Lies and the lying liars who learned from the Lying Liar in Chief

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem tells a whopper

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As of yesterday, Tuesday, 1779 residents of South Dakota have died from COVID.  That is one out of every 500 citizens, the highest death rate per capita in the country.  One in eight have contracted the disease, also a national high.  Active cases of COVID yesterday stood at 2,600, about the population of Redfield, a town in South Dakota.

One in 13 Americans have contracted COVID since the disease hit these shores last year.  One in 745 Americans has died from disease.

By any measure, the great state of South Dakota doesn’t have much to be proud of, but you wouldn’t know that listening to the state’s Republican governor, Kristi Noem.  Commenting on the state’s pandemic record today on Fox News as every other news channel carried Officer Sicknick’s Capitol memorial live, Noem bragged, “We did have losses, we did have tragedies, but we did get through it better than any other state.”

If there is one thing that Republicans have learned over the last four years from Donald Trump, the country’s Liar in Chief, it’s that they can say literally anything that jumps into their empty brainpans and all those people out there who watch Fox News, who listen to Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, who go on Newsmax and the OANN network, will believe them. 

I remember the day way back in 2016 when the New York Times first used the word “lie” in the same sentence with the name of Donald Trump.  It was during the campaign when Trump was asked by reporters if he still stood by the birther lie he had been pushing for five years that Barak Obama wasn’t born in this country, he was born in Kenya and was every likely a Muslim.  Trump replied, as I recall, with a single sentence.  “President Obama was born in the United States, period.”  The Times reported the next day something to the effect that Trump had “stepped away from the lie he had been telling about Obama’s birthplace.”

Note that they didn’t use “lie” as a verb, and state outright that Trump lied.  They said, in effect, that he wasn’t lying anymore about where Obama was born.

And where are we now, after more than 30,000 lies told by Trump during his presidency?  Thirty thousand times he opened his mouth and outright untruths came out, on subjects from how he lost the election of 2020 (it was “stolen” from him) to Trump saying that he didn’t know anything about the cash payment made to stripper Stormy Daniels, with whom Trump had had an affair, who he was paying off to keep silent about it.

There were plenty of other whoppers:  He lied that he ended family separation at the border rather than ordering it; he lied repeatedly that he was going to release his “beautiful” health care plan in two weeks, while Biden was going to “destroy” protections for pre-existing conditions; and of course there was his jewel that windmills cause cancer.

See what I mean?  Kristi Noem and Kevin McCarthy, and Mitch McConnell, and Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes – they learned and so did every Republican mayor, governor, state rep, state senator and dogcatcher that they could tell outrageous lies and be believed because Trump taught them with the never-ending firehose of lies that spewed from his mouth every single day for the last five years.

And now we’ve got our favorite spreader of insane clown conspiracies, Marjorie Taylor Greene, with her Jewish space lasers and fake school shootings where “actors” played dead so Nancy Pelosi could pass gun control legislation, and God only knows what we’ll hear from her next.  Maybe she and Kristi Noem will come up with a story that the new COVID vaccine was invented last summer at the big Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota, or the spit secreted from some North Georgia tree frog is a guaranteed cure for COVID, corns, and addiction to oxycontin. 

Anything is possible in this new world where up is down, black is white, and space lasers not only start forest fires, they’re good for removing warts, don’t you know.