bible.

When a witness took that oath, even if he was only a moderately religious person, he could not escape the knowledge that he had put his soul on the line.  If he got creative in his testimony, he wasn't just lying to the court, he was lying to his Maker.  That's serious stuff.

For the past many years, though, the oath has been abbreviated in American courtrooms.  Now, witnesses about to testify keep their hands in their laps and state only "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."  The end.

Can't you just hear the nefarious, knowing snicker a less-than-honest witness inaudibly tacks on to the end of that oath?  "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me . . . whatever . . . giggle, giggle."

Sure, a really peeved prosecutor might come after the witness for perjury, but having spent almost 30 years in the legal field, I've only known that to happen once.  While God's eye may be on the smallest sparrow, our legal system really doesn't care.

What many non-religious people forget is that original oath lies, not in the courtroom, but in the Bible.  Lying is anathema to God, who made "Do not bear false witness" the ninth of his Ten Commandments.  Dennis Prager neatly sums up why God's mandate about how men must speak to each other is such an essential part of a functioning society:

Lies rip apart society's fabric, and this is never more true than when the lies emanate from a nation's chief executive.  The last few years have revealed that Obama is a finely-tuned lying machine.  Those of us who opposed his politics from the get-go realized this early, but his second term, which revealed the depth and breadth of the lies he told to sell Obamacare, brought this dismaying fact home to the rest of America.  The recently revealed Obama lie is the fact that he told a bold-faced lie during the 2008 campaign when he pretended to oppose gay marriage -- a lie he told solely to make himself more electable.

What's so horrible about Obama's gay marriage lie is that he didn't lie just to the American people.  It's also a fraud against God.  (Not that God would have been fooled, but it's the principle of the thing.)  Thus, Obama repeatedly buttressed his lie ("I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman") by citing to God's laws:

“What I believe, in my faith, is that a man and a woman when they get married are performing something before God, and it’s not simply the two persons who are meeting,” he said.

Matt K. Lewis correctly says that it's the religious cloak in which Obama wrapped himself to spout those lies that so horrifies people who take truth seriously.  Lewis hones in on that abrogation of the honesty due God when he compares Obama's lie to two other famous political lies (George H. W. Bush's "No new taxes" and Clinton's "I did not have sexual relationships with that woman"):

But Obama's [lie] still belongs in a category by itself.

Consider this imperfect analogy. You say, "On the life of my daughter, I'm telling the truth..." and I find out that you lied. The lie itself might be about something terribly minor. But what kind of person would do that?

That's the problem here. Obama cited his belief in something sacred to buttress an argument he apparently didn't actually believe. By making his faith an accessory to a lie, he subjected something sacred to something profane.

For the faithful, this really is a damning revelation.

I'm less interested in how Obama feels about gay marriage than I am in the fact that he's the kind of person who would cite his faith to justify a lie.

Although Obama's lies have been the most consequential of late, whether he was lying about gay marriage or health insurance or Benjamin Netanyahu's properly conducted invitation to speak to the House, other people's lies, including lies about lying, have also shaped the national dialog in unseemly and dangerous ways.

Aside from the revelation about the president's gay marriage fraud, the other tale of lies that's been roiling the airwaves these past couple of weeks is the news that NBC talking head Brian Williams is a serial liar about such things as Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and even puppies.

The same media that endlessly gives Obama's lies a pass is savaging Williams.  It's therefore reasonable to believe that at least part of the media's willingness to turn on one of its own comes about because so-called journalists don't want Americans to look too closely at Obama's lies.  It's a form of misdirection.  If they go after Williams, they can say to Americans "See, we take lies seriously.  The fact that we haven't attacked Obama's lies means that they aren't serious."

In fact, the opposite is true.  Obama's lies are infinitely more serious than any Paul Bunyan-esque tales Williams told.  Williams' lies are designed purely for self-aggrandizement and career advancement.  Nothing he said changed American policy.  Instead, all were intended to make an armchair weeny look like a mighty stud.

Obama's lies, however, were out and out frauds.  He knew they were lies when he told them, and he told them for the explicit purpose of making people change their behavior in reliance on his lies -- and, moreover, to change them in ways that were damaging to the people he defrauded.  They were exactly the type of lies that the Ninth Commandment is meant to prevent insofar as they destroy important societal institutions.

