As the first presidential debate looms, the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is being billed as something more than red versus blue, rich versus poor, or war versus peace. The election is being billed as something even larger — a national referendum on the nature of truth itself.
The choice, according to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, is between a respected politician with some regard for the facts, and a “charlatan,” “con man,” and “duplicitous demagogue.” The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and New Yorker have all drawn up detailed anthologies of Trump’s lies. Hopes that the debates’ moderators might call Trump out on his bad facts are looking unlikely to be fulfilled. “What is a big fact? What is a little fact?” Janet Brown, the head of the Commission on Presidential Debates, asked CNN’s Brian Stelter on Sunday afternoon. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to get the moderator into essentially serving as the Encyclopedia Britannica.”
Instead, Brown said, it will be up to each candidate to call the other a liar.
Those who are calling Trump out as a liar are right. He is a liar. His deceptions are apparent both from the records compiled above, and in the way he talks. And for those who might believe that these charges are extensions of bias, we have Politifact and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, designated experts with the authority to call a lie a lie. A friend who works in New York City real estate once told me that Trump’s syntax is a familiar one in his business. The goal is to keep on filling the air with meaningless noise until your opponent adopts a defined position, which you can then proceed to undermine. Sometimes Trump lies to adjust his stated positions to the contingencies of the moment. Sometimes, as in this interview on foreign policy, his casual, fragmented way of speaking comes across as an attempt to conceal how little he knows. Sometimes, as with his claims that some U.S. cities are more dangerous than Afghanistan, and that African-American communities “are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before,” Trump’s words are so egregiously wrong, so obviously playing to emotion, that they are something closer to apocalyptic wishes than outright lies.
Part of the media’s job is to check politicians’ statements against the known facts. But there is something patronizing and hypocritical about the media’s sudden interest in Trump’s deceptions, as though his lies were larger and more harmful than anything in recent memory. “Our job is not stenography, but truth telling,” is how Kristof puts it.
Where was all this hard-nosed skepticism in 2002 and early 2003, during the Bush administration’s run-up to the Iraq War? In Kristof’s column, he presents himself as a prescient Cassandra during this period. Indeed, he did warn his readers that governing Iraq after Saddam Hussein would be difficult. But several weeks after the invasion of Iraq began, Kristof still wasn’t ready to call George W. Bush out on his lies about Iraqi connections to al Qaeda and the mythical weapons of mass destruction. He still wanted to believe in the administration’s good intentions. “I don’t want to believe that top administration officials tried to win support for the war with a campaign of wholesale deceit,” he wrote, in May 2003, and then gingerly pointed out “indications that the U.S. government souped up intelligence.” Three months before, his paper’s editorial board wrote that the Bush-Cheney WMD allegations were different from their “unproved assertions” about al Qaeda. For the WMDs, the Times wrote, there was “ample evidence.”
The backlash against Trump isn’t really about his lying. It’s that he is lying too clumsily, too openly, and in the service of the wrong causes. Earlier this month, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a summary of their report on Edward Snowden’s disclosures. They wrote that Snowden washed out of the Army because of “shin splints,” “doctored his performance evaluations,” and never received a high school degree. All three of these claims are lies, as spelled out by Barton Gellman. These lies came from 24 sitting members of Congress who are charged with overseeing the intelligence community. But there has been little outcry, no correction, and no demands that these assertions be backed up by evidence. This may be because our political culture has come to accept certain abuses of the truth as normal, and the lack of accountability for those officials behind the Bush-era deceptions has not improved matters.
Today, if you want to use your official position to slander Edward Snowden, or to claim that only three men were waterboarded at Guantánamo, or to argue against the release of 28 pages of a publicly funded report on the 9/11 attacks, the worst that most newspapers will do is quote someone who disagrees with you. Senior official says X, some critics say Y. This is stenography, and for those interested in figuring out how we came to inhabit a post-fact world, this might be one place to begin.
Trump’s lies are an essential part of his candidacy. Debunking them is crucial. But the attention given to logging Trump’s lies often comes at the expense of addressing the deeper truths that run through his “rigged system” rhetoric. Trump, more than Clinton, has played to the growing sense that the country is run by an elite network of self-dealing oligarchs. Economic frustration is what allows Trump to convincingly set himself up as a worthy outsider, the champion of the people, the guy who can fix the broken system because he was so skilled at exploiting it for his own benefit. This is an almost messianic image. It has and will continue to survive barrages of fact-checking.
