Friday 3 February 2017

How egregious are the Trump administration lies going to get?


The Trump administration has already been ridiculed after one of Trump's key advisers Kellyanne Conway coined the Orwellian phrase "alternative facts" to describe the outright lies told by the Trump team about the size of the inauguration crowd.

After just two weeks in the job Kellyanne Conway is back in the news again, but this time it's much more serious than inventing new Orwellian euphemisms for government dishonesty.

After research by the Cato Institute (hardly a left-wing organisation by any stretch of the imagination) found that between 1975 and 2015 not a single US citizen had been killed in terrorist attacks by foreign nationals from the seven countries affected by Trump's Muslim travel ban (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen) Conway decided to fight back by inventing a fictional terrorist atrocity called "the Bowling Green Massacre" supposedly committed by Iraqi migrants to try to justify the travel ban.

We're all used to politicians telling lies and getting away with it, but citing a completely fictional terrorist attack to justify an unjustifiable policy is so far beyond the normal standard of political dishonesty it's mind-boggling that she imagined that she could get away with it.

Kellyanne Conway is only two weeks into her job and she's already invented a new Orwellian phrase "Alternative Facts" as an euphemism for lies told by the Trump administration, and now she's presented her own "Alternative Fact" that there was any such thing as "the Bowling Green Massacre".

How on earth can Americans have any faith whatever in their government when they've been caught red handed inventing fictional terrorist atrocities?

Surely openly lying about terrorist atrocities against American citizens is a step too far, even for most Republicans?

If Kellyanne Conway can get away with such a huge and blatantly obvious lie without losing her job, what next?

If she gets away with it, other members of the Trump administration will obviously feel empowered to invent even more egregious lies in the future, safe in the knowledge that they can tell the most outrageous lies with complete impunity.


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