How do you want your nothing burger cooked?

Why do people lie? Mostly, they lie to hide the truth.

It can be a simple, almost innocent lie. “I didn’t break the glass, mommy. It fell off the table all by itself.” Or, “It wasn’t my fault. Tommy made me do it.”

There’s the incidental, relatively harmless lie to spare hurting someone else’s feelings. “I can’t come to your party, Michelle. I’m going to be out of town that night.” (You’re really not going anywhere, you just don’t like Michelle.)

It can be a manufactured lie with way too many details to be believable. “I had my report all written but I forgot to put it in a plastic cover and then today I had to run out of the house to catch my ride and it was raining really hard and I dropped my backpack in a puddle and the report fell out and got all wet and it got ruined and, no, I didn’t make a copy.”

It can be a cruel lie. “No, honey, I’m not seeing someone else. I just have to work late…a lot.”

And, of course, there are political lies that come in all forms imaginable. “If you like your health plan you can keep it.” “Read my lips: No new taxes.” And my favorite, from our pathological liar president Donald J. Trump, “I will never lie to you.”

What do all lies have in common? Simply that the liar considers them to be better than the truth, hopes everyone will believe them and thinks that no one will find out they’re lies. That, and they are always concealing something that, when exposed, turns out to be far worse than the lie.

“The glass didn’t fall by itself. I saw you knock it off the table.”

“I know you’re cheating on me, Jim. I followed you to her house last night.”

“We know that you met with Russians to gather dirt on Hillary Clinton. We have your own email to prove it.”    

Donald Trump’s administration has been a deplorable basket full of lies since the day he announced he was running for president. You don’t need me to list them for you. Just google “Donald Trump’s lies” for a comprehensive list.   

Listing Trump’s lies is not the point of this essay, however. The point is this: It’s time for Trump himself, his sons, his lawyers, his spokespeople and his other surrogates to stop repeating lies that have already been debunked, rebunked and bunked all over again.

Please stop saying that Russia “may not have hacked our election.” Everybody already knows that they did. Please stop saying there was “no collusion” and “no obstruction.” Everybody can see that there was. Even your supporters can see it; they just refuse to believe it. The questions are not whether there was collusion but who colluded with whom and when and how much. And please stop saying that Donald Jr. met with Russians to talk about the adoption of Russian children. That was just a throw-in at the meeting so they’d have some cover in case news of the meeting leaked out – which it did.

Trump Jr.’s own email clearly shows he was invited to a meeting to discuss Hillary Clinton, knew that in advance and endorsed the idea with his three-word response: “I love it.” Sending Sean Spicer out yesterday to bring up the adoption thing again just makes the lie that much worse. It’s a waste of good oxygen.

Please stop saying that the “Russia thing” is “fake news” or “bogus” or “a witch hunt” or “a nothing burger” or Barack Obama’s fault. It’s not. What it is is the greatest political scandal since Watergate and possibly even greater than that when all of the facts come out. And that really is the point I’m trying to make. If there's nothing there, why is everybody lying about it? What are they trying to hide?

If Russia really is a nothing burger, why does Trump keep pouring on the ketchup?

A special counsel, four Congressional committees and the FBI are all investigating Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election. When they’re finished, we’ll find out definitively whether there’s any there there, what was fake news and what was true and just what kind of burger they were cooking up in the White House. Until then, everything else is speculation and fodder for the 24-hour news cycle.

Trump and his trolls should do the country a favor and STFU about Russia. They’re not convincing anybody about anything. One-third of the voters still support him regardless of anything he says and the rest of us still want him to be impeached. They just keep kicking the dead horse instead of dragging it to the side of the road and driving on.

Here’s an idea, Mr. Trump: Instead of recalculating your election victory or reimagining the crowd at your inauguration or reinventing the whole Russia story, why not try your hand at governing the country for a change? Come up with a legitimate approach to health care or an actual infrastructure bill or tax reform that benefits everybody or even a plan to have your shirts made in America during “Made in America Week.”

I probably wouldn’t agree with you on many of those subjects, but at least they’re real issues that need to be resolved. There’s not one nothing burger in the whole bunch.