The Extreme Limits of Human Dishonesty and Stupidity

This is a follow up on my post on joy and sorrow. I feel great joy at having found the ultimate abyss of idiocy, but I fear Monday, October 30, 2017 Mysterious Ways

The competition for worst possible argument was provoked by the fact that former White House counsel Don McGahn told Mueller’s team that (sadly) current President Donald Trump twice told him to get Mueller fired and then told him to deny that “fake news” when it was reported.

Rudolf Giuliani attempted to surpass his previous accomplishments in dishonesty and idiocy by quibbling about an immaterial difference in wording

“I would ask, which of the three versions is McGahn standing by?” Giuliani told CNN’s Jake Tapper in response to McGahn’s lawyer’s statement, before listing several versions of the story.

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For example, while The New York Times used the word “fire” in its January 2018 report on the initial conversations between Trump and McGahn, McGahn himself did not use that word in interviews with Mueller’s team. Yet, Giuliani implied to Tapper that McGahn had used the word, citing the page number of Mueller’s report on which the New York Times article is described and saying: “The first version that he says is, ‘The President told me to fire him because he’s upset about conflicts of interest, and I told him I’d resign.’”

But there’s no such quote credited to McGahn in the redacted Mueller report.

It is impressive idiocy to base one’s case on the inconsistency between saying “Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the Special Counsel.” and “‘The President told me to fire him because he’s upset about conflicts of interest,” but it is truly outstanding idiocy to notice the difference in wording between McGahn’s testimony and a New York Times paraphrase of a leak.

One might expect that Giuliani’s denouncing someone for an immaterial difference between the words Giuliani put in his mouth and the words which actually came out of it would stand as the nadir of dishonest idiocy forever, or at least one day.

I put the following words in Kellyanne Conway’s mouth “hold my beer”.

She argued that we can tell that McGahn committed perjury for no compelling reason because

Don McGahn is an honorable attorney who stayed on the job 18 months after this alleged incident took place, and that if he were being asked to obstruct justice or violate the Constitution, or commit a crime, help to commit a crime by the President of the United States, he wouldn’t have stayed,”

Yes she said we know he is a felon who broke the law for no good reason, because we know he is honorable.

I really can’t even imagine dishonest idiocy which could top that, so I guess I will have to wait at least a day for Trump to outdo his minions.