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Catfish Nation

Posted on January 18, 2013
catfish

We live in a catfish nation.

“Catfish” is a television show on MTV about people who lie about themselves.

According to the New York Times, “a so-called catfish is the engineer of the false online identity," a reference to the bottom-feeding-whiskered water dwellers.

Manti Te’o has been catfished, apparently.  His dead girlfriend never real died and was never really a girl.  And the storyline that helped propel him to fame and helped inspire him to football greatness was a complete fraud.

As a Notre Dame fan, this is particularly humiliating.  I went down to the BCS championship game, and Te’o’s dead girlfriend wasn’t the only fraud about to be exposed.

Sharing the headlines with Manti Te’o is Lance Armstrong.

He too catfished the nation.  He told us all over and over again that he was on the up and up.

But, he lied.  And he tried to cover up his lie by browbeating his former colleagues.

It is infuriating that Armstrong would collect money from the United States Post Office as he took illegal drugs to win the Tour De France.   The Post Office has gotten a bad rap from the press lately, but at least it still delivers on Saturday.

The Baseball Hall of Fame decided to not let anybody new join its hallowed Halls earlier this year, despite record-breakers like Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire.

They were all cheaters, and they all catfished the nation.

That is typical of America these days.

Our heroes are all liars and cheats.

A poll came out the other day that close to 70 percent of the American people believe that Barack Obama is hiding something.

Now, Obama will probably go down in history as one of our greatest Presidents.

He is the first black President, so that will get the historian excited.  The economy will come roaring back in the next three years, so he will get undeserved credit for that.  He overcame a fiscal crisis and he has dealt with two wars, so that always makes analysts happy.  He got Obamacare through the Congress.  And he is blessed with a divided and increasingly extreme opposition.

I think Obama is a disaster.  He is a terrible negotiator.  He doesn’t really know how to lead.  He doesn’t know what he is doing.  But that is not how the historians will see it.  That’s my prediction at least.

But that is typical of the catfish nation will live in.

We tear down our heroes (or they tear down themselves).  And we glorify as heroes people who are largely incompetent.

 

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