Alternative Facts – something we all could use
By Melvin Durai
Donald Trump wasn’t happy when the media showed
photographic evidence that his presidential
inauguration attracted far fewer people than
Barack Obama’s inauguration eight years ago.
Trump is all about size ”“ it’s important for him
to be bigger than other people, whether it’s
bigger bank account, bigger hands, and, of
course, bigger lawsuits settled.
He also likes to have the biggest crowds, so the
idea that more people attended Obama’s
inauguration irked him to no end. He was fuming
in the Oval Office, saying to his assistants,
“How can anyone say I didn’t have a bigger crowd
than Obama? I saw them with my own eyes. It was
like half of China turned out for me.”
“That was just the Chao family from Manhattan,”
a brave assistant said. “We put them all in the
front row ”“ just so we could have some diversity.”
“Oh, we had plenty of diversity,” Trump said. “It
looked like half of India was there too.”
“Yes, Nikki Haley brought her extended family.”
Trump wasn’t pleased. He ordered White House press
secretary Sean Spicer to make a statement to the
media, accusing them of misrepresenting the truth
and asserting that “this was the largest audience
to ever witness an inauguration, period.” Spicer
put such an emphasis on the word “period” that
even male journalists shuddered.
For most members of the media, Spicer’s statement
seemed like nothing more than a blatant lie. But
Trump’s senior adviser Kellyanne Conway defended
Spicer during a TV interview, insisting that he
wasn’t lying but merely putting forth
“alternative facts.”
And that’s when millions of men around the world
started cheering. We love the idea of “alternative
facts.” We will forever be indebted to Conway for
reminding everyone that “alternative facts” do in
fact exist.
Whenever I argue with my wife, she assumes that
she’s right and I’m wrong. Well, she may have the
“facts” on her side, but I almost always have the
“alternative facts” on my side.
Just the other day, I got in trouble for leaving
the garage door open all night. I was the last
person to come home, so the “facts” indicated that
I was the one who forgot to close the garage door.
But my wife should have considered the
“alternative facts.” Here are just two of them:
1. Our garage door operates on wireless remote
technology that uses high-frequency radio signals
and, as such, is extremely susceptible to Russian
hacking.
2. Our dog often walks around the house at night.
While she isn’t normally tall enough to reach the
garage door opener, I have long suspected that she
walks on her hind legs at night when we aren’t
looking, allowing her to reach all the food scraps
on the kitchen counters. After completing her
misdeeds, she opens the garage door to make us
believe that an intruder was responsible.
We need to start taking “alternative facts” a
little more seriously because they’re going to be
a mainstay of the Trump Administration. For every
fact, there are at least two alternative facts.
For example:
FACT: Hillary Clinton won almost three million votes
more than Donald Trump in the presidential election.
ALTERNATIVE FACTS: (1) Donald Trump would have
easily won the popular vote if three to five million
“illegal” voters hadn’t cast their ballots for Clinton.
(2) Donald Trump would have won the popular vote if
animal lovers had not made a big deal out of an Access
Hollywood tape in which Trump admitted, jokingly of
course, that he likes to grab women’s cats.
FACT: Aerial photographs indicated that far more
people turned out for President Obama’s inauguration
than for Trump’s.
ALTERNATIVE FACTS: (1) More people actually attended
Trump’s inauguration, but many of them were Melania
Trump’s friends ”“ skinny fashion models who occupied
only one blade of grass each. Meanwhile, Obama handed
out invitations at Old Country Buffet.
(2) Millions of people turned out to support Trump,
but most of them left early because they were out in
the open and couldn’t endure the cold stare from
Michelle Obama.
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