What Corey Lewandowski Said Wasn't the Problem. It Was the Reaction.
Remind me never to sign on Corey Lewandowski as a character witness at my capital murder trial. On Tuesday, once he ended up facing a real lawyer with real lawyerin' skillz, his guts turned to water and he stumbled into a performance that underlined in neon what his entire appearance before the House Judiciary Committee was: a public act of obstruction of justice and obstruction of congressional proceedings. Barry Berke is being rightly praised today for having saved the day for the Democratic members of the committee by deftly removing Lewandowski's spleen and tossing it to the wolverines.
But I'd like to concentrate on something the former Trump campaign yob said, because I think it's been cause for undeserved horror among the folks in my business. Confronted with a video from MSNBC that clearly showed that he'd been lying on television, Lewandowski responded:
I have no obligation to be honest with the media.
In this, of course, he is absolutely correct. Nobody in government has an obligation to be honest with people like me. I know all the journalism school cliches about how we represent the people and a lie to us is a lie to them and wha-dee-doo-dah, but the fact is that none of them are our friends. All of them are at best friendly adversaries and, at worst, actual enemies. The sooner more people realize this simple fact, the better off everyone will be. We do not have a god-given—or even a constitutional—right to their time, and even less of one to the news.
People my age have lived through Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the spurious justifications for the catastrophic invasion of Iraq. We watched the Church Committee reveal how thoroughly undemocratic an institution the CIA is. We saw the government turn itself inside out so that deceit and lawlessness in the financial sector was not too heavily punished. Good Lord, we even saw, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." And we're shocked when a bottom-dwelling slug like Lewandowski says it out loud? Please.
All governments lie. All governments employ liars of varying degrees. This is not cynicism. This is practical wisdom. Nobody owes us the news. In recent history, journalism's biggest flaw has not been people lying to reporters, but the reluctance of major media operations to transmit uncomfortable truths.
And then there's CNN. Less than 24 hours after Lewandowski said what he said, CNN felt compelled to put him on television essentially to say the same thing on their air. Here's Chris Cillizza deploring everything except his network's outreach to an admitted liar. This is a bigger mess than anything Corey Lewandowski said.
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