Auchtoon!It’s Not a Lie If You Believe It
I hesitated to draw this one because not everybody may know the George Costanza character from the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld. But the odds against that are pretty good — Seinfeld was one of the last TV shows that everybody watched, it has been in constant reruns since, and of course its catch-phrases live on forever in memes (“No soup for you!”).
All you really need to know is that the Jerry Seinfeld character comes to his friend George — who has “the gift” of being able to lie without conscience — to find out how to beat a polygraph test. At first George demurs, “I can’t help you. It’s like saying to Pavaratti, ‘Teach me to sing like you.'” But as Jerry gets up to leave, George offers him the advice I drew in the cartoon.
I take no pleasure in equating the President of the United States with a congenital liar. There is no fun here at all. With George, his lies eventually unravel and in spectacular fashion, and that is funny. The same unraveling will eventually happen with Trump, but there is a whole country, a whole world, that will pay the consequences. That’s not funny.
Yes, all politicians lie, just as all people do (except for the very young and the very pure). But the difference with Trump is twofold:
A matter of scale: By April this year the Fact Checker at the Washington Post had tallied 10,000 false or misleading claims by Trump during his presidency. And the man had a well-established pattern before being elected.
And a matter of audacity: After his rally in North Carolina where his supporters chanted, “Send her back!” there were some negative reviews, what with the racism and all. So the next day Trump unabashedly claimed he was “not happy” with it and had tried to stop it by “starting speaking very quickly.” No. No he didn’t. He absolutely didn’t. He stood there for 13 seconds and basked. Millions saw it live. Many more saw the recording.
I can only imagine his excuse. “Should I have not done that? Was that wrong? Because if anybody had said anything to me when I first started…” Seinfeld fans know how that bit ended.
BigGuy said,
August 2, 2019 @ 10:16 am
Donald Trump being George Costanza is far too positive a spin. None of the characters in Seinfeld were ever extremely cruel just for the fun of being cruel. Trump and his administration have been cruel to children at the border purposefully all the time.
Very few characters from TV or movies are as evil as Trump. Blacks in Brooklyn in their 80’s and older say Trump murdered dying elderly Black tenants in the Trump Houses in the early 1970’s with his bare hands, strangling them to death, for sport. That way the apartments could be emptied quicker, fixed up, and rented out at much higher rents.
Trump’s wife Ivanka accused him of rape in their divorce proceeding; withdrawal of that accusation was demanded by Trump if she was to be paid. There are rumors aplenty that he raped their daughter Ivana when she was 15.
Before Trump went off to the New York Military Academy in 1959 for 8th grade, the Jamaica Estates neighborhood had been plagued by someone chopping off the legs of neighborhood pets for about five years. No connection to the Donald was proved out, but when he was sent away, the problem stopped.
If you visit as state of federal maximum security prison, nearly every single person incarcerated there will have stronger and better character than Trump.