Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes!

Greetings!

Conventional wisdom says practice makes perfect, but the first week of the Trump Presidency proved conventional wisdom wrong. The Trump Campaign was a cesspool of documented, provable lies, big and small, consistently, on every subject imaginable, but this week’s embarrassing display from the Trump Administration shows they haven’t been getting any better at it. If anything their lies have become clumsier and more blatant. But since they aren’t telling better lies, they’ve simply decided to lie more often and tell us not to believe our own lying eyes. And they have good reason to think it will work…

The record small attendance numbers for the Inauguration provided a spawning ground for “alternative facts”, and as we know nothing about the Donald can be allowed to be perceived as small. Throw in the lies on illegal voting, illegal immigration, the Media, Obamacare, and the Border Wall and you have a pretty full week of distortion and deceit. The Media is struggling with how to report on this effluence; tiptoeing around the obvious with words like “misinformation” and “falsehood”, and the even softer “though there is no evidence to support it” when all the evidence all points the other way. People used to avoid lying because of penalties when the truth came out, but in today’s America the Truth is now pliable for the convenience of the moment and the whims of the powerful. There is no truth so there are no lies, and no one ever is called to account. Whitney's text

The volume of sewage being pumped at us is no accident. It’s intended to overload our personal and media bandwidth so it’s impossible to examine any particular lie in-depth, much less any policy it might inspire. We’re left to triage among the outrages, wasting time exploding lies rather than comparing competing truth-based policies. And for every fraud that’s swatted down three more get through.

Some lies are actually necessary; we all lie about our friends’ ugly hats and our children’s performance in the play. The Trumpocracy is telling another kind of lies; intended to prompt us into decisions we wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) make if we knew the truth. The Donald is free to hallucinate in his private life but the world can’t afford to indulge him policy or action based on delusion or deceit. There are consequences for everyone who lives in the reality-based community, whether we believe our lying eyes or not.

We have front-row seats for this occupation and we have an obligation to bear witness and document. With that in mind, we’ll be adding a new section to our newsletter… “TRUMPWATCH”. We’ll try to keep track of the most egregious lies, the most insane policies, the most blatant violations of Constitution and basic human values that the Trumpocracy has to offer. In his prescient 1984, Orwell talked about the malleability of history… “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” There’s absolutely no chance TRUMPWATCH will change anything in Washington but it will be part of our witness; our attempt to make sure the past isn’t erased, manipulated or forgotten, and that “alterative facts” (aka “lies”) don’t pass into history… at least unchallenged.