As social media memes increasingly remind us, it can be a crime to lie to Congress – but not for Congress to lie to us.

Maybe it’s time it was. And perhaps it should be a crime for all other government employees to knowingly lie to us about substantive matters of the public’s business.

Indeed, as 2024 has ended, so concludes what is inarguably the most corrupt, deceitful and despotic presidential administration in U.S. history. It will take many years for the federal government to reclaim even a morsel of the public trust it once enjoyed. If it ever does.

To wit:

Biden family corruption

The Biden family reportedly took in more than $20 million from foreign entities – in China, in Russia, in Ukraine, in Romania, in Kazakhstan – since Joe Biden ascended to vice president under Barack Obama, according to the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

For what, exactly? Who in the world pays that kind of money without expecting certain and specific products or services?

Or, more to the point, political influence?

Meanwhile, after a Democrat/intelligence community scheme to frame 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump as a Russian asset failed utterly – notwithstanding the nearly two-year, $32 million Mueller red-herring probe – Trump, a well-known, high-profile entity for decades, suddenly managed to become Al Capone overnight when he ran again in 2024.

Ask yourself: How is that even possible?

Lawfare sets frightening precedent

Fair-minded historians will surely cringe, as most of us open-eyed contemporaries have, at the naked lawfare waged this year on Trump – which, just as the Russia hoax, also gives off the fetid stench of conspiracy.

Historians might also do better than we early 21st-century denizens of acknowledging the astonishing breadth and depth of these and associated scandals: to attempt to frame a rival candidate as a traitor, to try to impeach him twice while in office, then to endeavor to keep him off the ballot and/or put him into bankruptcy and prison.

Biden dementia coverup

Yet, given all that historic treachery of just the past few years – and the perpetrators’ rabid lust for power and callous disregard for what their duplicity has done to the nation’s health and the government’s trustworthiness – is it just possible the Biden dementia coverup is an even greater scandal?

What will the future’s dispassionate historians make of a shadowy White House cabal – emboldened and enabled by a lapdog media – that actively concealed the mental incapacity of the sitting president for years, allegedly from Day 1?

If that’s not treason, perhaps we need to establish a new subsection of betrayal in the law for handlers and puppeteers who deceive the American people so brazenly.

And so dangerously: Even if our own news media turned a blind eye, America’s worst enemies did not. A national security risk if there ever was one, the planet’s ne’er-do-wells could see the staggering frailty in the leader of the free world. “The World Saw Biden Deteriorating. Democrats Ignored the Warnings,” a Wall Street Journal headline belatedly blared.

From watchdog to lapdog

And the media. Oh, the media.

Despite myriad and manifest pratfalls and verbal stumbles through his presidency, it inexplicably took a long-overdue but explosive report by the Wall Street Journal in June of 2024 to bring Biden’s incapacitation out into the open.

And even then! Yes, even then the White House and its tame toadies in the media denied it – even savaging the truth tellers of social media as deep-fake liars and Republican stooges until the first, catastrophic presidential debate, when it could no longer be disputed.

Yet more lying, more secrecy

All the while, Biden administration officials colluded with social media companies to illegally censor conservatives, and lied through their teeth about the border – insisting we believe them rather than our lying eyes about whether it was open, while actually flying illegals in and arranging their arrivals via phone app.

Neither has the administration nor the intelligence community come clean on such pressing matters as mysterious drones haunting U.S. burgs by night – or, ahem, the worst pandemic of our lifetimes and one of the worst in history.

“Three scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, a branch of the Defense Intelligence Agency, conducted a scientific investigation in the summer of 2021,” writes the Washington Examiner, “concluding that COVID-19 was likely manipulated in a biolaboratory.

“But the information was suppressed by the Pentagon and not included in White House briefings on the virus, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal.”

Likewise, the administration seems to have largely ignored the 2023 COVID Origin Act requiring the government to declassify and release all information on the suspected lab leak of COVID-19.

Meanwhile, there are multiple allegations the federal government purposely downplayed the likelihood that a leak from the Wuhan lab in China began the epidemic. One allegation from a top congressman in late 2023 was that U.S. COVID spearhead Dr. Anthony Fauci was “escorted” secretly into CIA headquarters during the pandemic to “influence” the spy agency’s probe into the virus’ origin.

“Regardless of what happens to Fauci,” Sen. Mike Lee posted on X just after Christmas, “the federal government’s dishonesty surrounding COVID should make Americans leery of federal action for decades – if not centuries – to come.”

How are we supposed to respond?

Even when there’s no nefarious impulse, the people we choose to run the government lie to us on a routine basis.

Take Texas Republican Rep. Kay Granger – who went MIA in plain sight for some six months before it was discovered this past month she’d been at “a nursing home that specializes in memory care.”

No one said a thing. Not to the media, not to her constituents, not to nobody, not no-how.

The voters who hired her had no representation during her clandestine absence.

“The lack of a Republican vote representing CD-12 disenfranchises 2 million people,” local GOP Chairman Bo French lamented. “We deserve better.”

How does all this happen in a supposed free republic, in which we elect leaders who should be trustworthy enough that we don’t have to leave our workplaces or houses to go check up on them and make sure they’re doing what we sent them to do?

How is the electorate in such a country with such an untrustworthy government – and national media – supposed to think, feel or respond?

The Declaration of Independence speaks of the government in a free country being “instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

How can it be said that a government that has perpetrated the aforementioned disgraces has the consent of the governed?