The Lie That Keeps On Giving

It's funny how public opinion can be swayed by a good lie or repeating an untruth until people believe it. OK, well maybe it's not so funny when it comes to the presidential race, but here we have it. Up to now, Hillary Clinton was seen as the less truthful candidate, but the real truth is that more than half of the public pronouncements Donald Trump has made are, well, lies. And that's really why I said last week that Hillary's drop in the polls was not anything to panic about. All we had to do was wait a little bit and Trump would likely say something that would further reinforce the fact that he is woefully unprepared and unqualified to be president.

We didn't even have to wait a week.

Trump's commitment to the birther issue is proof positive that he doesn't have the intellectual capacity to run the Executive branch. After all, how can someone who is gullible enough to believe, and susceptible to low-level analytical arguments, be trusted to gather information and make an educated decision that might cost us lives? And he stuck with it for five years. Then, even though he received documentary proof that he was wrong, he continued to push the lie. Until Friday. Then he finally acknowledged what has never, ever been true. Trust Trump to make a decision. Nope.

But wait, there's more. He then doubled down on the lie that Hillary Clinton wants to gut the Second Amendment and, gasp, take your guns away. Rather than making the point with a political argument, though, he repeated the idea that Hillary should be harmed by pro-gun citizens in order to...prove a point. I'm not quite sure what that point would be, but since it is not anchored in reality, it really doesn't matter what the point is. The result is quite a backlash against Trump, and one that will reverse his momentum in the polls, and rightly so.

I'm sure that Trump will try to deflect all of this at the debates, but if he can go so far off script during a scripted campaign event, imagine what he'll say during a debate that, evidently, he hasn't really prepared for. September 26 should be quite a show.

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