Arthur Godfrey was a broadcaster and entertainer who lived from 1903 to 1983. He had a unique voice and he was easy to believe. He claimed that he would never promote a product unless he personally believed in it. His on-the-air personality was of the friendly next door neighbor you could trust. Soon people began to feel that “if Godfrey said it, it must be so.” He sold a lot of stuff and made CBS a ton of money.
At one point, he was considered to be one announcer that everyone trusted. He also had a voice that was very recognizable and difficult to imitate. There were rumors that President Dwight Eisenhower asked Godfrey to record several public service announcements to be played on American Television in the event of nuclear war. Eisenhower believed that Arthur Godfrey, along with Edward R. Morrow, was uniquely qualified to give Americans important information during a time of crisis. Those rumors turned out to be more than rumors, when in 2004 former CBS President Dr. Frank Stanton confirmed the existence of the tapes during an interview. (Source…conelrad.com)
Like most celebrities, what you see in public does not always match the off-the-air personality. I won’t go into the gory details, but by the end of his career Arthur Godfrey was a long way from being the most trusted man in America.
Eisenhower was right about one thing. During a time of crisis, it really matters that people know who to trust. Many of us still remember when John F. Kennedy spoke on national television about the Cuban missile crisis. That situation would have been much worse if people were not willing to trust what Kennedy was saying.
Now, if we have a huge crisis, we will be dealing with an administration that cannot be trusted to tell the truth about anything. There have been too many lies. That is one reason all the main stream media outlets are running stories about Barack Obama’s Uncle Omar. Normally no one would care about a 69-year-old man from Kenya who has been living here, illegally, for over 50 years. Who cares! But Uncle Omar is headline news because this administration was caught in a bald-faced lie about him.
In August of 2011, Uncle Omar got caught driving while under the influence. It turned out that he had a deportation notice dating back to 1992. Uncle Omar allegedly told the police he would just call his nephew in the White House to straighten things out.
At some point the White House went on record saying they would not be involved in Uncle Omar’s case. They also said that there was no record of Barack Obama ever meeting his uncle. That was a lie. Just this week Uncle Omar testified, under oath, that Barack Obama had lived with him for several weeks while getting ready to attend Harvard. The White House tried to explain the discrepancy by claiming that no one had actually asked Barack Obama about this in 2011. I doubt that very many people are buying this.
Bill Clinton looked the American people in the eye and lied. I remember one commentator at the time saying that if Clinton was lying he was through. That turned out to be wrong. Ultimately Democratic Senators decided that since Clinton was only lying about sex, it didn’t really matter. Of course lying always matters, which is why liberal Democrats still try desperately to prove that Bush lied. The difference between Bush and Clinton is that there is indisputable documentation that Clinton lied and there is indisputable documentation that Bush didn’t lie. That distinction, however, is lost on many liberal democrats. They “want” to believe that Bush lied, so they just ignore the facts.
Obama has been caught lying and it is a lie that really matters. That is why the Uncle Omar story matters. This country started out with “In God We Trust.” Then, thanks to the advent of television, we moved to “In Godfrey We Trust.” Now we are at a point where we don’t know who to trust. But we do know something very important. We know we can’t trust Barack Obama.
TDM