Remember that movie with Jim Carey playing a lawyer where all of a sudden he couldn’t lie to save his life? It was hysterical. His facial expressions alone were comedy genius.
The Flapper could lie with impunity. One time she announced at the supper table that she’d made the dessert herself! I remember being dumbfounded because I knew she had bought the cake at a bakery that very morning. Mind you, my foster parents never lied and I was taught at Sacred Heart School that lying was a sin, which is why this moment of time is embedded in my brain.
I just sat there in the dining room on Orchard Street, my ten year old self trying to make sense of my first major moral contradiction. Of course I didn’t contradict her, children were taught to respect their elders. If I could talk to my ten year old self, I’d tell her to wait patiently because soon I would be moving in with the Flapper. I’d exchange my black and white, absolutist home for a home of many colors, religions and shades of grey.
I wonder how much longer the GOP can continue to buy into the fire-hose of lies from this President.
“Some of Trump’s 2025 false claims were about consequential policy matters, others about trivial personal fixations. Some were sophisticated distortions about obscure subjects, others obvious fictions about issues average Americans experience in their daily lives. Many were ad-libbed or posted on social media, but many were scripted into prepared remarks. Aside from the staggering frequency and the trademark brazenness, what stood out was how repetitive Trump’s lying was. Though he regularly sprinkled in some fresh deception, he deployed a core batch of favored falsehoods again and again – undeterred by the fact that many of these claims had been publicly debunked for months or even years.” https://www.cnn.com/politics/fact-check-trump-false-claims-debunked
“…trademark brazenness.” In fact the Washington Post fact checker chronicled 30,573 lies in his first term! Many were repeated over and over again on Fox news. Mr T has continued lying to the American people – more than a hundred times in his first hundred days this year. How we managed to elect this man is still a mystery to me.
One of my favorite authors, Anne Tyler, was interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning this past weekend. She said that in order to write fiction, one must be able to craft …“an extremely believable lie.” Which got me thinking, maybe that’s why I wanted to write non-fiction, because I knew I’d be no good at lying. But I can embellish a story like any good Irishwoman. And the Grands tell me I’m great at playing “One Night Ultimate Werewolf,” a card game of deceit where the object is to lie if you want to survive.
But if the Republicans want to survive as a party, they will have to stop lying to themselves. Because I’m pretty sure that most Republicans don’t actually believe Mr T’s lies. They just want to survive the next election cycle.
Hope your summer is off to a good start. It’s still wild weather here in Nashville, to be honest…
MountainMornings 