For example, people who value traditional marriage wouldn't have voted for Obama if they knew he was lying.  People who thought the Affordable Care Act would lower premiums and allow them to keep their policy and their doctor wouldn't have supported Obamacare.  The invariably low support for Obamacare would have been even lower but for Obama's fraud, something that might have stopped even those Democrats' intent upon the bill's passage.  People who believed in racial harmony would never have voted for a man who, despite his flowery words in 2004 and 2008, practices racial demagoguery at every opportunity.  And of course, people might have thought twice about electing a self-professed "Christian," whose recent behavior indicates he spoke the truth only when he said "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam."

And that gets us to a rather unique kind of liar, who uses new lies as a vehicle for recycling extremely damaging old lies.  That unique liar, of course, is Jon Stewart, who pretends that his ideologically-driven news show interspersed with snark and dishonesty is, in fact, a comedy show impartially poking fun at the news.

Thankfully, Stewart is leaving his show this year, but he's still on the scene now and continues his solemn mission to protect Obama as long as he possibly can.  To that end, just this past week, Stewart used his bully pulpit at The Daily Show to prevent his audience acolytes from asking a logical question:  "If it's bad that Brian Williams lies, isn't it worse that Obama has been revealed yet again to be a serial and significant liar?"

Stewart effected this misdirection by explicitly tying William's lies, not to Obama's lies, but to George Bush.  (You remember, of course, the Democrat Party mantra:  "Bush lied, people died.")  At the 3:55 mark in his puerile, punny, unfunny segment about Williams' lies, Stewart suddenly inserts that eleven-year-old attack on Bush:

Now this might seem like overkill, but for me, no, it's not overkill because I am happy.  Finally, someone is being held to account for misleading America about the Iraq War.  Finally.  [Audience cheers loudly.]  It might not necessarily be the first person you'd want held accountable on that list, but never again will Brian Williams mislead this great nation about being shot at in a war we probably wouldn't have ended up in if the media had applied this level of scrutiny to the actual f***ing war.

But you want to know what the really funny thing is about the that flabby, sneering Stewart shtick?  Stewart is lying through his teeth when he accuses George W. Bush of lying about Iraq. In fact, George W. Bush was never anything but honest about Iraq. He relied on America's intelligence apparatus and that apparatus, as it does rather consistently about everything, got it wrong.

How do I know this?  I know it because, when Ron Fournier, a former AP reporter casually said, as if it were the truth, that Bush lied to get America into the war in Iraq, Laurence H. Silberman, who co-chaired the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, and presumably knows more about the subject than Jon Stewart, saw red.  He then wrote a detailed opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal about the debunked lie that Fournier touted:

The intelligence community’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stated, in a formal presentation to President Bush and to Congress, its view that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction—a belief in which the NIE said it held a 90% level of confidence. That is about as certain as the intelligence community gets on any subject.

Recall that the head of the intelligence community, Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet, famously told the president that the proposition that Iraq possessed WMD was “a slam dunk.” Our WMD commission carefully examined the interrelationships between the Bush administration and the intelligence community and found no indication that anyone in the administration sought to pressure the intelligence community into its findings. As our commission reported, presidential daily briefs from the CIA dating back to the Clinton administration were, if anything, more alarmist about Iraq’s WMD than the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. [snip]

Our WMD commission ultimately determined that the intelligence community was “dead wrong” about Saddam’s weapons. But as I recall, no one in Washington political circles offered significant disagreement with the intelligence community before the invasion. The National Intelligence Estimate was persuasive—to the president, to Congress and to the media.

And there's the truth:  Bush didn't lie; the intelligence community lied to Bush.

Looking back at seventy or so years of American intelligence failures, one can argue that only a fool would rely on our intelligence agencies.  Or one can argue that Bush's ultimate policy decisions were wrong regardless of these intelligence failures.  What one cannot do is to call Bush a liar -- but that's precisely what Stewart does, both to highlight the essential meaningless of Williams' lies and to keep the spotlight away from a president whose myriad lies are consistently intended to mislead the American public about significant policy matters.

