We're about to go for a ride tonight--how ROUGH will it be?
("National Lampoon's Vacation" Family Truckster heading west on I-40 in western OK, with old US Route 66 in the background.)
Pssst. I don’t have much time to write right now, so this is basically a placeholder for a slightly more elaborate future diary later today.
Like everyone else to the left of Attila the Hun and as reported at Daily Kos and elsewhere, I’m concerned about the massive curve that future “Dear Leader” Donald J. tRump has been—and is being—graded on by our conservative, compliant, corporate media watchlapdogs. They’ve lowered the bar so much for tRump’s acceptable performance in tonight’s debate that I’m seriously concerned about the walls caving in on their hole!
Fortunately (or so I imagine), our social media presence would seem to provide a possible corrective check on both Candidate tRump’s fantasyland and the media’s dereliction of its duty, if not outright malpractice of its craft. While I don’t know the mechanics of it myself, I wondered yesterday, and am writing today to posit this question:
Would it be a useful service for the Daily Kos (possibly in conjunction with other, similarly-leaning blogs and resources) and its loyal participants to crowdsource fact-checking The Donald’s expected Gish Gallop of misleading, truth-shading, inaccurate, and/or outright lies tonight in near-realtime?
Here’s where my lack of knowledge of dKos, its mechanics, and simple blogging fail me; I’m hoping others will see some merit to my idea and be able to quickly implement it—or direct me to where others are already doing it. My premise is that tRump’s lies will be flying so fast and furious, that it’ll take many people to catch and document, much less correct, them all. But hey, there are lots of us and we have the interest and ability to (at least) help with the task.
I’m quite sure dKos will be doing its typical live-blogging of the event, with multiple strings of reporting and commentary and I’m wondering if it would be possible—and advisable—to create a several single diaries—say, one per debate question/topic—and have all of us, via the diary comment section, provide elaborating comments and corrections with supporting links for ready selection, highlighting, and editing into the main diary (if possible by the diarist?), Tweeting, FaceBooking, Instagramming, and whatever else Teh Kidz Theze Dayz are doing. This would provide a ready reference by Kossacks and other Democratic entities and supporters—maybe even campaigners, spinners, and (hey, it’s theoretically possible) media!
It seems to me like it could be a useful endeavor, particularly when compared to the old standby of simply yelling at the TV.
In any event, I wanted to toss this thought out there for others’ consideration, modification, elaboration, expansion, and (hopefully) implementation. If I’m all wet, that’s fine, too. I just didn’t want to mention something about it tomorrow morning and get a bunch of “...hey, great idea—why didn’t you say something when we could have done something about it?”
So, that’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll check in later tonight to see if there’s anything worth discussing on it. Thanks all in advance for any consideration (and action?) this might merit.
