The lie's the thing.

Imagine going to a pharmacy to get your prescription for antibiotics filled. Imagine that the pharmacist is a devotee of Refafu and gives you powdered rat's anus instead - because of his "faith."

Imagine going to your tax preparer who tells you you don't owe anything when you really do - because his politics deny the taxing authority of the government.

Imagine being given bad legal advice because your lawyer gets paid to do that by someone you're suing.

Imagine making a bank deposit at a branch that has nothing to do with First National and you never see your money again.

Imagine being sold tofu at the butcher shop because it's owned by PETA.

It's only a matter of time. Imagine you've been raped and you're pregnant or that you've been told your baby will be born without a brain. You go to the Yellow Pages and look up an abortion clinic. You find you're at a clinic, supported by your taxes that is owned by anti-abortion religious fanatics who give you fake and fraudulent pamphlets telling you birth control is evil and potentially fatal, that abortion causes breast cancer, that 8 week fetuses have brains that think and feel pain and that an egg cell is a "baby." It's already happening. The Liars for Jesus are doing this and you're paying for it.

Imagine that a prominent scientist is interviewed about an important heath threat but his words are cut and pasted so that they deny the threat. It's already happening and the Liars for Oilgreed are doing it.

It is beginning to seem to me that Orwell had it wrong. Big Brother is doing an increasingly bad job of bamboozling us. He's fooling fewer of the people less of the time with his propaganda and rigged elections, but Big Oil and Big Jesus and Big business in general are doing it better every day. Stings, scams and frauds are becoming standard procedures, even with organizations that pretend to be all about truth and ethics and morality; the lie's the thing.