Trump's sham justifications for spurning the Paris climate agreement is only the most recent evidence of this.
"We are confident the federal district court will once again see through the sham justifications for this underhanded clinic shutdown law and ultimately strike it down permanently as a gross violation of women's constitutional rights".
He steeps himself in German thinkers whose genocidal texts provided sham-intellectual justification for murdering 6 million Jews.
As such, there are lingering questions about the applicability of, and necessity for – and thus the goal-based justifications for – sham surgery.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor in particular mercilessly shredded Keller's arguments, forcefully exposing Texas's justifications as a sham.
But one of the critics quoted in the memo – a former deputy attorney general under Republican President George H.W. Bush – has called the justification for Comey's firing a "sham," and said his legitimate criticisms of Comey had little to do with the real reason the FBI director was fired.
And if you're feeling guilty about doing it, they give you plenty of justification: The banking system is a fraud, they say, the Federal Reserve is a sham, and the American dollar is worthless paper.
He takes this to mean that the ethical virtue of justice which their subjects are enjoined to cultivate traditionally seen as the necessary bond among citizens and the justification for political rule is in fact a distorted sham.
And, what's more, they never will until the principal justification for them, talent, is exposed as the self-serving sham that it is.
Put most forcefully, public reason is a sham: it purports to be an impartial or neutral method of moral or political justification, but it is, in fact, a form of sectarian secularism or modern liberalism masquerading as something more inclusive.
Grotius argued that wars of aggression are legal as long as states provide justification for them, but that even when the justifications prove to be shams the winners have a right to keep whatever they have managed to seize.
