Columns

Column: Pants on fire

COURTESY PHOTO | Looking for votes, one candidate in particular has an estranged relationship with the truth.
COURTESY PHOTO | Looking for votes, one candidate in particular has an estranged relationship with the truth.

To paraphrase a famous proclamation Alice heard during her romp through the looking-glass: The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things: Of the camel’s hump and Forest Gump and that garish man called Trump.

Yeah, him.

I’ve resisted the temptation to write about The Donald and his helter-skelter run for the presidency, mainly because I could scarcely believe what was happening. For a large part of four decades, I covered and wrote about national politics in one form or another, and I’ve never seen anything like the raucous and reckless whirligig show Trump has put on since he entered the fray last summer.

Many of the positions he’s embraced on major issues — such as his call for a “total ban on Muslims entering the United States” — are so bizarre they would have destroyed the campaign of a normal candidate. But for Trump, they’ve had the opposite effect.

The more outrageous his comments, the more he’s strengthened his front-runner status in public-opinion polls.

Yet to me, the most striking aspect of Trump’s political persona is his chronic mendacity. Ah, mendacity — the marvelous, fancy-pants word for lying.

Many of us first became aware of Trump’s flair for mendacity back in 2011 when he became a vigorous force in spreading the calumny that President Obama was born in Kenya and, therefore, had no legal right to be in the White House.

The transparent purpose of the “birther movement” was to sabotage Obama on the eve of his run for re-election. But since Trump and his fellow birthers couldn’t come up with a shred of evidence to back up their scurrilous claim, their movement soon fizzled into ridicule.

Yet that failure didn’t diminish Trump’s zest for the lying game, as he has demonstrated time and again during his current campaign for the Republican nomination. And I can cite a formidable database to support that assertion.

I now doff my hat to Kevin Drum, an enterprising blogger for Mother Jones, who has assembled a thorough and entertaining list of Trump’s brazen ventures into mendacity. Here are just a few of my favorites from that Litany of Lies.

• On September 11, 2001, he saw on television “thousands of Muslims in Jersey City cheering” the destruction of the Twin Towers.
• The Obama administration wants “to admit 250,000 Syrian refugees” and send most of them to Republican states.
• ISIS has “built a luxury hotel” in the Middle East.
• Under terms of the Iranian nuclear deal, if Israel attacks Iran, the U.S. would be required to “fight on the side of Iran against Israel.”
• Climate change is a “total hoax invented by the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
• The U.S. has “the highest tax rate” in the world.
• There are “actually 93 million Americans not working” and the real unemployment rate is about 40 percent.
• Among white homicide victims, “81 percent are killed by blacks.”
• “Vaccines cause autism.”

And rest assured, there are plenty more where those came from.
In fairness, the vast majority of candidates exaggerate or distort facts to make self-serving points and, at times, resort to outright falsehoods. In the hurly-burly world of politics, telling lies — from little white ones to shameless whoppers — is not a fall from grace so much as a way of life.

But even by the shabby standards of our political discourse, Trump’s frequent and audacious lies have established a new gold standard in the art of mendacity.

It’s true, of course, that politicians aren’t the only ones who get hooked on this addiction. Back in the 1950s, the man who was viewed by many as the biggest liar on the Washington scene was not a president or a member of Congress — but a journalist. (No surprise there, as I’m sure many will agree.)

I’m referring to the muckraking columnist Drew Pearson. Although largely forgotten now, Pearson was one of the most powerful and controversial figures of his era, which extended from the early 1930s until his death in 1969.

His widely syndicated column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” was famous for its aggressive attacks on high-ranking officials.

His specialty was digging for dirt in the dark corners of the political establishment, and he frequently found it. But Pearson also had a reputation for playing fast and loose with the facts. His columns often included insinuations and allegations of misconduct that did not stand up and some of his prominent targets struck back.

President Roosevelt once denounced Pearson in public as “a chronic liar.” Not to be outdone, FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, called the columnist “a vicious liar” and, on another occasion, referred to him as “an S.O.B.”

But the piece de resistance in this name-calling game was provided by Kenneth McKellar, a six-term senator from Tennessee. In a speech delivered on the Senate floor, McKellar described Pearson as “an ignorant liar, a pusillanimous liar, a peewee liar, a liar during his manhood, a liar by profession, a liar in the daytime and a liar in the nighttime.”

If I had the power to reach across the generations and bring these champions of mendacity together, I would take great delight in introducing them to each other.

“Mr. Pearson,” I would say, “meet Mr. Trump. I think you two guys have a lot to talk about.”