Watching the fall presidential election take shape brings to mind the old Chico Marx line from “Duck Soup,” “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”
As the coronavirus crisis plays out, President Donald Trump has ramped up his lava flow of lies and half-truths, apparently embracing the notion that if you insist on falsehoods long enough they will become truth – at least for people willing to suspend skepticism.
Or should I say, for people willing to embrace selective skepticism. The same group considers most of the work published by the American media to be mendacious, out of the conviction that the media are conspiring with the Democrats to bring down the leader of that particular cult of personality.
(A former colleague, asked at a panel discussion about media conspiring about something or other, replied: “You can’t get six journalists to conspire about where to go for lunch.”)
But back to the Fibmeister. In recent days he’s spouted off about unspecified crimes committed by his predecessor in the invented “Obamagate”; made the preposterous insinuation that MSNBC “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough (a former Republican congressman) may have murdered an aide; persistently suggested the coronavirus was incubated in a Chinese lab; accused the World Health Organization of being a “puppet of China,” and on and on.