Column By John Young
If your interest here is intonation and inflection in a presidential debate, read no more.
If your worry is words fumbled along with political chances, forward your attention elsewhere.
The internet is long and wide, so if you want to fixate on any rhetorical opportunities Joe Biden may have squandered, you will find others to fixate with you.
Here, we will focus on lies.
It serves no purpose to relitigate Thursday’s debate — not when it provided so much information that any sane, informed voter could use to prosecute the “do not elect” case against the only felon on the CNN stage.
CNN? Ooh. Ooh. We could dedicate this moment to denouncing CNN, which has provided Donald Trump with two prime-time opportunities this election cycle to spew lies with barely any challenge.
Oh, yes. One would say that on Thursday, CNN outdid itself in that regard, except that it did its job, sort of, fact-checking Trump’s claims in print on CNN.com. The problem is that few swayed by Trump’s lies are swayed by print. That’s the charm of TV; no?
Do you want a media critique? Take a flying leap.
Let’s leap into the lies.
The most egregious Thursday was Trump’s unconscionable carry-over of the deceit that anyone other than him was responsible for the wholly insufficient military response to the Jan. 6 terrorist spree.
Trump wants us to believe that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (or was it Nikki Haley, Mr. Ex-President?) was at fault for what he didn’t do on Jan. 6 – which was to call out available resources to stop the riot.
We needed former Capitol officers Harry Dunn and Michael Fanone to throw their bodies onto the stage and stop the show until Trump explained that.
Pelosi turned down 10,000 National Guard troops? Please give us the details of that conversation, Sir, bearing in mind your role in said conversation as commander in chief. Please identify the military figures involved in that discussion.
The people preparing a massive civil suit against you for sitting on your pork-rind hindside in the Oval Office dining room while the riot raged would appreciate those details.
Acknowledging that Trump doesn’t need his followers to stretch their imagination very far to believe his words, in light of Trump’s absurd statement, a Pelosi spokesperson conjured the imaginative stretch that Pelosi would have calculatedly put herself and her colleagues in mortal peril. Sorry, folks, but, “Speaker Pelosi did not plan her assassination.”
On his National Guard/Pelosi statement alone, not to mention all else he did to subvert and override the popular vote, incite violence, and then do nothing to quell what he incited, Donald Trump should be disqualified from any office and for all time. Indeed, he should be behind bars that long.
(If Mitch McConnell had voted his conscience during Trump’s second impeachment trial, Trump would be disqualified from running today. Sadly, McConnell has no conscience.)
Lies, lies. Here’s another.
Trump said he had 19 people – count ‘em — who could attest that he did not call interred World War I heroes “suckers” and “losers.” In so doing, he is calling former chief of staff John Kelly the liar. We as voters should demand that Trump produce even one – yes, just one — of these, ahem, 19 people who will vouch counter to what Kelly will attest is a bald-faced lie by a political weasel.
Nineteen people, eh? Not 25? How about 46? Name names.
Trump is such a numbers guy – or great at pulling numbers out of his patootie.
There are the numbers scribbled before him, like when he pressured the Georgia secretary of state to “find, uh, 11,780 votes” so he’d win the state.
You can bet Trump plucked the number 19 from the same yum-yum tree where he got “250,000 more votes than you had voters in Pennsylvania” for his Jan. 6 call to rampage, and “6,000 votes switched” in Michigan, and “over 36,000 non-citizens voting in Arizona.”
Yeah, right. Nineteen people will attest to that, too.
Lies. All lies. Don’t let the felon get away with them.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email him at jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
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