REGAN: Column ‘a profound irony’
Usually I can ignore Mr. Brent Regan’s nonsense, but I found his recent longwinded lesson on “laundering lies” to be a profound irony. Regan, an acolyte of the Premier Liar of our times, Donald Trump, actually tried to explain to Press readers why Fake News is so prevalent and then call out Democrats as the chief purveyor of such. His flimsy evidence for this involved Sen. Schiff’s paraphrase of Trump’s infamous phone call with President Zelenskyy, Sen. Blumenthal’s statements about his service in Vietnam, and vague accusations against Brennan regarding “Russiagate” and “the Biden laptop” (no further explanation).
Certainly in the world of American politics, lies and half truths abound on both sides of the aisle, but to point fingers at Democrats, especially with these marginal examples, when your own party is wallowing in its own sea of Trumpian untruths is almost humorous.
Mr. Regan’s examples of Democrats’ laundering of lies pale in the face of his own party’s many fictions. A few examples of some of the more memorable falsehoods by our former president which have been laundered for his base:
1) Trump’s claims that he had the largest turnout for an inauguration in the history of our country (all photo evidence to the contrary).
2) Trump’s claim that COVID was nothing worse than the flu and would just go away (COVID killed nearly a million Americans before it was controlled by vaccines).
3) Sharpiegate, Trump’s false claims that Alabama would be more adversely affected by Hurricane Dorian than was originally expected (his aides actually tried to pressure federal weather experts into admitting the facts were wrong, and Trump was right).
4) Trump’s claims that he won the 2020 election (despite an embarrassing lack of evidence and at least 60 court decisions to the contrary).
And Trump isn’t all. What of the newly elected Republican Congressman George Santos? I wonder how many New York voters are feeling snookered at having believed his laundered lies. More locally, how many North Idaho voters in the last NIC election swallowed laundered Republican claims that concern for accreditation was a hoax?
CHRISTINE BAKER
Coeur d’Alene