Trump and his aides lie all the time -- why are they so bad at it?

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

Everyone knows that the proper response to "how do I get to Carnegie Hall?" is "practice." Baseball's all-time hits leader, Pete Rose, once said, "my father taught me that the only way you can make good at anything is to practice, and then practice some more." And kung fu legend Bruce Lee promised that, "after a long time of practicing, our work will become natural, skillful, swift, and steady."

Benjamin Franklin is believed to have coined the phrase, "practice makes perfect." But that cliché raises a question: How might one explain the Trump regime's inability to lie convincingly?

According to The Washington Post's fact-checker, which "analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement he has uttered," Donald Trump had made 15,413 "false or misleading claims" through December 10 of last year. During the previous two months, he had averaged 32 lies per day so he's probably closing in on 16,000 as of this writing. He lies about important things, but he also lies about meaningless stuff--like the size of the crowds at his inauguration or whether a hurricane was likely to hit Alabama. And that doesn't count all of the bullshit that members of his cabinet and a series of hapless press secretaries have offered to the American public. Imagine what the total would be including their mendacity, and then consider that they don't even conduct press briefings anymore.

And yet small children caught in the act of stealing sweets are better liars than this crew of miscreants. Their floundering attempts to justify Trump's drone attack on Iranian general Qassim Suleimani at the Baghdad airport is just the latest example. A US defense official told The New York Times that "intelligence indicated [that it was] 'a normal Monday in the Middle East' — Dec. 30 — and General Suleimani’s travels amounted to 'business as usual',” but Trump and his apologists have lurched from one story of imminent threat to another. "Again and again," reported CNN, "Trump's national security officials have contradicted each other about how imminent a threat Qasem Soleimani posed, whether they had specific intelligence on the threat and even what that threat was, with Trump saying one thing then another, while officials offered varying explanations."

Trump has most recently settled on the claim that Suleimani was planning to attack four US embassies, which nobody but the members of his cult could possibly take seriously given his track record and all the fumbling around for a justification that preceded it.

Why couldn't they just get their stories straight? Are they just lazy?  Is it impossible to coordinate their messaging because Trump's short attention span doesn't permit it? Or do they simply not care about being viewed credibly outside the Fox News bubble because they know their nonsense will be well-received within it?

It's a mystery, but one thing is clear: Lying over and over again all the time doesn't hone one's skills at deception. Apparently, practice doesn't always make perfect.

*****

Speaking of Trump's blundering Mideast policy, The New York Times reported that "the American-led coalition in Iraq and Syria halted its yearslong campaign against the Islamic State" while it prepared for retaliation from Iran, and that's not the only problem plaguing the fight against what is widely regarded as among most brutal terror organizations in the world...

*****

As you probably know, a group of red state attorneys general are trying to get the courts to kill the Affordable Care Act based on the ludicrous argument that Congress zeroing out the penalty for not carrying insurance coverage rendered the whole enchilada unconstitutional. And the Trump regime is on board, refusing to defend the law.

But they don't want the highest court in the land to hear the case before the election. Politico reports that in a filing this week, they "argued the Supreme Court has no pressing need to intervene since the law remains in effect while it's on appeal."

*****

If you're sensing a pattern here, you're not alone.

"The Trump administration is seeking to delay a Democratic effort to require the Secret Service to disclose how much it spends protecting President Trump and his family when they travel — until after the 2020 election," reported WaPo. 

Since taking office, however, Trump has made more than 50 visits to his properties outside the Washington area, according to a tally kept by The Washington Post.