With each passing day, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and his surrogate, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, are neck and neck in who can best the other in their feast of falsehoods. That is, who tell the most outrageous lies, who can be the most incoherent, the most absolutely wrong about facts.
Giuliani took the lead recently in declaring that during the eight years before President Obama came into office, the nation had experienced no attack from radical Islamic terrorism. Whether this claim was a lapse of memory or a convenient lie, we may know if and when Giuliani gets up off the couch.
This occasion was not the first time Giuliani appeared clueless about an incident that is indelibly etched in the memories of most Americans, and others—and one that he gladly promoted as America’s “mayor.” He seems to be so obsessed with making a case for Trump that he deliberately lies about things. Or is there a clinical problem?
During his rounds for Trump on national television, he confused the acts of police violence endured by Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima. Yes, Rudy, they were both immigrants, but one was felled in a barrage of bullets in the Bronx and the other was sodomized by a sadistic cop now serving time. Both incidents, like the attack on the World Trade Center, occurred under your watch.
Most of these fabrications or brain freezes have come in the service of Trump, who doesn’t need Giuliani’s arsenal of lies. He has more than a warehouse of dousers, none more recent than his revisionism on foreign affairs.
First of all, Trump said that from the very beginning he opposed the Iraq war, which is a bald-faced lie and that contradiction is easily found online. When the Obama administration backed the toppling of Mubarak in Egypt, he praised a move he now says he was against. And we recall Trump’s outrage at the U.S. involvement in the Libya debacle, a military campaign he saluted.
Even more egregious, he had the mendacity to blame the creation of ISIS on Obama, and then began the charade of retracting the comments.
The great humorist Mark Twain once said there are three kinds of lies—“lies, damned lies and statistics.” And all of them apply to Giuliani and Trump, particularly the latter one. Several weeks ago, Giuliani, attempting to negate the Black Lives Matter movement, stumbled over a time-worn statistic about the prevalence of Black-on-Black violence without noting that whites are more likely to kill whites.
This gaffe was more foot-in-the-mouth disease affecting Giuliani, and he has very little to offer in the vital need for calm and civility. What he has been doing lately as a straight man for Trump is to provide the trigger for the candidate’s toxic blather, not that Trump needs any inspiration.
Their litany of lies and misinformation is extremely disturbing, and some of it could have lethal consequences.
If the lying routine between Giuliani and Trump wasn’t so troubling it could be compared with the exchanges between the vaudeville team of Gallagher and Shean, in which they often ended their self-congratulatory duets with “Positively, Mr. Gallagher! Absolutely, Mr. Shean!”
They are a duo of self-deception, feeding incestuously off each other, confirming the narrow universe in which they are the sole inhabitants.
Both Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump need reality checks, and we mean that positively and absolutely!