No lie: National Honesty Day coming up this week | Opinion

Happy National Honesty Day (April 30) to all those who celebrate, writes local playwright Mike Vogel. We can assume that does not include large parts of Washington and certain defendants in New York courtrooms.

Just under the wire before National Honesty Day this Tuesday, Donald Trump denied having affairs with porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal and then buying their silence to keep them from hurting his presidential campaign.

So why did Trump pay $130,000 to Daniels and $150,000 to McDougal?  A Trump-loving condo neighbor of mine angrily leapt to his defense: “You don’t know why he paid them,” she challenged. “Maybe it was for pickleball lessons.”

Pickleball lessons? Is that what they call it now?

National Honesty Day was created in the 1990s by author Hirsch Goldberg while writing “The Book of Lies: History’s Greatest Fakes, Frauds, Schemes and Scams.” Goldberg chose the last day in April to celebrate, as a counterweight to the beginning of the month’s April Fools Day, a holiday celebrating lies.

The purpose of the book was to encourage honesty in politics and daily relationships. Sorry to break this to you, Mr. Goldberg, but it failed miserably.

According to a recent Gallup Honesty and Ethics Poll, Americans rated virtually all 23 listed professional categories, including politicians, lower than they’ve ever been ranked.

Even nurses, rated the most trusted profession in America, dropped 11% from their previous ranking to a still impressive 78% for impeccable honesty and ethics.

Can you guess which profession came in dead last? Members of Congress garnered a rating somewhere south of the sewer at 6%, earning the polar opposite of the trust nurses garnered. Senators hardly did better, with a measly ethics rating of 8%. If a national referendum demanded every member of Congress and the Senate be thrown out today and replaced by a nurse, do you think it would have any trouble passing?

Why does the public view so many of today’s politicians as unethical liars? To quote former Trump White House advisor Kellyanne Conway, they’re not spewing lies, just “alternative facts.”

And the alternative facts keep piling up. Notorious Georgia congresswoman and serial liar Marjorie Taylor Greene famously declared that the wildfires in California were sparked by space lasers controlled by utility companies and the Rothschild family, maybe the only Jews at the center of more antisemitic conspiracy theories than George Soros. But she is far from the only member of Congress pulling such “facts” out of her tuchus.

Senator Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) recently had lying about bribe money added to the staggering pile of corruption indictments against him, such as receiving kickbacks including, but not limited to, a Mercedes-Benz, 13 gold bars and $500,000 in cash. Menendez attributes this windfall to withdrawing money from his personal savings account. Whatever you say, Bob.

Legendary Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said “You can have your own opinions, but you can’t have your own facts.” To which disgraced former Congressman George Santos replies “Yeah? Watch me!”

Santos maintained the allegations that he spent thousands of dollars from his campaign account on everything from Botox treatments to payments for OnlyFans, an online sex content platform, are false, and his actions perfectly legal — until his non-stop lying, including about his own life story, became too much even for many of his fellow Republicans, who helped expel him from Congress.

Perhaps National Honesty Day will inspire these compulsively lying politicians to check the mirror and take the ethical, honest path going forward. Anyone holding their breath?

As a lad, George Washington famously said “I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down that cherry tree.” If he were around today, I’m afraid it would sound more like “Cherry tree? What cherry tree?”

National Honesty Day. Only 30 years after it’s inception, why does it sound so quaint?

Mike Vogel is a produced playwright and columnist who has written for numerous publications, including Long Island’s Newsday and the South Florida Sun Sentinel. He lives in Delray Beach.