In a Monday editorial, the Times convincingly shot down Trump’s claims to be a financial genius, a “straight talker,” and an “expert negotiator.” But the paper grudgingly admitted that Trump was “a change agent for the nation and the world.” As much as Clinton might wish that the burden is on Trump to back up his outlandish statements, apologize for his slurs, and fill out his hollow, privileged résumé, Trump’s lack of respect for the truth may not matter, not unless Clinton can differentiate herself from the status quo.
Top photo: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks from a teleprompter while addressing supporters in Austin, Texas, on Aug. 23, 2016.
‘I remember landing under sniper fire.’
‘I only used one device.’
‘I never sent or received classified information.’
‘I never sent or received anything marked classified.’
‘It was allowed. I had permission.’
‘I turned over all work related e-mails.’
‘I have now turned over all of my e-mails.’
‘I was named after a mountain climber for climbing Everest 7 years after I was born.’
‘All of my grandparents were immigrants.’
‘I’ve always supported gay marriage.’
‘I was against the Iraq war before Obama was.’
‘Don’t let anyone tell you that corporations create jobs.’
Hmm…seems like you are forgetting to mention the war on truth Hillary has been waging for decades.
Interesting that no Trump lies were cited, that Hillary’s lies were not mentionned, that
Colin Powell gave the so called evidence that Saddam had chemical weapons before the UN,
that Trump could hardly be considered the mainstay of the “new world order”
Since he has never been in government, globalism and socialism is a mainstay of the
Left from Bernie, through Obama if you like your doctor care to every Hillary and Obama economic concept to..Trump lies… The media tells the truth? Okaaay.
You don’t have to go back to Bush II to find big lies. Hillary Clinton claims that she’s opposed to the TPP. Bullshit! She only supposedly changed her position in response to the fact that Sanders’s opposition to the TPP was providing him a big advantage in the polls. As soon as Clinton gets into office, she’ll find an excuse to change her position on this.
big fan of intercept…..but Schwartz should know better, do better research. low point in credibility?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-25/politifact-apparently-even-facts-are-subjective-and-based-party-affiliation
The establishment is laughing at anyone who thinks Trump and Clinton are on different sides.
The establishment needs a wake-up call.
The establishment tries a great pretense
Dividing with a phony fence
Clinton crushes America’s dream
And no one sees Trump’s on her team
The establishment needs to be disciplined by the people.
Related:
Colin Kaepernick: ‘Embarrassing’ that Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton are candidates
MAD Magazine Skewers Hillary Clinton As ‘My Little Phony’
Trump’s debate incompetence a slap in the face to his supporters
What a hateful pile of shit America has become. Don’t point to the wisdom of your Founding Fathers, the greatness of your achievements, the unity of your nation, the depth of your laws, your breadth of peoples and ideas, your wealth and progress – this is it: Hillary fucking Clinton verses Donald fucking Trump talking hateful shit so they can strut their insane fucking stuff as Mr or Mrs Big Stuff and empower all the loony-tune muthafuckas that helped get them there.
The linear nature of Time has brought you to this moment, all the things you cherish has created this. There is nothing else, no ifs or maybes, there is only this, now. There is nothing to be proud of any more, you are THE Pariah State and once one of these dreadful cuntoxes makes it into the White House, the world is going to be a worse place. Keep writing your bullshit – witty, wise, sarcastic, sharp, whatever – then look back sometime in the future at Linear Time as more of the world far away burns and struggles on and wonder: did I do enough to try to stop these horrendous hateful people?
Finally, someone who sees the truth. I agree that a well-educated principled non-politician should run & be elected into office. But that evil greed – polluted, ignorant, fascist, racist, nihilistic mutated orange isn’t the one for the job.
Trump lies. Clinton covers things up.
What we get from this is most, if not all, politicians lie and our job is to weed out the worst liars. When we do that we’re excercising our democratic right to have only the best liars represent us but..even if they say they are there’s a good chance they’re lying.
