The average American — cynical A.F. about the media — hears Cory Lewandowski defend his lie to MSNBC by saying “I have no obligation to tell the truth to the media — after all, they lie about me.”
If you are cynical about the media to start with, maybe you shrug and say “Well — I guess he has a point. After all — he wasn’t under oath.”
His critics (and the House Committee lawyer and Committee Chair) have failed to make a very powerful, very simple argument that blows up this shrug and — with many people — replaces it with a “Hey! That’s wrong.”
The committee lawyer — who was quite good at pinning down Lewandowski — failed his clients, failed the public and failed the pursuit of truth by not taking his examination one step further.
When you are on MSNBC you are not talking only to Chris Hayes or to a cable network; What you are really doing when you go on television is making a statement on the public record The show is available to everyone in America, either live or on video (or free podcast). When you go on national television and tell a lie you are lying to the American people
It’s one thing for this little weasel to spit out a scornful “I have no obligation to tell the truth to the fake news.” It’s quite another for him to defend “I have no obligation to tell the truth to the American people.” Saying this at a public hearing would be fatal to his Senate campaign and make his involvement (as a consultant) on anyone else’s campaign a toxic liability.
The ideal time to do this would have been at this week’s hearings— but even now (24 hours later) nobody of any prominence is connecting the dots and saying “He wasn’t lying to ‘the media,’ he was on TV lying to the American people He was lying to Republicans, he was lying to Democrats, he was lying to Independents. He was lying to all of us, and he was bragging about it at a congressional hearing as if lying to America makes him proud.”
I’m not sure how to push this meme out into conventional wisdom — nobody ever described me as “an influencer.” I am sure that the lawyer yesterday missed an opportunity to further hang Mr. Lewandowski by his own words, and it would be nice if it wasn’t too late to do so after the fact.
