I’ve been thinking a lot about Al Franken’s pre-senatorial book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Firstly, I’m thinking about how that book used to be on many a dorm-room shelf at my policy-wonk-heavy college. And now, for obvious reasons, the only places you’ll see it are library book sales and Goodwill. But I’m also thinking about how character-defining lying is seen in America. If you’re caught in one lie, you are a liar. It has changed the noun we use to describe you, from “person” to “liar.” Jimmy Kimmel Live! constructed a supercut of every time Michael Cohen was called a liar by Republican congresspeople, as if a witness can’t testify to their confessed crimes.
Cohen testified that Donald Trump is a racist, a con man, and a cheat. As Trevor Noah pointed out, this isn’t exactly news. But according to Cohen, the scope of Trump’s lies are even wider than we could have imagined. That is news. For example, the painting he bought in the Hamptons, then proactively lied about on Twitter. Trump lies about the littlest things, and House Republicans don’t even pretend to care.
The best dissection of Michael Cohen’s testimony came from Seth Meyers. (Stephen Colbert must be cursing CBS for not running late-night shows this week.) It was the longest A Closer Look segment in the show’s five years on TV. Meyers laid bare the way Cohen’s testimony showed the ass of Republicans: wasting time on posters that would make a middle-schooler embarrassed; Matt Gaetz trying to intimidate Cohen out of testifying; and that one “rassen frassen” representative pretending to have never heard of Michael Cohen until this moment.
The crux of the Republicans’ argument is an ad hominem attack on Cohen, based on his lying: “Why should we believe what you say if you admit to lying?” It’s not super-successful against Cohen, but the general public seems to be adopting it with regards to Lady Gaga. Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s Oscars performance had too much chemistry, says Joe Q. Public. He’s never been that electric with any woman. The sparks between Cooper and womankind have never set the public’s imagination aflame, even when he was reading Lolita to Suki Waterhouse in front of paparazzi. But that Oscars performance was the real thing, according to Twitter. The question of our age: Are Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper boning? “Hell, yes,” says Busy Philipps. “No co-workers talk this close ever!” says Conan O’Brien.
Gaga went on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to specifically denounce these rumors. Haha, gotcha! she said. We were acting. This is what actors are supposed to do, trick you! But does the lady protest too much? It is true that what Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper do professionally is “act,” which is either an exercise in lying or an exercise in telling the deepest truths that aren’t even factually accurate, depending on which actor you ask. And they were both nominated for awards in acting/lying at that very same award show. But they didn’t win those awards! Which means maybe they can’t act that well. If acting is a kind of lying, then why should we believe that you are lying about lying right now? The world has turned into that riddle about the two doors and the guard who only lies and the guard who only tells the truth. We only have one question we can ask the guards, and that question should be, “Ain’t it hard keepin’ it so hard-core?” Anyone who tells you “ain’t” is a fucking liar.
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