Remember When Facts Actually Mattered?

Remember When Facts Mattered?

by Bill Gouveia for the Sun Chronicle

If old enough, you might remember Sgt. Joe Friday on the television series “Dragnet.” He was a hard-nosed, professional police detective best known for his terse line: “Just the facts, please.”

Facts — you remember when those were important, right? Can you still recall those days of yore, when a fact was real and didn’t automatically set off a political discussion followed by insults and disparaging remarks?

This space is devoted to opinion (specifically, my opinion), but opinion and facts are not mutually exclusive. Opinions are often based on facts, and although reasonable folks can disagree, they should be able to discuss them rationally.

So when people ask me why I have such a problem with our current president, I tell them — look at the facts. In the limited space I am generously granted here, I’d like to share some absolute, indisputable facts with you.

The President of Russia admitted that he wanted Donald Trump to win the last American presidential election, and his government and intelligence services worked very hard to help make that happen — something confirmed by America’s intelligence community.

President Trump’s son willingly and knowingly met with Russians in hopes of gaining “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, bringing with him the president’s campaign manager and son-in-law, and then flat-out lied by saying the meeting was primarily about Russian adoption.

President Trump dictated a memo saying his son’s meeting with the Russians was about adoption, let his staff and lawyer defend that statement, then much later admitted in a tweet it was not true and that the meeting was about “opposition research.”

President Trump’s first National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was fired because he lied to members of the administration, then pled guilty to lying to federal law enforcement agencies, was a lobbyist to Turkey and other countries, and is now cooperating with the Mueller investigation.

President Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort is in jail and on trial in federal court for a variety of fraud charges, some of them connected to lobbying work for countries with ties to Russia.

That former campaign manager’s top aide Robert Gates, a senior aide in President Trump’s campaign, admitted in open court to committing federal crimes and lying to investigators with Manafort over a period of many years.

President Trump pardoned convicted felon and former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio despite legal judgments that said Arpaio used his office to discriminate against minorities even after being directed by authorities and the courts to stop doing so.

Candidate Trump insisted the “Central Park Five” in New York should be executed, but after DNA evidence exonerated the five young African-American men, refused to accept their innocence and called the settlement they received from the city “the heist of the century.”

Candidate Trump said he would release his tax returns if he won the nomination, never did, and now President Trump is the only president in the last 50 years not to release those documents.

President Trump promised “extreme vetting” of immigrants, yet failed to properly vet Flynn, Gates, and other admitted criminals who worked in his campaign.

Facts matter. Now, let the denying begin…

Bill Gouveia is a local columnist and longtime local official. He can be emailed at billsinsidelook@gmail.com and followed on Twitter at @Billinsidelook.