CAIRO — In April 2012, I attended a news conference at which the Muslim Brotherhood's powerful financier and strategist Khairat El-Shater announced both his candidacy in the presidential election and the "Renaissance Project," which he claimed would put Egypt among the world's richest countries within his first term as president. Weeks later, Shater was out of the 2012 presidential race and Mohammed Morsi became the Brotherhood's second pick, dubbed by Egyptians the "spare tire."

Morsi placed less emphasis on the Brotherhood's Renaissance Project, but during another news conference I attended at one of Cairo's poshest hotels in May 2012, he declared his "100-day plan." Flanked by his aides, bodyguards and political lackeys, Morsi declared that within his first hundred days in office, he would resolve Cairo's security, traffic, garbage, fuel and bread issues. I turned off my voice recorder, stopped taking notes and looked at the bearded liar as he shamelessly vowed to resolve the decades-old crises of a city of 20 million.

Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt's new president and former defense minister, who put both Morsi and Shater behind bars, was much smarter. He let the lies be told by the propagandists surrounding him. That being said, the Sisi era's lies are much more insulting than those of the Muslim Brotherhood. They targeted the most vulnerable and desperate Egyptians.

In the last week of February 2014, three months before Sisi became president, he sat in the front row of a massive news conference held by the Engineering Authority of the Egyptian Armed Forces as Gen. Ibrahim Abdel-Atti, an unknown man in military uniform, said he would "take AIDS from the patient and give him back a kofta skewer."