Republican Senator Eric Schmitt from Missouri falsely accused Jack Smith of perjury and called him a “dirtbag” at an open Senate Judiciary hearing on Tuesday after suggesting that texts leaked to Republicans by the Justice department “proved” that Smith was attending an Atlanta Hawks NBA basketball game in Georgia on 3 February 2024.

https://www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/news/eric-schmitt-jack-smith-perjury-caitlin-clark-hearing-b3058747.html

This photo however shows Special Prosecutor Jack Smith sitting in the crowd at College Park MD while attending a female collegiate Basketball match between University of Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa Hawkeyes on Saturday 3 February 2024.

The telling bit is that even after being immediately exposed to universal mockery for making this ridiculous Hawks/Hawkeyes blunder, Senator Schmitt went straight onto the far-right wing "Charlie Kirk TV Show” and repeated the slander.

As the late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said:  "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts" .

Edited yesterday at 10:04 AM1 day by toucana
Corrected parentheses l.3

It's not like anybody in the current Administration, or the Republican party ( or even some Democrats ! ) are above lying.

Says everything about the gullibility of some Americans, or, as G W Bush would say

"There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, 'Fool me once, shame on... shame on you.' Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

It is not the lying I object to, it is the stupidity. And perhaps the fact that folks cannot tell if it is a lie, apparently. I am reminded of a quote by Bonhoeffer, a pastor murdered by the Nazis. As so many things from that time, it echoes very strongly today.

Dummheit ist ein gefährlicherer Feind des Guten als Bosheit.
Gegen das Böse läßt sich protestieren, es läßt sich
bloßstellen, es läßt sich notfalls mit Gewalt verhindern, das
Böse trägt immer den Keim der Selbstzersetzung in sich, indem
es mindestens ein Unbehagen im Menschen zurückläßt. Gegen
die Dummheit sind wir wehrlos. Weder mit Protesten noch mit
Gewalt läßt sich hier etwas ausrichten; Gründe verfangen
nicht; Tatsachen, die dem eigenen Vorurteil widersprechen,
brauchen einfach nicht geglaubt zu werden – in solchen Fällen
wird der Dumme sogar kritisch, und wenn sie unausweichlich
sind, können sie einfach als nichtssagende Einzelfälle beiseite
geschoben werden. Dabei ist der Dumme im Unterschied zum
Bösen restlos mit sich selbst zufrieden, ja, er wird sogar gefährlich,
indem er leicht gereizt zum Angriff übergeht. Daher ist
dem Dummen gegenüber mehr Vorsicht geboten als gegenüber
dem Bösen. …

Rough translation:

Stupidity is a more dangerous foe to the Good than evil.
You can protest evil, you can expose evil and, if necessary you can prevent it with force.
Evil carries its own seed for self-destruction by leaving an unsettling feeling in humanity.
We are defenseless against Stupidity.
Neither protest nor force works against it; reasoning doesn't work; facts that contradict ones own prejudice can just be disbelieved-in these cases the Stupid actually becomes critical and even if inevitable, they can be just ignored as important exceptions.
In contrast to the Evil, the Stupid is absolutely content with themself, and can even be dangerous and goes on the attack when provoked.
Therefore one has to be more careful about the Stupid than the Evil.

A definitive viral moment was the slow camera zoom-in on Senator Katie Britt’s open-mouth look of horror as she realised the magnitude of the six-cylinder cockup that had just taken place. This Republican Senator from Alabama was once a former chief of staff herself -  so she knew just how bad this was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux2fkM8VD50

Katie hasn't yet converted to "MAGA face" it seems. Though she's pretty much MAGAfied in other ways.

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

Katie hasn't yet converted to "MAGA face" it seems. Though she's pretty much MAGAfied in other ways.

Well, she apparently hasn't converted to MAGA ideology, either. Otherwise she would have known that in the new world there is no such thing as embarrassment.