First, let’s get one thing straight. I did not write this column.
I know, that’s my name up there and that’s my picture right next to it and any reasonable person would therefore conclude that these are my words and I can thus be held accountable for everything that follows.
Wrong. Never wrote it. Never said it.
How can I make such a ridiculous claim?
Easy. I just did.
It’s the latest thing in public discourse these days, brought to us by our chief executives both here in Maine and in what’s left of Washington, D.C.
Up in our neck of the woods, Gov. Paul LePage did it with remarkable aplomb during a town hall forum in Gorham on Wednesday.
A woman in the audience asked why he vetoed a politically charged solar-power bill last year, yet signed another bill granting a $13 million bailout for Maine’s biomass-to-electricity industry.
Timely question: Just the day before LePage’s town hall, Portland Press Herald staffer Ed Murphy reported that struggling loggers have stopped delivering biomass to Stored Solar of West Enfield, one of two companies receiving the state subsidy.
Their problem? According to the loggers, Stored Solar stopped paying them for their deliveries weeks ago – adding fuel to many a critic’s prediction that the bailout would end up benefiting only the corporations.
So there stood LePage with this hot potato of a question on his hands and what did he say?
“I did not sign that bill,” he replied flatly. “It went into law without my signature.”
The crowd lapped it right up. But sitting off to one side, Maine Public State House reporter Steve Mistler’s ears went up.
The ever-observant Mistler followed the biomass bill closely last spring and distinctly remembered LePage reluctantly signing it. He even remembered double-checking and seeing the actual signature on the actual document.
And so Maine Public immediately ran with Mistler’s story, headlined “LePage Says He Didn’t Sign $13 Million Biomass Bailout (He Did).”
It was hardly LePage’s first head-on collision with the truth. But unlike many of his past whoppers, this one wasn’t about some distant memory or some story that could never be fully vetted.
No, this was a flat-out denial of a recent signature that’s still there, plain as day, for all to see. This was the preschooler solemnly swearing he didn’t eat the cookies, oblivious to the Oreo chunks still lodged between his teeth.
So how did Team LePage contain the damage from this one?
They didn’t. No pushback, no clarification, no claim that the governor, once again, was taken out of context. Not a peep.
Lie? What lie?
Damage? What damage?
I’m telling you, folks, you just can’t go wrong with this look-people-in-the-eye-and-lie strategy. I mean, you literally can’t go wrong. Ever!
Cut to Washington, D.C., where President Trump has spent the last few weeks drowning in his made-up claim that the Obama administration had “wires tapped” in Trump Tower during last year’s presidential campaign.
Umm … nope. Never happened.
Yet still Trump clings to this fabrication. It’s only a matter of time before he tweets that he heard about the wiretap from none other than the Man from U.N.C.L.E. … or was it Agent Maxwell Smart?
Then, late on Friday, Trump one-upped even himself.
While the repeal and replacement of Obamacare went down in flames all around him, a strangely serene president told a gaggle of reporters in the Oval Office: “You’ve all heard my speeches. I never said repeal it and replace it within 64 days.”
Correct, Mr. President. As the Washington Post points out in a delightful, rat-a-tat video montage, you repeatedly said “one of my first acts as president” would be to deep-six the Affordable Care Act “immediately … starting on Day One.”
Foiled again? Fuggedaboutit. It’s time, Trump now tells us, to move on.
So this is what we’ve come to, folks.
While fake news swirls through the gutter in the stiffening political winds, our highest elected officials no longer obfuscate, equivocate or prevaricate.
They just flat-out lie.
There is no ink on that piece of paper.
There is no video on that screen.
There is no unassailable truth. Reality itself is now up for grabs.
And while those smart enough to have not voted for them in the first place watch these “day-is-night, night-is-day” twisters in utter amazement, Trumpists and LePage loyalists nod along in blissful agreement with whatever spews from their heroes’ mouths.
In LePage Land, there simply is no signature to what’s starting to look like yet another shameless corporate giveaway of millions in taxpayer dollars.
In Trumpworld, repeal and replace was … meh … somewhere down there on the to-do list. (A fantastic to-do list, by the way. Totally fantastic. Terrific list. …)
So now I get it.
Facts are facts, until they’re not. What happened happened, until it didn’t.
Memory is in the eye of the rememberer – perhaps best illustrated by the time on “Get Smart” that Agent Max took a fire extinguisher to the head of the Chief.
“I said I was sorry,” Max later told Chief. “You just didn’t hear me because you were in a mini-coma.”
There’s a lot of that going around these days. Indeed, considering how high LePage and Trump have risen, maybe this complete lack of accountability for what comes out of one’s mouth is the new normal.
I don’t know about you, but I find that strangely liberating. Kind of like not having your cookies and eating them too.
Tempted to give it try? Allow me.
Paul LePage is a fraud. He’s disgraced his state, squandered millions on boneheaded ideological crusades and, one year after trying to organize a Republican coup against then-candidate Trump, now fantasizes about the call from the White House that will come … someday?
Donald Trump is beyond a disgrace to the office of the presidency. He’s supremely unqualified, has no leadership acumen whatsoever and poses a serious danger to the entire planet.
Say what?
You didn’t like that?
Not my problem.
I didn’t write it.
Bill Nemitz can be contacted at:
bnemitz@pressherald.com
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