I think I get it now.
The ‘sin’ that Trump has committed that makes the ‘free press’ so willing to call (some of) his lies lies is not their egregiousness, nor their blatancy, nor their frequency, nor their changeability, it’s not even how self serving they are.
No, what it is is that he has taken what is considered acceptable behaviour (as in never, or only rarely, being called out as even a stretching of the truth) when the American public’s short attention span, insularity, and gullibility allows the pretence of truth to be maintained for the many, and brought it to places and subjects where much of the American public has the knowledge of what the truth is, even as they proclaim their belief in the lies.
A lot of people think that what, more than anything, brought down the Soviet empire was that the citizens knew the official, accepted, and often believed in, ‘truth’ were lies, and that if Americans came to realize how often the official, accepted, and often believed in, ‘truth’ that their media, government, and society feeds them were lies, the American empire would also implode.
I think the implosion will start at the edges, just as with Solidarnosk in Poland. Just about now, Puerto Ricans are going to start seeing visibly how many of their babies are being born with shrunken heads, even as ever more draconian austerity measures are rammed through by the imperial government. (Then again, I guess leaving Zika to run free and unchecked was already pretty much as bad as it could get; but there are more recognizable kinds of draconian) The predictable result should be a great Puerto Rican exodus to the mainland, possibly with some very mediagenic images of overcrowded boats as the people fleeing get poorer. And there is nothing more instinctive for the U.S. than to slam the gates when they see poor people coming.
I’m thinking the moment the U.S. comes up with some scheme to throw Puerto Ricans out or at least deny new ones the right to work on the mainland, they lose their biggest carrot and the island soon declares independence. This probably is even before Micronesia fails to renew the Compact of Free Association. After that, it’s just a matter of dominoes. The Chinese ambassador has already been joking about Hawaiian independence, but ten years from now it’s not gonna be so funny!
The American public has been condition to believe lies. Daily. Print, radio and television. Madison avenue has a name for this conditioning by lying. It’s called ADVERTISING.
Americans, primed and ready to believe anything. WMD anyone?
Fact checking is the job of the candidates themselves listening and responding to each other. As in the Lincoln-Douglass debates. Lester Holt, burdened with both moderating and fact-checking, should have invited Jill Stein as the ideal on-the-spot, real-time fact checker for both Trump and Clinton. Then he might have been relieved from wearing earbuds on both sides of his head as the designated fact checker.
the real tragedy here is not about these two plutocratic lying narcissistic assholes it is how did we get to this bottom of the barrel non choice. the third party candidates ,who have been denied the 100 million audience of this shit show, would be far preferable to either of the media clowns that were forced down our throats on our own public airways (how on earth can this be happening?) if only their voices could be heard. this nation indeed the world needs leaders who will say no more to the military industrial surveillance complex and get about the existential threat of our own over consumption. if we do not as the 99% block the corporate candidates THIS NOVEMBER we may not get another chance.
pray for peace and vote against the status quo (dem and rep) for EVERY candidate on the ballot. these people have created a world in which perpetual war is unavoidable and then demand that WE PAY FOR IT. that is bullshit. apology for my language it is visceral.
Hellary did not change her mind about supporting the TPP, SHE IS LYING (again).
googled PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE TPP
Fact Check: Clinton did call TPP ‘the gold standard’
Fact check: Trump is right on Clinton’s TPP flip-flop
breitbart*dot*com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/26/fact-check-clinton-lies-support-tpp
googled HILLARY SUPPORTS THE TPP
45 times Clinton pushed the trade bill she now opposes
cnn*dot*com/2015/06/15/politics/45-times-secretary-clinton-pushed-the-trade-bill-she-now-opposes
CLINTON ADVISOR: “They (DNC) don’t see much of a risk. Most Americans don’t know or care about the TPP.”
