{"id":1315858,"date":"2019-10-19T20:28:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-20T02:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/parker-column-yet-again-the-truth-outed\/"},"modified":"2019-10-19T20:28:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-20T02:28:00","slug":"parker-column-yet-again-the-truth-outed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/parker-column-yet-again-the-truth-outed\/","title":{"rendered":"Parker column: Yet again, the truth outed"},"content":{"rendered":"
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WASHINGTON \u2014 Shakespeare long ago wrote that \u201ctruth will out,\u201d meaning that what\u2019s true \u2014 by virtue of its basis in fact and logic \u2014 eventually will conquer the lie.<\/p>\n

Sometimes truth is so eager to be heard that it slips past the speaker\u2019s tongue without his conscious cooperation.<\/p>\n

Enter acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. On Thursday, Mulvaney\u2019s cat escaped the bag he had been carrying for Trump during his 10-month-long \u201cacting\u201d tenure.<\/p>\n

Yes, yes, yes, we withheld funds to Ukraine in exchange for help investigating the 2016 hacking of a Democratic National Committee server! You could almost hear the relief of having gotten it out \u2014 the truth, that is \u2014 so that he could get some REM sleep for a change.<\/p>\n

Keeping the lie that there was no quid pro quo, as the official White House narrative went on and on, would have been a burden to the good, which Mulvaney is. If he were otherwise, surely he\u2019d be the non-acting chief of staff by now. It\u2019s the liars and the not-so-good who seem to survive in the Trump administration.<\/p>\n

Mulvaney\u2019s days, on the other hand, are likely numbered. Truth may be the heart\u2019s best friend, but it is not helpful in the sort of presidential politics being played out on Pennsylvania Avenue. This may explain Mulvaney\u2019s near-immediate walk-back of his comments to the press. He issued a statement asserting \u201cthere was absolutely no quid pro quo\u201d (because Ukraine didn\u2019t produce anything?) and that the pause on funding was related only to \u201ccorruption\u201d in Ukraine and had nothing to do with the fantastical server heist.<\/p>\n

Remember that the Mueller report concluded that Russian operatives did, in fact, hack a DNC server to gain information that might be helpful to Trump\u2019s election. Trump is still so undone by this now-obvious truth that he seems determined to disprove it and has become obsessed with the conspiracy that the server somehow ended up in Ukraine and contains evidence that there was no hacking by the Russians. Even though the special counsel also concluded that there was no coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, the president seemingly has a desperate need to prove that he won by his own genius.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to see the server,\u201d he told reporters in the White House last Wednesday. \u201cI think it\u2019s very important for this country to see the server.\u201d Really? I have bad news for the president: The idea even that a single server exists \u2014 and can be hidden somewhere \u2014 is ludicrous. Nowadays, a \u201cserver\u201d is actually dozens of different interconnected systems.<\/p>\n

In other words, Trump has risked everything, inviting impeachment, to prove that he won fair and square. His Ukraine parry was a matter not of national security but of ego. His need for reassurance and public validation is so consuming that he\u2019s apparently blind to consequences, never more obvious than his recent dealings with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which led to Turkey\u2019s invasion of northern Syria. In that case, however, people \u2014 not reputations \u2014 died. What part Trump\u2019s ego played in that transaction hasn\u2019t been discovered yet, but Utah Sen. Mitt Romney\u2019s theory that Erdogan issued an ultimatum and Trump caved may be getting warm.<\/p>\n

Before we leave the subject of the 2016 election, let\u2019s be very clear: Trump didn\u2019t win so much as the Democrats lost. And, if they\u2019re not very careful starting immediately \u2014 that is, if they don\u2019t stop sounding like aliens whose implanted data receivers haven\u2019t yet mastered the code for \u201cMainstream America\u201d \u2014 they could lose again.<\/p>\n

Mulvaney\u2019s stab at survival, meanwhile, may have been a smart move. A wise friend once told me: \u201cAlways tell the truth as soon as possible.\u201d You may not win friends; you may sacrifice something wanted. But over time, lies will consume the liar, make you crazy, and paranoia usually follows. Mulvaney may lose his job over the truth \u2014 the bus under which so many have been cast sits idling outside the West Wing \u2014 and it calls for thee.<\/p>\n

Granted, he might have skipped his other lines about \u201cGet over it\u201d and \u201cWe do that all the time,\u201d but he must feel that a weight has been lifted. Mulvaney, at least, will enjoy an afterlife beyond the White House. As for Trump, his paranoia expands with his prevarications. By The Washington Post\u2019s Fact Checker\u2019s count as of Oct. 9, the president had made 13,435 false or misleading claims since taking office.<\/p>\n

If truth ever does slip off his tongue, Congress will have to declare a national holiday.<\/p>\n

Kathleen Parker\u2019s email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 Shakespeare long ago wrote that \u201ctruth will out,\u201d meaning that what\u2019s true \u2014 by virtue of its basis in fact and logic \u2014 eventually will conquer the lie. Sometimes truth is so eager to be heard that it slips past the speaker\u2019s tongue without his conscious cooperation. Enter acting White House chief of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1315858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-06 17:23:27","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1315858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1315858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1315858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1315858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}