It's not only our president and his Pravda-esque media who tell the lies that rip society apart.  The so-called scientific establishment turns its back on truth at every opportunity in order to promote the big lie about Global Warming. James Taylor (not the one who committed an act of musical terrorism against the French) has a superb article up at Forbes debunking ten whoppers that some of the climate change priests just sent out to their ignorant acolytes.  Other helpful articles are those published at Watts Up With That and those written by S. Fred Singer and Sierra Raine, here at American Thinker.  All these articles are part of a body of data-driven work revealing how the climate change movement, having taken control of the world's narrative, no longer even pretends that it's either honest or committed to scientific principles.

The last horribly damaging societal lie I want to touch upon is what happened in Rotherham, England.  Brendan O'Neill quite properly blames political correctness for a governing culture that, rather than engaging in the un-PC act of investigating and arresting Pakistani Muslims for criminal behavior, preferred to see more than a thousand young girls sold into sexual slavery.  O'Neill's is correct that Political Correctness gained traction because it filled the vacuum created when society abandoned traditional manners and morals:

It moved into the vacuum left by the decline and fall of older Western values, most strikingly the Enlightenment ideals of universalism, tolerance, and freedom. For this, in essence, is what P.C. represents—not simply the harebrained schemes of spoilt students who want to shut down debate, but a new, hastily constructed, and speedily spreading moral system that might replace the morality of old that has withered and lies gasping for breath.

Political correctness, though, isn't just a new form of good manners that conveniently silences us.  Instead, as Orwell predicted when he dreamed up Newspeak, PC codes force us to lie to ourselves.

PC thought force upon us the lie that men are women and women are men, just because a vocal minority wants that to be true.

PC thought forces upon us the lie that Israel, the only free liberal democracy in the Middle East -- one that grants full civil rights to all of its citizens, regardless of race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, or country of nationality -- is a Nazi-like dictatorship with genocidal tendencies.  And it forces us to pretend that the opposite is true too:  that Hamas -- a theocratic tyranny that turns its citizens into cannon fodder, exiles or kills all non-Muslims, subjugates and often murders women, routinely executes homosexuals, and openly espouses a genocidal agenda against Jews -- is a meek and peaceful victim ready to emerge as a democratic, free state if only Israel can be disarmed and, even better, disappeared.

PC thought forces upon us the lie that Islam is entirely a religion of peace, despite the Qu'ran's and Hadith's constant incitements to violent warfare.  While not all (not even most) Muslims are terrorists, almost all (although not entirely all) terrorists in today's world are Muslims.

PC thought forces upon us the lie that women are precisely the same as men in all ways and should therefore be integrated into America's military precisely as if they were men.  In the same way, PC's tyranny of the intellect forces us to pretend that women's sexual make-up is the same as men's.  This is not a harmless lie.  It leads to a culture that degrades women, whether by turning them into the perfect victims for sadists or leaving them a mass of quivering fear because of fear of false rape statistics (statistics that are gamed based upon another lie, which is that women never lie).

And of course, as O'Neill powerfully states, PC thought PC thought forces upon us the lie that, throughout Western Europe and Australia, Muslim men aren't sexually preying on non-Muslim girls and women.  Again, it's true that not all (not even most) Muslim men in the West are doing this.  It's also true, though, that Muslim men do in fact engage in sex trafficking that victimizes Western children -- and it is a mortal sin, for which we deserve serious societal punishment, when we deny this reality because PC thought leave us unable to admit that non-White, non-Christian (or Jewish) males can and do engage in this crime.

We have become a society built entirely on deceit.  Our president lies to us, our media lies to us, our scientists lie to us, our police officers lie to us, and our local governments lie to us.  If the truth will set us free, than the corollary has to be that these lies will imprison us.

It's only those who pitilessly acknowledge the truth (as, for example, is the case with members of both ISIS and the Communist party) who will ultimately control the future.  They are entirely and perfectly aligned with reality.  They see the world for what it is, and they know precisely what they must do to re-shape the world to mesh with their ideology.  And sadly for those of us who cling to the Judeo-Christian, Enlightenment, Western tradition, as long as we continue being the passive victims of our own culture's lies, we are defenseless against the tyrants who are honest with themselves.

Bookworm blogs at Bookworm Room.