Revisionist History

"You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." -- Abraham Lincoln.

"If the president does it, it's not illegal." -- Richard Nixon

"The president cannot obstruct justice, because he is the chief executive." -- John Dowd, lawyer for Donald Trump

"L'etat, c'est moi." (I am the state.) -- Louis XIV, king of France.

Truth cannot be cornered. -- Pug Mahoney

   The circus now playing in Washington has a ringmaster determined to fool all the people of America all the time, and is trying to back Truth into a corner.
   It seems to have escaped his attention that in the public and political ring there are no corners, and a free press is always on the perimeter watching, monitoring, tracking and reporting what he says and does, as well as whether it conforms to fact and reality, and how it compares to what he has said and done in the past.
   But thanks go to past associates who have developed an attack of conscience, and an active news media ready to report his emphasis on "alternative facts" as well as how these claims conflict with past history and fact.
   The president's lawyer, John Dowd, now claims it was he, not the president, who used the president's Twitter account to attack former aide Mike Flynn for having pled guilty to a charge that he lied to the FBI.
   Grammarians, linguists and especially other lawyers quickly pointed out that no competent lawyer would use "pled" as the past tense form of the verb "plead." The preferred form is "pleaded."
   Granted, many people do indeed use the form "pled," but they are not lawyers, linguists or editors.
   And this gives impetus to the suspicion that the president himself tweeted that particular message, since it's another example of his pattern of language usage evident in his many other tweets. Besides, since when does this president allow others to use his Twitter account? Especially when access requires a password?
   So it would seem that lawyer Dowd is taking a fall on behalf of his client the president. And that in itself raises these questions: Why would he do that? Why would he risk his own career and possibly be disbarred for doing stuff that runs counter to law and ethics?
   As for the argument that a president cannot obstruct justice because he is the president, that's a ploy that's known to any student of Logic 101 as circular logic. Moreover, while the president is indeed the chief executive of federal law in America, that does not raise his status above the other two branches of government.
   Try using that argument to the Supreme Court and see how far you get.
   The president's constitutional obligation is to enforce all laws, not just those that serve his own purposes while he ignores others.
   As for revising history, the president now claims the "Access Hollywood" recording in which he bragged about his sexual prowess and his ability to grab women by their private parts because he was a celebrity and therefore "can do anything," is a fake. It was not his voice, and not his image on the recording, the president alleges.
   In response, the host of the "Access Hollywood" show wrote in the New York Times that it was indeed Donald Trump who said (and later admitted to saying) exactly what he was quoted as saying. Moreover, there were seven other people on the bus who heard him.
   As another president once said, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time."
   Thanks to the First Amendment of the Constitution, we have some people who cannot be fooled and are ready and able to expose foolishness to all the people, at any time.