Opinion: Kellyanne Conway’s lies have caught up with her

In her short tenure as counselor to President Donald Trump, former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway has repeatedly raised eyebrows for her reliance on “alternative facts” and the dissemination of hoaxes. She has also raised serious questions about the administration’s transparency and operational effectiveness, often touting the administration’s narrative on morning TV shows only to be refuted by the president himself later that same day. In the fog of the Trump administration, only one thing appears to be clear: Mrs. Conway must go.Like retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Conway has done a disservice to the president and the American people by accepting a position she is wholly unqualified to take on. She has taken part in a conscious effort to mislead the American people, going so far as to state the president’s repeated and frequent lies aren’t important — because he says “many things that are true.”When we are guided by such reckless officials as these, the idea that the traditional staples of American government such as accountability and transparency can survive is fundamentally threatened. Credibility is such an issue here that Conway was recently turned down by CNN when offered by the White House as a surrogate. When confronted about this, Conway — yep, you guessed it — demonstrably lied to the public via Twitter before being publicly curtailed by CNN’s communications team.In short, CNN (Trump’s own favorite source of “fake news”) does not believe the president’s senior counselor can be relied upon to accurately articulate his positions.To be fair to Conway, her questionable behavior in the White House is consistent with her flip-flopping on the campaign trail, though here the stakes are much higher. One can only hope her tendency for full-reversals of opinion sticks; it may be the only way to get her back to reality.In light of these — a small (but by no means finished) list of her misdeeds — we must ask ourselves: do American citizens really deserve to have someone this brazenly self-serving on their president’s list of top advisors?It is the right of the American people to have fair access to their president to inquire about the direction he is leading the country. With Conway, we simply don’t know whether the answers we receive from the commander in chief are truly his words.As a senior representative of the president, Conway’s chief responsibility is to echo his words to the last sentiment Should she be unable to do this, due to her ignorance of the president’s stance on an issue, or perhaps, her aforementioned tendency to lie, it then follows that she should resign or be removed. We know her record. What else are we waiting for?