It would seem that yesterday was not a good day for the Trump campaign. But time will tell.

The general story is that Republicans just can’t keep to the truth.

(1) Take Special Counsel Robert Hur’s testimony, and the discrepancies between the full transcript of his interview with Joe Biden and his report of his findings. Hur testified that he saw Biden as an elderly man with a faulty memory, and in his report gave as his major example the fact that Biden couldn’t remember when his son Beau died. This created, as Eric Swalwell said, a “firestorm”, leading to Republicans claiming again and again that Joe Biden was mentally unequipped to be President and that his mind would weaken further over the years of his second term. It led to denials, of course, from the Democrats, who tried to explain that Biden was very distracted by the Hamas attack on Israel, which had taken place a day or so before.

But it turns out that this denial rationale was unnecessary. It turns out that Hur reported something that never happened. The transcipt (as opposed to the official report) showed that Hur asked Biden if he remembered the month that Beau died, and Biden responded immediately “Oh, God. May 30.”

This important Special Counsel report was just wrong on this very important fact. Period. Well, maybe not Period. How could this have happened? How/why did Hur make this mistake? And, once he did, knowing how it would end up being the focus of the report, how could the Department of Justice simply released the entire report without, apparently, doing any checking?

And, just to add to this, in the transcript, when talking about where various files were stored, Hur told Biden that he had a photographic memory of his house. This mental complement, of course, did not make it into the report.

Robert Hur is a registered Republican, and former Trump appointee. Although he swore again and again that politics played no role in his investigation or report, was he being deceptive to the public or to himself?

(2) And this came less than a week after Alabama Senator Katie Britt, in her response to President Biden’s State of the Union Address, attacked the Biden immigration policy by giving the example of a 12 year old girl, who was raped and sold for sex on the American side of the Mexican border by someone connected to a Mexican drug cartel, and, by implication during the Biden administration.

The problem with this is that this event happened during the administration of George W. Bush, that it occurred in Mexico far from the American border and having nothing to do with this country, and that it had absolutely nothing to do with a Mexican cartel, but was rather the action of an apparently independent pimp.

Now, I don’t know who prepared Britt’s speech, whether she did it or someone else. But again, minimal fact checking would have helped. Or – if it wasn’t a question of simple carelessness – are we looking at a second attempt to deceive the public.

As Joy Reid said last night – the Democrats play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules, and the Republicans don’t.

Now, when I Googled the Marquis of Queensbury, this painting appeared. I could have simply added it to this post and told you this was the Marquis of Queensbury. But, no, I am not a Republican, so I looked further and discovered, lo and behold, that this is a painting of the first Marquis of Montrose. Well, Bob’s my uncle.

Google apparently made this “error” because both the Marquis of Montrose and the commoner who developed the Marquis of Queensbury rules (first published by Queensbury) were James Grahams. And there you have it.

So, Republicans, take note. It’s not that hard.