“And everything is gonna work out tight
If you ain’t like you been told
Just don’t try to lay no boogie woogie
On the king of rock and roll.” — Long John Baldry
Having practiced newspapering in the Mississippi Delta for 30 years, I figure I have been lied to more than almost anybody, with the possible exception of your average divorce court judge.
And you know, at some point in that process, a fellow with two eyes and bat sense, really does become something of a human lie detector.
And a connoisseur.
While abhorring the inherent dishonesty itself, I can nonetheless appreciate the creativity requisite within a good lie, and there’s not much I hate more than a bad one. Tell a bad lie to a lie detector and you insult his intelligence.
As example, I was sitting in a courtroom in Coahoma County many years ago, covering a hearing related to a lady who maintained she had been most inequitably charged with having received stolen property — in this case, cash which had been stolen during the robbery of a nearby convenience store. This, I suspect, was the charge prosecutors had settled upon since the Mississippi Code of 1972, as annotated, does not contain the offenses of either raising a felonious child or being dumb as dirt.
Consequently, against the strident objection of a public defender appointed to fill the constitutional requirement of representing her, this woman felt compelled to launch into a diatribe she described as “’splaining” her side of the story.
You see, it was all quite simple, really.
There she was, just sitting on her screened-in front porch, when this sho-nuff strong gust of wind came up and started blowing money. And don’t you know, that money — cash money — blew right into the screen on her front porch and stuck there. And well, there wasn’t anything for her to do but go out and take it down, ’cause otherwise, she wouldn’t even be able to see out. And she didn’t know who it belonged to, naturally, what, with the wind just blowing it up and all, so she just kept it, which is how she came to have it when the local constabulary showed up a day or two later to arrest her innocent as the fresh-driven snow son for robbing the convenience store.
That was her story, and she was sticking with it.
And that, folks, was the tallest tale anybody ever tried to make me believe — until I heard the yarn being spun by Donald Trump and his now-in-hot-water lawyer.
I now have a new standard for the worst lie anybody ever tried to make me believe.
The President of the United States, hardly a poster boy for marital fidelity, and his personal lawyer, who looks, sounds and apparently acts like a character straight out of “The Godfather” (all of Trump world comes across as some unfortunate combination of “F Troop” and “The Sopranos”), want me, you and everybody else to believe:
• That a number of years ago, he did not have a one-night stand with a knocked-out-looking porn star, a tryst she described in some detail on national television, and about which she keeps hinting at having “evidence.”
• That one month before the 2016 presidential election, the lawyer, whose name is Michael Cohen, and whose reputation is that of being Trump’s “fixer,” decided, all on his own, and with no knowledge of his client, to create a non-disclosure agreement between a made-up name for the president and the porn star (a book title if I ever heard one), the terms of which would call for her to be paid $130,000 in exchange for her eternal silence about the politically problematic dalliance.
• That the lawyer paid this hush money out of his own pocket and concern for Trump’s “reputation” was never reimbursed and never said a word about any of it to his client — all of which flies in the face of the legal code of ethics, not to mention common sense.
• That after the porn star hired a shark of a lawyer and sued to have the non-disclosure agreement voided because he never signed it at all and she only signed it under duress, Trump and his lesser lawyer are in turn suing to have the agreement ratified, but only within secret arbitration, the details of which would never be known.
And remember, now, they are doing all of this in reaction to what is nothing more than a fraudulent claim about an affair that never happened in the first place.
That’s their story, and they’re sticking with it.
Right. Yes, siree. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Ray Mosby is editor and publisher of the Deer Creek Pilot in Rolling Fork.