Progressives (Liberals)

I don’t know why we’d “get stupid” about polling at ANY time - now, or a week before the voting.

http://able2know.org/topic/468987-363#post-6832902

It’s a tsunami of lies.

It’s an avalanche of falsehoods. It’s a deluge, a torrent, a rockslide, a barrage, an onslaught, a blitzkrieg.

President Trump has made more than 10,000 false or misleading statements since becoming president — on the size of the inaugural crowd, the number of steel plants being built in America and whether he knew about hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, to name just three.

And as unbelievable as it sounds, the tempo is picking up dramatically.

On Tuesday, an oddsmaker predicted that the prevaricator-in-chief will tell 22,500 false statements by Election Day 2020.

“As the election approaches and the number of rallies, debates and opportunities to discuss policy is magnified, we are expecting all-time highs in the number of false statements from President Trump,” said odds consultant John Lester of BookMaker.eu.

The gambling site sent out its prediction as an email blast on Tuesday, and when I followed up with Lester, he told me that Trump is more likely to bend the truth when he is “caught up in the excitement of crowd reaction” and when he is discussing policy.

The site — which uses The Washington Post’s Fact Checker as its measuring rod — has been burned before by underestimating the president’s tendencies.

After Trump gave his first address from the Oval Office (on border security) last January, the site had to pay out nearly $300,000 to people who had bet that he would tell more than 3½ lies during his televised talk.

“We knew we were in trouble early with this one,” Lester, at the time, told BuzzFeed News. The Post, as it turned out, clocked six presidential falsehoods in that address. The site’s experts had reasoned that Trump would be constrained by the address’s short duration and the fact that the world was watching.

Clearly, they didn’t know who they were dealing with: the greatest.

At some point, and we’ve definitely arrived there, the number of presidential falsehoods overcomes the public’s ability to care.

The thinking seems to go like this: We get it, already. He lies a lot. Now, back to whether James Holzhauer will win big again tonight on “Jeopardy!” or whether the Nationals’ bullpen will get fixed.

But it does matter. Lies — especially repetitive lies — are a crucial part of how propaganda works. Truth is a basic part of a functioning democracy.

And the press is supposed to hold powerful figures accountable for their misdeeds.

So, to do their jobs, the news media can’t engage in business as usual.

Yes, they have to do the hard work of fact-checking and keeping track.

But they also have to bring some new tools and techniques — and maybe a new attitude — to the project.

First off, they should stop using euphemisms, such as the New York Times did the other day when on Twitter it described one particularly brutal falsehood by Trump — that doctors and mothers collaborate to execute newborns — as a case of the president reviving
“an inaccurate refrain.”

As one Twitter wag put it, an inaccurate refrain is when the Jimi Hendrix lyric from “Purple Haze” is bungled as “ ’Scuse me, while I kiss this guy.” This, on the other hand, is a despicable lie.

The Times is far from alone in this tendency to soft-pedal, as Daniel Dale, the excellent Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, told Benjamin Hart of New York magazine.

“I think our job as journalists is to call things what they are. And so if someone commits 100 crimes, you don’t say, ‘We’re gonna call the first two ‘crimes’ and the [rest]’ — I don’t know what the softer word would be — ‘non-legal behavior.’ ”

“If we use the word ‘lie’ 100 times in a week, you know, people are gonna think we’re biased or the word is gonna lose its power. But, to me, if there’s 100 lies, you use the word ‘lie’ 100 times.”

Editors have noted, reasonably enough, that the word lie denotes intentionality, and it’s sometimes unclear if Trump’s misleading statements are always intentional or just what some have called his “word salad.”

But when appropriate, say so, as a Post editorial did recently with this headline on Trump’s border separation policy: “Lie No. 10,000 is really a whopper.”

Dale would also like to see reporters challenge the president more directly and more often on false statements, even small ones such as his recently saying that his father was born in Germany, when it was actually New York.

Do it, he suggests, in the president’s frequent, informal gaggles with reporters. (“Why did you say that your father was born in Germany?”)

“I don’t expect that a more confrontational approach would result in him being dramatically exposed and no one supporting him anymore,” he said. But it would be worthwhile anyway.

And look for innovative ways to tell the story of the endless lies, as the Times did in a graphic, putting to rest the often-heard argument from Trump supporters that “all presidents lie, you guys are just picking on our guy.”

None of this, of course, will solve the problem. It’s unlikely to reverse the avalanche or slow the ever-increasing pace.

But it may help an overwhelmed and numbed public find renewed reason to care.

Fox News host Chris Wallace sought to set the record straight Wednesday, urging viewers not to take “opinion people” — including those on his own network — at face value in regards to their commentary on special counsel Robert Mueller’s letter to Attorney General William Barr.


“I know there are some people who don’t think this March 27 letter is a big deal,” Wallace said. “Some opinion people, some opinion people who appear on this network, who may be pushing a political agenda.”

“But, you know, we have to deal in facts,” he continued. “And the fact is that this letter from the special counsel, and it was one of at least three contacts with the Attorney General between March 25 and March 27, was a clear indication that [Mueller] was upset, very upset, with the letter that had been sent out by the attorney general, and wanted it changed, or wanted it at least added to and the attorney general refused to do so. He felt the attorney general’s letter was inaccurate.”

This take varies wildly from some of Wallace’s peers’ coverage, including Laura Ingraham’s, who called the letter a “non-story.”

Barr’s Justice Dept asks court to tear down the ACA in its entirety

...The filing from Trump’s Justice Department has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer: it asks the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to tear down “Obamacare” altogether, stripping tens of millions of Americans of their health coverage, and eliminating important health care benefits for millions more.

The evolution of the Republican administration’s position has been extraordinary in its own right. As regular readers know, shortly before the 2018 midterm elections, Donald Trump tried to tell voters that when it came to health care benefits, Republicans were actually more liberal than Democrats. “Republicans will totally protect people with Pre-Existing Conditions,” the president tweeted two weeks before Election Day. “Democrats will not!”

Forget the wannabe socialism of American Democrats like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The 29-year-old Mr. Kühnert is aiming for the real thing. Socialism, he says, means democratic control over the economy. He wants to replace capitalism as such, not just to recalibrate it.

In the United States, policies frequently branded as “socialist” — health care for all, a national minimum wage, and tuition-free universities — have very little to do with actual socialism. Big government, yes — but all of them fit comfortably in a traditional free-market economy.

In contrast, German neo-socialism is profoundly different from capitalism. In an interview with my newspaper, Mr. Kühnert took specific aim at the American dream as a model for individual achievement. He said he questioned a system “in which millions start a race, very few make it over the finishing line and then shout back to the others, ‘You could have made it, too!’”
[...]
Unrestrained capitalism was clearly not what the founders of the West German republic had in mind. “The capitalist economic system did not serve the interests of the German people,” the center-right Christian Democrats declared in 1947. That’s why West Germany was built on the idea of the social market economy — in German, the soziale Marktwirtschaft — in which individual competition was prized, but so was the obligation of the wealthy to help the worse off.

Today, though, the wealthiest are often those with the resources and skill to avoid taxes and ship jobs to China. Often they aren’t even German; Warren Buffett is a major investor in Berlin real estate. Seventy years ago, no one imagined such scenarios, and neither of Germany’s major parties has figured out to to adjust the social market economy to those new international realities.

As a result, some Germans, like Mr. Kühnert, react not with calls to fix these mistakes, but by condemning capitalism outright. What they fail to see is that socialism will not bring the change they seek. On the contrary, offering failed recipes from the past will only make it easier for the profiteers of unfettered capitalism to denounce them. Cousin Werner would have understood this all too well.