BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG
We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
THE neo-nazi, fascist, authoritarian wing of the gop / greed over people-republican party, in alliance with the right wing, white supremacist, neo-nazi, fascist, authoritarian domestic terrorist remain the greatest threat to our democratic Republic. All of these traitors in the U.S. Congress, mostly representatives in the House who participated in the insurrection of 6 JAN 21 and / or gave aid, support and comfort to anyone who participated in the insurrection of 6 JAN 21 should be charged with treason as they have violated their oath of office and have failed to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. If the voters in their districts reelect them to office then they too are traitors and bring shame to our nation by claiming to be Americans. Thank you Rep Zoe Lofgren D CA for having the courage to expose these traitorous representatives to the nation. We need to press the leadership of the House and when appropriate, the Justice Dept, to bring charges against all those who participated in and / or supported the treasonous insurrection of 6 JAN 21. From CBS News and VOX.....
A Democratic congresswoman has released a nearly 2,000-page report compiling social media posts about the 2020 election from House Republicans who voted to overturn the results. The report lays out how some Republicans relentlessly pushed misinformation and conspiracy theories about election fraud, and kept at it even after Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol.
"Like former President Trump, any elected Member of Congress who aided and abetted the insurrection or incited the attack seriously threatened our democratic government," Representative Zoe Lofgren writes in the introduction of her report.
The California lawmaker suggests the social media posts could be used as evidence for potential punishments of these Congress members, including expulsion and any criminal charges stemming from the Capitol insurrection.
Representative Paul Gosar was the most prolific, with his posts taking up 177 pages of the report. The Arizona Republican's messages include phony allegations of his own state "stealing" the election, and support for protests against local election officials. He wrote in one post that officials who were "stealing" votes were committing "sedition and treason."
Gosar's office declined to comment to CBS News.
Posts from Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, one of the first Congress members to publicly challenge Mr. Trump's defeat, span 123 pages of the report. Posts from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican sworn in to Congress on January 3, take up nearly 100 pages.
The posts echo many popular conspiracy theories that later disproven through investigations, including claims that dead people voted and that Dominion voting machines flipped votes to Joe Biden. Some House Republicans posted selfies from "Stop The Steal" protests against the election results. Some also told supporters that Mr. Trump had indeed won the election.
These falsehoods fueled the mob of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 as Congress counted the electoral votes confirming Mr. Biden's victory. The siege led to five deaths, and to Mr. Trump being impeached a second time just one week before the end of his term.
But the report shows that even this didn't change the tone from some Republicans, who continued to post about election "irregularities" and "fraud" in the days after the riot. Several equated the Capitol riot with Antifa, Black Lives Matter and the nationwide racial justice protests from 2020.
"Those who stoke insurrection & spread conspiracy theories have blood on their hands," Taylor Greene wrote in a January 7 tweet tying top Democrats to mob violence. "They must be expelled."
NOT MY pres drumpf/trump is a systematic liar, he uses lies and deceit to manipulate public opinion to justify his opinions and actions that generally would be objectionable to his audience, in this case the American people. NOT MY vice-pres pence, the entire drumpf/trump-pence administration as well as the republican political leadership and many of the parties elected officials are systematic liars, repeating with little difference drumpf/trump's lies to lull the American people into lemming like acceptance of the fascist authoritarianism they want to impose. From The Atlantic.....
The president is open in his affection for oppressive rulers and in saying it’s acceptable to lie to the public. Why does anyone still doubt he means it?
For some reason, there remains a public debate about whether the president of the United States is honest or inclined toward autocracy. There’s a certain logic to this: Voters don’t want to believe they elected a chronic liar or a skeptic of democracy and rule of law, and the traditional conventions of press coverage prevent mainstream media from stating otherwise plainly.
Yet on a regular basis, Donald Trump speaks publicly and makes clear both his dishonesty and autocratic impulses. Friday was an especially clear demonstration.
The president strode out from the White House in the morning, first appearing on Fox and Friends alongside Steve Doocy, and then taking some questions from reporters on the lawn of the executive mansion. While he covered a range of topics, and went through many of his greatest hits, the most notable elements were his praise for the totalitarian rule of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, his own declarations of criminal behavior by political opponents, and a series of easily disprovable statements about immigration law and a Justice Department inspector general’s report released Thursday.
While Trump has shown surprising deference and affection for autocratic rulers in the past, including effusive praise for Kim after the summit earlier this week, Friday’s comments were still unusual.
