Blame Bill Clinton.  If the President can lie, why shouldn’t I?

It’s an epidemic.  From Wall Street down to Main Street.  The truth is for losers.

Like Floyd Landis.

Of course Lance Armstrong is doping.  You’ve got to dope to win.  And that’s what he’ll say when he’s ultimately caught.  Actually, he’s been caught already, it’s just that somehow he’s managed to wiggle free, to explain away the results.  But the truth outs.  Just ask Marion Jones.

Especially today.  Where there’s a "paper trail" of evidence miles long online, and it’s impossible to make these major decisions on your own, and someone will ultimately cough up the truth.

Or, as Bob Dylan so eloquently sang, "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose."  That tells the Landis story.  He could never regain the title he forfeited at the Tour de France, he kicked and screamed for years and now broke and alone, he finally speaks up.  Sure, you can decide whether to believe him, but it would be tough to make up so many facts, and we all know that when you finally admit to yourself that your options are gone, you kick the artifice and tell what you did.  Like Ted Bundy.  Just before they were gonna execute him, he confessed to all those murders he’d been denying so emphatically for years.

Kind of like record sales.  Ever talk to an indie act?  They’ve sold 100,000 copies of their album!  You know, on the road, to fans!

I don’t believe that.  I don’t believe any statistic a wannabe tells.  If people are manipulating their MySpace plays, and it’s a jungle out there, you’ve got no choice.  Or do you?

The major labels are no better.  Lying is institutionalized.  They don’t pay royalties, never mind ripping you off blind by keeping your copyrights and recouping at your royalty rate, however low it might be.

And then there are people like David Geffen.  Who’ll say what you want to hear now, and fight later.  Sure, I’ll allow public access to the beach in front of my house.  Of course I’ll open the gate.  All I need you to do is let me build this monstrosity of a house on the beach and we’ve got a deal!  And the house gets built, and suddenly, he doesn’t want to open the gate.  Did he ever want to open the gate?  Can we believe the excuses he made?

And it’s no better in politics.  Did you know Obama wasn’t born in the U.S?  Yup!  Show me the birth certificate!  And even if you do, I’m gonna keep repeating my accusation, because it works for me!

Fred Durst canceled his shows because he couldn’t sell tickets.  Same deal with Christina Aguilera.  Do they really think the ridiculous excuses they made are gonna stick?  Especially when one can go on ticketmaster.com and check availability?  Limp Bizkit’s music is equally abhorrent indoors and out.  Believe me, if we paid them a mil to play on a stadium bill, they’d show up.  And Christina has been hitless too long.  It’s hard to maintain paying fans, especially at these prices, when the attraction is Top Forty records.  We believed in the bands of yore. We believe in neither Bizkit nor Aguilera.  The former was a moment in time, that we’d rather forget, kind of like Frankie Avalon, but a lot more offensive, and the latter was the best of the late ninety teen acts.  There’s no one in America who doesn’t know this.  Unless, maybe, it’s the acts themselves.  No, they know too.