Saturday, August 22, 2020

8/20: Lies, D*mned Lies, and Trumpers

8/20/2020

You expect spin from politicians. If they spin wide, we roll our eyes. But when it's a Trumper-level lie, we have to pick our jaws up off the floor.

These guys seem to think that no one follows the news.
Steve Bannon in 2017. He was released on $5 million bail yesterday after his
arrest for fraud. He allegedly took money raised to fund the border wall.  

Today's howlers include: VP Mike Pence saying he didn't know that Trump was embracing QAnon. He says he heard Trump saying "I heard the president talk about how he appreciates people that support him."

Postmaster General DeJoy, in a House hearing, saying it's "unfair and false" to suggest that he is trying to suppress mail-in voting. He never even talked to Trump about it. DeJoy says it's an "outrageous claim." He clarified later, saying he never talked about operations with Trump.

Steve Bannon says his arrest for fraud when he took money from a fundraiser that was supposed to support building a border wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. He says his arrest was a "fiasco," but not for him: He says it's designed "to stop people who want to build the wall." 

And that's just one day.

How anyone can say such things with a straight face is beyond me. This is cynicism beyond belief.

These aren't QAnon members assembling a false reality from hints and fictions. They're people in the highest positions in the land.

Maybe they intuitively know their supporters right down to the pig knuckles, and know their fans won't care. Or maybe these liars understand that their fans enjoy seeing people get away with lying, as if it were some kind of a prank being played on the A students they hated in high school.

Spin is normal for politicians. Nobody is questioning the level of shock and anger that Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) expressed Friday upon learning that the local USPS in San Antonio, TX cleared away big piles of mail to create a kind of Potemkin Post Office for his visit. The man's grandstanding, but not lying. Eye roll.

But when the President lies about voter fraud in mail-in ballots, when he tells Americans that COVID-19 is going to go away, when he sends a private federal army to assault peaceful protesters, when he puts flunkeys into positions of trust, when he refuses to listen to intelligence briefings, when he's willing to commit fraud to be re-elected, and when he lies about all of it --

I have no words that can encompass how awful it is.


Clearly Trump and his henchmen are the biggest liars. But beyond them, are regular Republican politicians kind of lying, too, when they don’t call out Trumper lies? What would it take for regular Republican politicians to denounce actions like Trump’s and DeJoy’s destruction of the Post Office? Will any of the Republican politicians ever step away from Trump and stick up for their constituents? What could possibly change to make that happen?

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