The Problem: Politicians lie with no real fear of being called to account. Even if a fact-checker strikes back, it happens later, and the lie is unchallenged in the moment. Wouldn’t you make shit up all the time, if you had no real fear of being called on it? (Have we mentioned that we used to play first base for the Detroit Tigers?)
The Proposal: We will take a lesson from one of the greatest misinformation gambits of all time: Death Panels. Except our death panels will be real death panels, imbued with the authority to execute any politician found to have made a demonstrably false statement. You might fear that this will push politicians toward honesty and transparency in all their public statements, but then you underestimate the utter incompatibility of truth and politics. They will instead have to find ways to produce better misinformation, which can never be proven true or untrue. The obvious challenge is to find a body of people who could be trusted to be non-partisan in making life-and-death decisions and who would have a reliable moral sense of what is true and what is not. Our death panelists would be drawn from the pool of public school second graders across the nation. Kids love to dress up, and to maintain their enthusiasm for serving on the panels, they would be allowed to wear long black robes with skull masks and given toy laser guns, novelty buzzers, or other implements with which to pronounce a verdict. If the thought of certain death doesn’t deter politicians from clumsy lying, the thought of being condemned by a gang of hooded, plastic-skull-faced seven-year-olds should do the trick.
a bad habit for good readers
