Kellyanne Conway, the one-time Donald Trump political strategist and White House senior adviser, will go down in history as the author of arguably the greatest nonsensical statement ever uttered.
I mention this because her former sugar daddy is using that statement as a mantra to defend himself against 78 counts of alleged misdeeds that have been filed against him by multiple grand juries.
Conway once infamously told NBC News “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd that falsehoods muttered by her boss were “alternative facts.” Todd was astonished, answering that anything that is not factually based is a “falsehood.”
Conway stood her slippery ground.
Here we are in the present day and “alternative facts” are coming forth in Trump’s defense against allegations that he sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election by hiring fake electors to cast votes for him in states that went for Joe Biden.
Alternative facts do not exist. They are a figment of a political operative’s phony glossary of verbiage. You have facts and you have non-facts … which are lies if the teller of non-facts knows that he or she is saying is false.
In this new age that now accepts lying as normal, alternative facts have become something of an accepted version of what passes for the truth. It is an amazing thing to witness for those of us who used to deal with reporting and commenting on facts.
I did that for nearly 37 years. I knew a lie when I heard it. Never did I consider them to be an alternative to facts. I guess I’m just old school in that regard.
It’s a new day, indeed. I am going to continue to hammer away at falsehoods when I hear them. I will call them what they likely are: lies told those who know what they are saying is false.
I suppose I ought to thank Kellyanne Conway for providing us with such a graphic and descriptive model for the art form that lying has taken in this bizarre time.