Unhingery as "unbeknownst to almost everyone", the Taliban was coming to US on the 18th 9/11 anniversary, and Trump tries to divert attention from his latest screw-up.
“Moral cowardice” is not in short supply these days in DC; it’s just so impractical for Individual-1, what with the upcoming impeachment. And then there’s all those re-election related events. With Trump’s attempts at democratic erosion, one can imagine a post-democratic America, complete with cat videos at midnight.
There’s a tweet….
So Putin will be getting that Nobel Peace Prize by himself.
And on the weather front:
Because Trump grabbed a … cat video to media frame his duplicity:
Again and again, government officials have wheeled into action in an effort to make Trump’s lies, errors and obsessions into truths, in some cases issuing “official” information explicitly shaped or doctored to do so.
I will tweet out 7 examples.
1) Multiple White House and administration officials issued official statements or were sent to hunt for evidence to prop up Trump's lies about his paltry inaugural crowd size:
2) The White House set up an official commission to validate Trump's repeated lies about voter fraud in the 2016 election.
Remember, those lies were rooted in Trump's rage over losing the popular vote:
3) When Trump lied wildly about Middle Easterners and terrorists infiltrating the migrant caravan, multiple officials pushed an entirely bogus "official" statistic designed to support Trump's claims:
4) When Trump fake-promised a 10 percent middle class tax cut just before the midterms, multiple officials wheeled into *official* action to make it look as if this was a real thing. It wasn't:
5) To justify suspending the credentials of CNN reporter Jim @Acosta after he enraged Trump, Sarah Sanders shared a video deceptively doctored to disgustingly smear Acosta:
6) After Trump fearmongered about the border by concocting a wildly false story about the binding and gagging of migrant women that was flatly debunked, a top border official went on an internal hunt for official "information" to make the story true:
7) To buttress Trump's nonstop distortions and lies about the migrant threat, the Department of Homeland Security issued a slick, official "presentation" that used a statistic to "support" his claims that was flat-out bogus nonsense:
The Alabama thing isn't like one of the big lies he tells regularly, the ones that are foundational to his propagandistic narratives about his presidency.
So why not just admit error?
Here's my answer -- and my take on why this is all so galling. FIN
Professors say Trump has shattered long-held assumptions about how presidential elections are won, as well as the unwritten rules that govern U.S. institutions and America’s relations with other countries.
Maurice Cunningham, a politics professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, said Trump’s presidency forced him to substantially revise the syllabus for an “Introduction to American Politics” course for the first time since he began teaching it during the Clinton administration.
“I don’t want him to drown out 230 years of the American experiment, you know?” he said. “But you have to account for him.”
The Trump administration has also helped revive interest in topics like nationalism and the decline of democracy that they often skipped over or touched on lightly, academics say.
“When I was in graduate school, democratic erosion was not a topic we considered when we studied the U.S.,” said Brendan Nyhan, a politics professor at Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire. “Now, it’s an active concern.”
www.bloomberg.com/...