For example, ABC is reporting that “the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve lied to the American public last fall when they said that the first nine banks to receive government bailout funds were healthy, a government watchdog states in a new report released today.” Paulson simply regarded the banks as too important to fail and gave them a clean bill of health.

Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP), says that despite multiple statements on Oct. 14 of last year that these nine banks were healthy and only receiving government funds for the good of the country’s economy, federal officials knew otherwise.

“Contemporaneous reports and officials’ statements to SIGTARP during this audit indicate that there were concerns about the health of several of the nine institutions at that time and, as detailed in this report, that their overall selection was far more a result of the officials’ belief in their importance to a system that was viewed as being vulnerable to collapse than concerns about their individual health and viability,” Barofsky says.

Now, assuming Barofsky is telling the truth (now there’s a problem: how do we know?) then why should we believe the Treasury now? Why? Because it’s being run by the unimpeachable Timothy Geithner right? What eventually happens is that politics becomes like a shady used car lot; and members of the public begin to assume that they are being lied to, at least to some extent, by whoever is in power.