“He is the head of a country and I mean he is the strong head,” Trump said. “Don't let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
I want my people to do the same. It ought to go without saying that the reason that North Koreans react that way to Kim is that he is a brutal dictator who runs enormous prison camps and a repressive state. Lest anyone believe that Trump is simply naive and unaware of this, the president made clear that he understands how Kim maintains power, smirking through a reference to North Korean executions of top aides.
“Just before you met with him, he cleaned house. Three of his top hardliners he fired,” Doocy began.
“When you say he fired ... fired may be a nice word,” Trump replied. The president later claimed he was being “sarcastic,” a move he and aides have often employed to walk back egregious statements, even when there is no indication of humor at the moment, and even though his latest statement about Kim matches his earlier praise for him.
Trump also misrepresented the agreement he signed with Kim, saying that it contained detailed steps for denuclearization of North Korea—it doesn’t.
The other most notable moment came during the gaggle, when reporters asked Trump about a statement to The New York Times concerning a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and campaign chairman Paul Manafort, along with a Russian lawyer. The president dictated the statement, as his lawyers acknowledged in a letter to special counsel Robert Mueller. That statement was false and quickly debunked.
“That's irrelevant,” Trump said Friday. “It's a statement to The New York Times, the phony, failing New York Times. That's not a statement to a high tribunal of judges. That's a statement to the phony New York Times.”
In short, the president is saying that it’s totally acceptable to lie to the press, and by extension the public, as long as he is not under oath in the justice system. (As I’ve reported, Trump is far more honest under oath.) As a matter of law, this is true, but as a matter of character and leadership, it is not. The president is freely telling the public that he has no compunctions about lying through his teeth. Why does anyone still debate whether he means it?
There were other dishonest statements peppered throughout his remarks. He said that the inspector general’s report found “total bias” in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails; in fact, it found the reverse, saying political bias did not affect decisions. He said that the report “totally exonerated” his statements; in fact, it rejected the entire thrust of his statements about Comey. Trump said that Comey acted criminally; the IG report does not say that. He said Mueller’s team has no Republicans; Mueller is a lifelong Republican who has served under GOP presidents as well as Democrats.
Trump also continues to misrepresent the reasons why children of unauthorized immigrants are currently being separated from their parents at the border, creating a political firestorm. That decision, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions has acknowledged, is the direct result of a policy change that Sessions implemented in May. Nonetheless, the president has falsely blamed it on a law passed by Democrats, ignoring that Democrats do not control Congress and have not passed any new laws about separations, yet the change began only last month.
“That is a Democrat bill. That is Democrats wanting to do that,” Trump said. “And they could solve it very easily by getting together but they think it's a good election point.”
There’s a long list of these lies, both in what Trump said today and running back for months. It becomes tiresome to fact-check them, trying to prove that Trump is not telling the truth about them. But there’s no need to take reporters’ word for it: The president makes no secret that he thinks it’s OK to lie to the public. After all, he said so himself.
The president has repeatedly “revealed” the same catchphrase as new, demonstrating how he uses minor untruths to confuse the public and destabilize facts.
Early in his Thursday-night rally in Elkhart, Indiana, President Trump had a special treat for Hoosiers: He was going to make them the first to hear the tagline for his reelection campaign.
“By the way, this is the first, for Indiana,” he confided. “Our new slogan for 2020. You know what it is? ‘Keep America Great.’ Because we’re doing so well that in another two years when we start the heavy campaign, ‘Make America Great Again’ wouldn’t work out too well.”
The crowd cheered, and the pressdutifullyreported that the president had revealed the new slogan.
But wait a second—that’s not quite right. Didn’t Trump announce his new slogan exactly two months prior, on March 10, in Moon, Pennsylvania? Trump said he was revealing “Keep America Great” then, too, earning the same dutifulheadlines. In its writeup, the Washington Examiner focused on how Trump had emphasized the exclamation mark at the end of the phrase.
But wait, that also sounds familiar. Days before his 2017 inauguration, Trump sat for an interview with Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post, in which he triumphantly described how he’d come up with the “Make America Great Again” line. (In reality, as Tumulty pointed out, he hadn’t—Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign first used the phrase, but the Gipper never trademarked it.) Then this happened, according to Tumulty:
Halfway through his interview with The Washington Post, Trump shared a bit of news: He already has decided on his slogan for a reelection bid in 2020.
