By KYLE PRATT
Opinion Editor
Just a day after Friday’s inauguration, deception clearly became a chief goal of the new President and his minions.
In his first press conference as White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer launched an attack on the news media using twisted facts and blatant lies. He was responding to numerous recent reports, including one saying that the crowd at the new President’s swearing-in paled in comparison to that at President Obama’s first inauguration.
Acting as a mouthpiece for the thin-skinned President, Spicer called recent actions by reporters “irresponsible and reckless,” specifically referring to reports that the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office. These reports later turned out to be false.
Score one for truth.
In the next passage of his pre-prepared statement, Spicer challenged the validity of pictures seen on Twitter of the crowd at Obama’s first inauguration compared to the crowd on Friday. He suggested the picture was an attempt to undermine the new President.
“Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way,” Spicer said, “to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall.”
To Spicer and his boss, side by side, unedited pictures count as “intentionally framed.”
The next sentence is where the truth began to fall apart.
“This was the first time in our nation’s history that floor coverings have been used to protect the grass in the mall,” said Spicer.
As he attempted to explain that the white floor coverings made the national mall look emptier, the “dishonest media” were fact-checking is previous statement.
According to Kevin Liptak of CNN, white floor coverings were used in 2013 at President Obama’s second inauguration.
Score negative one for truth.
Spicer went on to claim that security measures, including magnetometers, or metal detectors, slowed the flow of people into the national mall. Are the dishonest media claiming this is false too? No, that would be the Secret Service, who said that exactly zero magnetometers were used at the inauguration.
These lies are coming from the press’s only window into the presidency, and two minutes into his first conference, Sean Spicer was already an embarrassment.
But wait, there’s more.
Spicer continues the embarrassment, claiming that all of the space between the presidential platform and the Washington Monument was full when the President took the oath of office. Photographs taken at that moment reveal Spicer’s battle with reality. Those pesky photographers.
Score? Let’s just say “not good.”
Spicer then claimed that 420,000 people rode on the D.C. metro on Friday, saying it was much more than Obama’s 317,000 in 2013. Here’s the problem: the number Spicer used for President Obama’s inauguration is the amount of people who rode the D.C. metro before 11 a.m. on that day. The number for the entire day was 782,000.
As if Spicer wasn’t making enough of a fool of himself, he also used the wrong number for Friday’s inauguration. The actual number of people who rode the D.C. metro on Jan. 20 was 570,557, according to the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority. In an effort to appeal to his boss’s narcissism, Spicer miraculously made him look worse.
Many people have bad first days on the job, but few royally screw up with as much efficiency as Sean Spicer. Truth is the foundation on which his position was built, and he managed to destroy that foundation with such success, that the entire job should be reformatted and renamed just for him. I propose the title White House Buffoon.
