Politicians should never be taken at face value. Each statement should be assumed to include its own asterisk and warning label: "* The foregoing statement is subject to a number of qualifications, exceptions and conditions that I am not telling you; should not be considered effective if conditions change; and should not apply to you if I later am seeking your vote and you don't like what you hear."
The underlying, unspoken premise for politicians--and I suppose the Village stenographers who slavishly take down their words and DO report them at face value--is what I put in the title: "You pretend to tell the truth; I pretend to believe you."
And....sometimes that is OK.
Over the weekend Oklahoma State basketball player Marcus Smart fell into the first row of the stands under the basket at Texas Tech after trying to stop a fast break at the end of the game. The footage has been shown over and over: You see him starting to get back to his feet, then his head whips around as he hears a comment behind him. Smart (black) confronts a fan, Jeff Orr (white), and shoves him. Smart complains to the refs about the man and angrily walks away.
Smart got a 3-game suspension. All in all, this is a good outcome--you can't have athletes at any level getting into altercations with fans, regardless of circumstances. Smart apologized for his actions. The fan apologized for his actions, and will not attend the rest of his school's games. That too is a good outcome--fans should be loud, exuberant, and enthusiastic, but for the sake of their fellow fans and players, shouldn't be abusive. But the fan denied that his comment included any racial slur.
I don't believe Jeff Orr for a second. Not seeing the speed and anger in Smart's reaction. Smart by all accounts is a good guy; Orr has a reputation for being that guy you really wish you weren't sitting next to at a game.
But right now, everyone is walking away, and that is as good as the outcome needs to be in the circumstance. No one, ultimately, is served by trying to get to some baseline truth about whether Orr cracked a racist comment. Colleges get a teachable moment about athletes not going into the stands, and about the need to police fans. Hopefully there will not be a next time, or something will be learned that gives colleges better tools to deal with the next incident.
In the meantime, Jeff Orr is pretending to tell the truth, and I will pretend to believe him.