On Father's Day, the highest-paid employee of Washington State University tweeted out a video of a 2014 speech by Barack Obama that was altered to make him sound like a one-world-government tyrant.
When called on the fraud, Mike Leach, the head football coach and $3.5 million-a-year representative of the same school that gave us legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow, said, "Prove it."
It was easily proven as doctored. But instead of apologizing and owning up to his dissemination of a fake conspiracy video, he then wrote, "What is a fact?"
Of all the things President Donald Trump has done to destroy civil norms, his debasement of language is the most chilling and poisonous. For it has now reached down to every level, allowing people who are supposed to be societal pillars, or even role models, to act as if reality has no foundation.
We saw it when Vice President Mike Pence called former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio a champion of "the rule of law." Arpaio is a convicted criminal later pardoned by Trump. You can say he's a hero to the political right, or a fighter, but by no standard is a sheriff who was repeatedly called out for violating the law a champion of the rule of law.
And we saw it in graphic detail over the last week with the Trump administration policy of ripping migrant children from their parents. The cages holding weeping kids are "essentially summer camps," in the words of Fox News host Laura Ingraham.
Everyone laughed when the North Korean news agency reported that the late Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, scored five holes-in-one while playing a round of golf. But how is this any different from Trump saying last week that crime is "way up" in Germany when it just recorded the lowest year for crime in nearly three decades? Who is left to call him on this? The press, which he's labeled the "enemy of the American people"?
When Mike Leach was caught in his video lie, his university did not set the record straight. Washington State issued a meaningless statement backing its coach's right to his "personal opinions."
And where did coach Leach get this mush, an excuse that would be laughed off the field if one of his players tried it with him?
From the top. Remember when Trump retweeted a video purporting to show a Muslim migrant beating up a Dutch boy on crutches? After authorities in the Netherlands said the assailant was neither migrant nor Muslim, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the truth didn't matter.
"Whether it's a real video, the threat is real," she said. In other words: What is a fact?
Editorial on 06/25/2018