Charlie and I watched a “20/20” crime documentary last night about a crafty woman who killed her husband and went to great efforts to cover her tracks.
She was eventually caught lying about several significant things, one of them being her use of contact lenses. When questioned about the discrepancies in her story, the lady prefaced her testimony with this: “My truth is this…”
“My” truth?
How many versions of truth are there? What, in fact, is truth?
The definition of truth is “that which is in accordance with fact or reality”.
Accordingly, a story about something is either factual or fiction. Put another way, it is either real or imagined. There is no non-fiction or imagined truth…except in the mind of a confused or manipulative person.
We hear a lot these days about “fake news”. Politically, particularly since 2016, “fake news” is fact (or fiction) that doesn’t comport with the supposed truth that our President is telling his audience. In most instances, the President’s version of truth has been quickly shown by journalists to be faulty; i.e. lacking a factual basis or an exaggeration meant to drive home a point. Typically, that embarrassment (of lying) results in a response from the President calling the journalist “fake”.
In essence, the President wants us to believe that whatever he says is the gospel truth and whatever critics says is “false”.
As someone once said, “In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is or becomes true.”
People believe a lot of things, some of which are not true (i.e. based on facts/reality). For example, our President said of the coronavirus, “It will go away in the Spring”. He wanted to believe that…so he did. It became “his” truth, not because it was based upon facts but, rather, because such an outcome would work for his re-election campaign.
Similarly, Senator Ted Cruz confidently stated in July 2020, “I’ll guarantee you the week after the election suddenly all those Democratic governors, all those Democratic mayors will say everything’s magically better. Go back to work. Go back to school. Suddenly the problems are solved.”
We all wish it had happened that way, Senator.
Speaking of bullshit, President Trump sent out six Tweets between August and October saying that stock markets would “crash” if Joe Biden was elected. On September 2nd he wrote, “The Dow Jones Industrial just closed above 29,000…With Joe Biden it would crash.”
That’s not what happened.
The S&P notched its best election week since 1932, and the Dow is up nearly 12% in November, on track for its best month since January 1987. As someone once said, “Believing that you have a five dollar bill in your pocket doesn’t put one there.”
Since the economic collapse of 2020 was due to a lame Trump Administration effort against the global pandemic, it is possible that financial analysts believe that there will be a quicker economic recovery with Joe Biden leading the fight against Covid-19.
Just sayin’ (opinion).
Speaking of the pandemic, we’re now almost three weeks past Election Day and health officials are reporting almost 200,000 new cases of Covid-19 per day in the United States, hospitals are at max capacity, and were seeing almost 2,000 people succumbing daily. Business closures and “stay at home” orders are the rule rather than the exception in most States, Red and Blue.
Not exactly the “truth” that Senator Cruz was guaranteeing in July.
In our culture, at this moment in time, belief has become legal tender in social intercourse, outweighing facts, common sense, and things that one can see and touch. To many people, scientists (folks who deal in facts) are pariahs, because the truth that they uncover with scientific research doesn’t match up with their beliefs.
People want to believe that Covid-19 is just “the flu”, i.e. the same annoyance that society deals with each Fall and Winter. Treating this plague dismissively and optimistically, such believers are then justified (in their own mind) for not socially distancing and not wearing facemasks and bitching and moaning that government efforts to flatten the infection curve are “overreactions” and unfair intrusions on their Constitutional rights.
Back when I was a young man, similar knuckleheads moaned and groaned about the new requirement to wear a seatbelt while traveling in an automobile. They believed that car crashes only happened to the “other guy”…while 50,000 people per year perished in auto accidents.
My brother, who is a Trump honk, informed me last week that Democrats had been throwing a “temper tantrum” for the past four years and that, if Joe Biden had lost the election, “Democrats, Socialists, and Antifa would have rioted and burned cities”.
That sounds a whole lot like an opinion (based upon “his” truth/belief) from a sour grapes loser. By the way, the only “temper tantrum” in evidence as we approach the end of November 2020 is the one President Trump is throwing because he lost the election and doesn’t want to concede defeat.
Ballots tallied in all fifty states resulted in Joe Biden beating President Trump by almost 6 million votes and (prospectively) winning the Electoral College with 306 votes. In 2016, Donald Trump amassed 306 Electoral votes and called his victory a “landslide”. This year, he claims, the election was “rigged”.
Accordingly, the President has legally challenged the election results in a half-dozen States, claiming “fraud” and various voting irregularities based upon his belief that victory was “stolen” from him. His attorneys have taken this belief, and not much else, to the courts…where they had their pants pulled down and shown the door. One Federal Appeals Court judge, speaking for a 3-judge panel (all of whom were appointed by Republicans), said, “Calling an election unfair does not make it so”, “Charges require specific allegations and, then, proof. We have neither here.”, and “Voters, not lawyers, choose the President.”
After being admonished by several courts (31 suits, 30 losses), the President yesterday tried a new tack: “Joe Biden needs to prove that he actually got 80 million votes.” Talk about gall! With no proof to back up claims, require the other guy to make your case!
I’m pretty sure that President Trump knows the one and only truth about the election and is just positioning himself for some kind of victorious (in his mind) exit from the White House so that he can continue to be a kingmaker in the Republican Party.
One of the schemes he is using to set himself up financially is the “Official Election Defense Fund”, supposedly a fund-me site that would help pay for all of the (spurious) lawsuits that Trump has filed over the election that was “stolen” from him.
Trump’s post-election fundraising emails – sometimes issued hourly over the last several days – used names such as the Election Defense Task Force and the Official Election Defense Fund.
Contributions to this fund from Trump supporters are unlikely to defray legal costs of those lawsuits, though. In the fine print of the donation pitch (i.e. the actual truth of where the money will go) a prospective donor would find that, unless the contribution is over $8,000, the money is split 60/40 between a Trump Leadership PAC and the Republican National Committee. Both of those organizations can spend the money any way they want. After $8,000, contributions will flow to the “recount account” up to a maximum of $2,800.
Thus, if a Trump supporter wanted to help out on the President’s legal attack against democracy, he would have to contribute more than $8,000. One dollar shy of that amount would put $4,800 in Trump’s pocket to be used for just about any purpose during or after his term in office.
It’s pretty obvious that the legal strategy is just a means to stimulate Trump faithful into forking over money to the President. It reminds me of a televangelist asking their blue collar, Bible-toting parishioners to send their hard-earned money so that the pastor and his wife can upgrade their Gulfstream V to a VI.
In Trump’s own words, his Official Election Defense Fund is “fake”.
After almost four years of this guy doing his best to obliterate truth, what did you expect?
January 20th can’t come soon enough.
