Liliputin-4525

From George Washington "I Can’t Tell a Lie“ to  Donald Trumps George Costanza defence "It’s not a lie if you believe it" ... "
Glenn Kirschner


Liliputins. What, the heck, is this?
http://stihi.ru/2021/11/24/7101



In the US it’s called, and ridiculed as, the Costanza defence. The name refers to a 1992 episode of the hit TV comedy, Seinfeld, when George Costanza (the sitcom’s resident loser) is confronted by his boss: It had come to his attention that George had had sex with the cleaning lady on his office desk. The term has been used to describe the defense strategy of some politicians, including Donald Trump, who have been accused of making false claims about the 2020 presidential election3.

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Trump’s Jan 6 arguments dubbed ‘the Costanza defence’ after ‘Seinfeld’ joke
In the ‘Seinfeld’ episode, a character says, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”

Josh Marcus
San Francisco
Friday 17 June 2022 06:29


Trump’s Jan 6 arguments dubbed ‘the Costanza defence’ after ‘Seinfeld’ joke

Donald Trump has been accused of using the “Constanza Defence,” a reference to an episode of the classic sitcom Seinfeld, to justify his false claims about the 2020 presidential election.







In a Tuesday episode of MSNBC’s The Beat, host Ari Melber said the former president seemed to be copying a line of logic from Seinfeld character George Constanza, who says in one episode, “Remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it.”

The MSNBC host claimed Mr Trump was doing the same thing, pressing on with baseless claims about the election even though recently uncovered evidence in the 6 January hearings in Congress suggests the former president was warned numerous times he was wrong and his plans to overturn the election were illegal.

“The evidence shows he was not actually deluded on this point,” Mr Melber said. “He was very much, they say, an informed coup plotter, not some bumbling unemployed goofball bs-ing in a coffee shop.”

Former attorney general Bill Barr told the committee, in pre-taped testimony, that he informed the president his ideas about the election were “idiotic” and “complete nonsense”.

“I told him that the stuff that his people were shovelling out to the public was bulls*** – I mean that the claims of fraud were bulls***,” Mr Barr said.

White House attorneys described how Donald Trump’s plan to have his vice-president overturn the election result anyway was “completely crazy”, while Mike Pence himself alerted the president “many times” this would be illegal.

Mr Trump has since said that Mr Pence was actually onboard with the plan to overturn the election result during vote-counting in the Senate, but the former vice-president’s team has said this is “categorically untrue“.

Despite all this evidence, the former president has maintained that he did nothing wrong, and that the January 6 committee is a political stunt to stop him from running for president again.

Mr Trump lashed out at the “pitiful” 6 January Capitol riot investigation on Monday, after the congressional committee held a day of scathing testimony accusing the former president of lying to supporters and losing touch with reality as he tried to overturn the 2020 election.


“The January 6th Unselect Committee is disgracing everything we hold sacred about our Constitution. If they had any real evidence, they’d hold real hearings with equal representation,” Mr Trump wrote in a lengthy statement on Monday. “They don’t, so they use the illegally-constituted committee to put on a smoke and mirrors show for the American people, in a pitiful last-ditch effort to deceive the American public…again.”

The missive concluded ambiguously, with Mr Trump seeming to tease a 2024 presidential comeback run.

“This is merely an attempt to stop a man that is leading in every poll, against both Republicans and Democrats by wide margins, from running again for the Presidency,” Mr Trump wrote, before blaming Democrats for inflation and high gas prices.

Elsewhere in the 12-page message, Mr Trump cites debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election from the recent documentary 2,000 Mules, by conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza.

The film, which has been repeatedly debunked by fact-checkers, claims that numerous people were illegally paid in highly contested states like Georgia and Arizona to collect and fraudulently deposit Democratic votes.

The documentary does not have any concrete proof that this actually occurred, beside a single unnamed whistleblower from Arizona claiming she saw what she “assumed” were payoffs taking place.

The film also makes specious use of cellphone geolocation data, which it claims shows ballot “mules” returning again and again to ballot drop locations.

Experts say such cell tower data is imprecise, and that there are many reasons why someone in a dense metro area like Atlanta or Philadelphia might pass by a ballot drop location for reasons totally unrelated to an election.


“The Fake News media repeatedly calling hard evidence of election fraud ‘debunked’ doesn’t make it so,” Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington told The Independent. “Nothing in 2,000 Mules has been refuted.”

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Did George Washington Really Say, “I Can’t Tell a Lie”?
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George Washington delivering his inaugural address April 30, 1789, in the old city hall, New York. President Washington delivered his first inaugural address to a joint session of Congress, assembled in Federal Hall in the nation;s new capital, NYC.
Tompkins Harrison Matteson/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-pga-03486)
In the words of Henry Lee’s eulogy, George Washington was "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." His accomplishments were titanic: commander of the victorious Continental Army during the American Revolution, first president of the United States, “Father of His Country”—you can’t get much bigger than that. There is no question that George Washington was larger than life, but how much of what we know about him is fact and how much is legend? Take the most famous story about his unassailable character. Did Washington as a boy really say “I can’t tell a lie” after damaging his father’s prized cherry tree with a hatchet?

In a word, no. This is not to say that young Washington was a Pinocchio. It’s just that there is no evidence that this event actually occurred. However, it’s the story behind the story that is the story here. When Washington died in 1799, Americans were well aware of his public accomplishments but knew little about his personal life, and they were keen to fill that void. Enter Mason Locke Weems, a clergyman and an itinerant book agent, who saw that need and was ready to meet it as one of Washington’s first biographers. A moralist as well as an opportunist, Parson Weems determined that he would show that Washington’s “unparalleled rise and elevation were due to his Great Virtues.” In the process, Weems created a prescriptive portrait of Washington as a role model for the fledgling country’s citizens.

Weems’s The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington was first published in 1800, but his cut-from-whole-cloth anecdote about the cherry tree was not added until the book’s fifth edition, which hit the shelves in 1806. (By 1825 the book would be in its 29th edition.) Weems claimed that he had heard the story from an elderly friend of the Washington family, but there is no evidence to support his claim. Nevertheless, Weems confidently related how the value of honesty was firmly inculcated in Washington by his father:


‘Truth, George' (said he) ‘is the loveliest quality of youth. I would ride fifty miles, my son, to see the little boy whose heart is so honest, and his lips so pure, that we may depend on every word he says.’

When, according to Weems, a six-year-old Washington accidentally damaged his father’s beloved cherry tree with a new hatchet, the boy was driven by his conscience to own up to his actions:

I can't tell a lie, Pa; you know I can't tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.

Washington’s father was supposedly then beside himself with pride in his son’s rectitude:

Glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son, is more worth than a thousand trees.

Weems having provided the groundwork, in 1836 William Holmes McGuffey recast the cherry tree story for children as “The Little Boy and the Hatchet” in his McGuffey Readers, a series of grammar school books. Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, the story was retold in a variety of readers and textbooks. In the process, the cherry tree story would define Washington’s character for generations of Americans, and, though its veracity would begin to be questioned, it had already taken on a truth of its own. As a journalist says in John Ford’s classic motion-picture western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”