SIX Inconvenient Truths
One example: A lie isn’t an alternate version of the truth. A lie is a lie.
In the past week we’ve been hit with SIX INCONVENIENT TRUTHS. Six, in just a single week.
One was prompted by the pronouncement prolonging Donald Trump’s Facebook banishment. The inconvenient truth is, even in a free country like ours, you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. Of course we’ve known that ever since Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote it for a unanimous Supreme Court more than a hundred years ago. But it took that decision on Facebook to drive it home yet again in 21st Century America: yelling fire goes behind the shelter of free speech, beyond the sanctuary of the First Amendment.
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg had said six months before the ban, “Often, seeing speech from politicians is in the public interest, and… we think people should generally be able to see it for themselves on our platforms.” On top of that, like it or not, when it comes from politicians with a prodigious audience, it also is irrefutably newsworthy.
But then, on January 6th (and to be accurate, in the months-long run-up to the deadly disorder at the United States Capitol), Trump became the guy who incited insurrection. He became the guy who fomented violence. He became the guy who yells fire in the crowded theater.
Having covered stories in so many dictatorships where free speech was only a dream, I’ve long drawn the line at the bottom when it comes to censorship. But that line is defined by Justice Holmes’ injunction.
So as long as Trump keeps inciting his acolytes as he did yet again last week with the angry assertion that “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as the big lie!” and adding the insolent inducement to “Never give up!,” he shows us that with his insatiable thirst for vengeance, he’s still inclined to incite insurrection. As long as that’s the case, our democracy is safer without hearing from him at all.
Good riddance.
Which leads us to Liz Cheney, who became an inconvenient truth for the leading lights of the Republican Party. Her inconvenient truth is, a lie isn’t an alternate version of the truth. A lie is a lie. Period.
Cheney last week wrote in The Washington Post, “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading the big lie.” And as if that wasn’t heresy enough to those who genuflect to the former president, she wrote to her fellow Republicans in Congress, “Steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”
Voting to impeach the man in the aftermath of the sedition he incited and now pounding away at his enablers, Cheney faces excommunication, losing her leadership position in Congress and, in pro-Trump Wyoming where the state Republican Party already has censured her and demanded her resignation, maybe even her very seat in the Capitol.
As historian Helen Cox Richardson wrote here on Substack, “Cheney will at least have forced members of her party into admitting, on the record, that they are making a choice between truth and Trump’s untruth— and choosing the latter.”
Which takes us to the inconvenient truth of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Last week he said without a scintilla of shame, “One hundred percent of my focus is on stopping this new administration.”
Oh, so it’s not to energize the economy, not to choke the pandemic, not to reverse the warming climate or reform bad policing or reduce gun deaths. It’s just to stop a president who’s trying to achieve all of that.
Given the cynical history of this man, his blinkered focus comes as no surprise. Remember what he said when Obama occupied the Oval Office? “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Do you start to see a pattern here? The only break McConnell took between erecting roadblocks to Obama and doing the same to Biden was throwing the door wide open in-between to a president who pummeled democracy at most every turn.
The inconvenient truth of Mitch McConnell is, his modern-day party’s only plan is to foil someone else’s. Wouldn’t it be a more fitting example of governance if he and his lockstep legislators put even a fraction of their focus on starting what they can instead of stopping all they can?
And this takes us to the politically existential issue of voting rights where the inconvenient truth is, those who can’t win, cheat.
The number of cheaters keeps growing. The latest count from the Brennan Center for Justice shows more than 350 bills in 47 states that would give voters less time to vote and fewer places to do it. And make no mistake about it: they are Republican bills. As late night television host Seth Meyers put it, “Rather than actually appeal to a majority of voters, they’d rather just rig the game so they always win.”
This might not seem so sinful if not for the fact that turnout in the last election was at record highs, for both parties, underscored by attestations at all levels of election bureaucracies that assertions of abuse are absurd.
True, in the swing state of Wisconsin, one woman was charged with voter fraud, after trying to cast a ballot in the name of her partner, who died in July.
True, in the swing state of Pennsylvania, a man whose mother died 13 years ago pleaded guilty last week to getting an absentee ballot in her name and voting for Donald Trump. Lest you miss the irony here, let me repeat something: he committed fraud to vote for Trump.
But widespread fraud, worthy of restricting voters’ rights? It’s a fantasy. But another election like the last one— where voters had more time to vote and more places to do it— is an existential threat to the Republican Party.
Case in point: Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston, our fourth most populous city. According to the Brennan Center, up to 15,000 low-income residents voted at newly authorized 24-hour polling places when they finally got off work.
At drive-through locations, most who voted were minorities. Such expanded opportunities are good news for democracy, but bad news for Republicans since most voters who availed themselves naturally fall into the Democrats’ constituencies.
When the Republican author of the “election security” bill in the Texas House was asked what fraud his bill would prevent, the best he could come up with was right off the pages of Reasoning for Dummies 101: “We don’t need to wait for bad things to happen.”
So what did already happen? After last year’s election, Texas’s own attorney general was able to identify a total of 16 “problem ballots.” That’s 16, out of eleven million cast. As rebel Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois yesterday told the National Press Club in Washington, “74 million people (who voted for Donald Trump) were not disenfranchised. They were outnumbered."
Which now takes us to Arizona, where a so-called audit began last week— “undercover” in more ways than one— with the two-million-plus ballots cast for president in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix. It was ordered up, of course, by the Republican-led State Senate.
The auditors? A Florida-based company called Cyber Ninjas, run by an ardent acolyte of Donald Trump. One of the auditors— the guy pulling down his mask— is a former state rep who was at Trump’s “Save America” rally on January 6th. That’s where the crowd started out that ended up attacking the Capitol.
As David Graham wrote in The Atlantic, “Arizona is committing all the same sins that Trump’s supporters have been denouncing, using a brazenly partisan process run by apparently unqualified parties, with procedures kept secret and subject to change.” Reporters who tried to get close got booted out.
But they’re not dodging all media. They have an official broadcast partner to live-stream the auditing process: One America News Network, infamous for spreading conspiracy theories of the far right.
Apparently they’re even inspecting ballots for bamboo fibers, which they say would prove they were flown in from China.
If they find those fibers, I’m sure we’ll all be the first to know. But don’t wait up nights for the news. Maricopa County already did a post-election hand count of sample ballots, then also hired three separate firms to do full forensic audits, all of which found zero discrepancies.
The inconvenient truth here? If you have slithered into the slimy universe of Trump World, you will search for a disease even if no one got sick.
The last inconvenient truth from last week’s news isn’t political, it’s personal. At least for Bill and Melinda Gates.
Following in the footsteps of Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man who two years ago was divorced from his wife MacKenzie Scott, Gates, the world’s fourth richest, is to be divorced from Melinda, who already has taken back her maiden name to be Melinda French Gates.
There is much speculation about what happened to a couple that presented such a united front to the world. Maybe diverging interests in the direction of their philanthropy. Maybe Melinda’s greater interest in an equal role; she wrote in her book The Moment of Lift, “I’ve been trying to find my voice as I’ve been speaking next to Bill and that can make it hard to be heard.”
And maybe, like many of the three-quarters of a million divorces in the U.S. last year, they just grew apart.
So, although money does buy comfort, the inconvenient truth is, no matter how much you’ve got, it doesn’t always buy happiness.
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies at home and international crises around the globe. He won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his essays also are published— with images— on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.