Sweet Dreams -- Or Else

"I wanted to play [Division I] ball more than anything. When I realized that wasn't going to happen, I made up what I wanted to be reality."

Pity young Kevin Hart. Not only did the Nevada teen lie about being recruited by Cal and Oregon's football programs, which was swiftly disproved since the kid had nowhere to go with his fabrication, he and his family suffered national embarrassment and disgrace, as sportswriters and radio hosts took turns jumping on his head. The insufferable Mitch Albom, who's been to Heaven and back and already knows who awaits him at the Gates, went a little further and blamed the college football recruiting system itself, saying that the madness created an environment in which Kevin Hart felt justified to lie.

While I blame Hart first and foremost, to the tiny degree that I actually care about the kid's sad attempt to seem important to his high school peers, I'll go even further than Albom and simply point to our fantasy nation, a place where lying about anything is acceptable, just so long as it serves the right interests.

Forget college recruiters -- how about the head of state and those seeking to replace him? Nothing a coach tells a prospect remotely approaches the endless deceit that pours upon us daily, from the White House down through the propaganda system -- err, the mainstream media. The entire system is based on dishonesty, which requires not only brazen lying on a massive scale from our rulers, but also fantasy concepts spun by the ruled, as assessing the horrid reality of our existence is too depressing to contemplate. Thus, deception, conscious or not, is a regular feature of our lives.

It's a very real part of the present election cycle, especially among Democrats and liberals hoping for some kind of deliverance. Hillary and Obama lay it on thick, and their respective groupies eagerly lap it up, crawling around the debris-littered floor, looking for anything to chew on. Hillary and Obama want state power for reasons other than what they each piously express; their followers want to believe that either candidate will turn what's left of the country around, or will at least cater to their enlightened opinions about such quaint, bygone concepts like constitutional order. At both ends, deception and fantasy. Breaking free of this chokehold is the last thing on most of their minds.

So some high school kid lied about being recruited by a Division I school. Last time I checked, Kevin Hart's fabrication had no destructive effect on, say, the Gazans, to cite one taxpayer-funded atrocity routinely ignored by political fantasists. If only American duplicity were that innocent.