“Are you ready?” he said. “‘Keep America Great,’ exclamation point.”
This is vintage Trump. He knows it’s not true that he’s really announcing something new, but he also figures that the people at the rally won’t know anybetter. They weren’t in Moon, and most of the press—no matter how much he maligns them—won’t realize it’s a retread either, leaving the claim largely unchallenged. You can’t make an untruth a truth simply by repeating it enough times, but you might get people to forget it’s not true.
The slogan was not the only example Thursday night of Trump’s tendency to repeat a lie until his audience is numb to it. For example, Trump keeps insisting that his border wall is under construction, although it is not. “We have to build a wall and we have already started the wall,” he said at the Indiana rally. This is not true. There is ongoing work on existing border fences, and the spending bill passed by Congress in March (and signed by a frustrated Trump) allocates $1.6 billion for that effort. But it explicitly prevents the construction of any of the new border-wall prototypes the president has ordered.
Now, one could argue that the fence is the wall—but the fence existed before the election, and Trump’s raison de courir was that a real wall, broad and deep and high, was needed. Claiming that this new wall is under construction is simply false, but the president keeps saying it, even tweeting pictures of a project that began in 2009 and claiming they show his wall.
To bolster the claim on Thursday, Trump delivered a strange bit about the border fence outside San Diego, which contained a dizzying series of claims. Congress appropriated $251 million for secondary fencing there, where a fence already exists. Echoing a tweet in April, Trump said the people of San Diego were eager for a wall, which may or may not be true, although its city council and Republican mayor have been less positive. Then he said that he should have refused to build the wall there, so that San Diegans would pressure California Governor Jerry Brown, a frequent Trump sparring partner, to back border-security measures. Finally, he claimed that—actually—he had asked his aides what it would cost to halt construction, so that San Diegans would pressure Brown.
“They got back to me and said it would cost approximately $7 million to stop. That is not big numbers when you hear about the numbers we talk about, $7 million to stop and restart at a later date,” Trump said. “I said, ‘I can’t do that to the American people, keep building the wall.’”
The whole thing is peculiar: Even if he decided against the plan in the end, the president is saying he considered punishing his own supporters to make a political point, and considered burning millions of taxpayer money to do it. As far as I can tell, these alleged internal discussions haven’t been reported anywhere previously, and it’s unclear whether they really happened. Customs and Border Patrol referred to the White House for comment, and a spokeswoman did not immediately reply.
Trump’s adventures in bogus claims extended overseas, too.He devoted a long section of his speech to a discussion of how he had supposedly saved millions of dollars on the construction of the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. This time around, he didn’t really place a solid figure on what he claims the embassy will run, but he’s told this story several times before, with varying amounts. In March, he said it would cost $250,000. In April, he said it would be more like $400,000. In both cases, he was misleading. The six-figure price tag is for a temporary embassy in Jerusalem, while the U.S. is still working to build a new, permanent embassy, which will be more expensive. (The GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson has offered to chip in for the cost.)
Elsewhere in the speech, Trump claimed that the Obama administration “gave” Iran $150 billion as part of the nuclear deal, which is misleading both in terms of the size and what the monies were—Iranian funds that had been frozen. He also said, “We have a trade deficit with almost every country in the world. We are changing that around rapidly.” But the trade deficit actually grewduring his first year in office.
Once listeners were snowed under with these claims, Trump laid the groundwork for other outlandish statements of the vaguer variety. “What we did was unprecedented in the history of our country and the history of the world, what we did with this election,” Trump said. Insofar as Donald Trump had never previously been elected president of the United States, this is true, though it’s hard to extract anything more meaningful. “We have delivered, one of the only times ever, more than we promised,” he said. “I have delivered more than I promised, if you think about it.” As I have written, Trump has pushed hard on his central promises, from the wall to Obamacare repeal to the travel ban, but many of them remain incomplete, and this claim isn’t remotely true.
Critics sometimes suggest that Trump is employing Adolf Hitler’s infamous “big lie” tactic. In fact, what Trump is using is the opposite: It’s the small lie. Through sheer repetition, Trump convinces the public and the press that what he’s saying is true, and his slogan really is new and being revealed for the first time. Piece by piece, objective reality corrodes, and facts give way to alternative facts.
DAVID A. GRAHAM is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers U.S. politics and global news.