Zaid Jilani from The Intercept, .. reported that the Clinton campaign was actively engaged with platform committee delegates and directing them on votes.
progressivearmy*dot*com/2016/07/10/hillary-clintons-covert-campaign-tpp
googled HILLARY WILL SUPPORT THE TPP
Chamber of Commerce Lobbyist Tom Donohue: “Clinton Will Support TPP After Election”
huffingtonpost*dot*com/robert-naiman/chamber-of-commerce-lobby_b_9104096.html
truth-out*dot*org/opinion/item/34629-chamber-of-commerce-lobbyist-tom-donohue-clinton-will-support-tpp-after-election
=== imho ===
Hellary clinton is a sell out specialist and will sell America down the river because she is wallstreet’s whore.
https://theintercept.com/2016/08/26/clinton-foundation-spin/
quit crapping all over the threads here with this campaign spam
go knock on doors or something, maybe somebody will hurt you
anything else?
Yes. Stop saying racist shit about Mexicans you paranoid freak.
welcome to northern mexico?
i.e. what California, etc., would have been if the Yankees had not stolen it?
Oh the Terror!!!!
You mean California might not be a purely white state like (you imagine) it used to be?????
The Intercept should have to file with the FEC. They are obviously a campaign arm of the Democrats. Baghdad Bob would be proud.
The funny thing is that when Trump says the truth, nobody hears it. I mean, did *anyone* else notice that Trump promised to raise our sales tax by 16 percent, to make up for his 20% corporate tax cut? With a “value added tax”, a national sales tax, which is I should add a traditional component of the Republican-Libertarian “Fair Tax” scheme that makes everything normal people do much more expensive while allowing the wealthy to do whatever spectacular thing they want because it’s a business expense and an investment.
This is satire worthy of Benito Mussolini.
Trump uses hyperbole to get his message out. It seems to work. For example, he said that we spent 6 trillion on wars in the Middle East with little to show for it and that we could have rebuilt the country twice with that amount of money spent at home.
The exact figures don’t really matter to me. The general thrust of his message seems correct.
The same thing with trade deals and giving away American jobs. Trump failed to connect the trouble in black America with the decline in American jobs Though any sensible person would be able to see a correlation.
I haven’t watched the whole debate yet. I’ll look into it later.
He wasnt 100% sure of the number either, neither are the numbers people and economists. He also said “could be 5 trillion” and emphasised 6T for the common number it is without supposing to know or must know.
He needs to use the word “foundation” as in building, or “footing”. America’s foundation is broken and until it’s fixed, nothing is going to go right.
War on Truth? Lying by candidates? Did author ever read Plato’s Republic?
It is what politicians do, lie, lie and for a change lie more, nothing else, any shred of truth they utter by mistake gets them out of there quick purged by this sordid type of criminal establishment who run this god forsaken place.
This was nothing but a charade, a tasteless show for imbeciles dog-herded by oligarchs and pushed into a slaughterhouse.
There is one, however, and desperately denied by many fact that emerged from this dubious farce. After everything is said and done, looking into the core of what they are uttering it is clear now there is no sliver of difference between their neoliberal, neocon rantings as far a ordinary American people are concerned since both, while seeking funding money at this stage dropped all fake populist notions they whipped up population with before and by now reneged on previous empty promises they used to betray desolated desperate Americans drowning in economic collapse.
Facing unconscionable choice of two Wall Street thieves, warmongers like Hillary or flat TV personality of Trump or rather utter lack of any decent and moral choice in these elections, as I have been saying this for nine months now, the idea of stepping out of the system that corrupts us all is very slowly getting pregnant although it is still being under assault of those who refuse to argue or question the distressing unreality of American Imperial politics and are afraid to unplug and take charge of their own lives.
Since the system was proven, basically peacefully unreformable for centuries, it is time to unplug from the system, condemn it and rejects it and create not a movement within legal/political control and parameters set by the regime but one outside of it, a shadow system of political thought and organizations not aimed to mobilize people for rigged fraudulent elections but to mobilize people to demand all the calcified establishment to resign and handing over power to the people and consequently collapse of this oligarchic regime.
However, this time as well, millions of irrational, desperate and helpless in their daily lives electoral zombies such as those following this pseudo-debate under
political apartheid of exclusion, under a spell of exciting political masquerade, will
be aligning themselves with an anointed by the establishment winner of a
popularity/beauty contest, in a delusional feat of transference of a fraction of elite’s power to themselves just for a second of a thrill of illusion of power. And they will continue to authorize their own suicide mission, since even baseless, continually disproved hope of any chance of influencing of the political realm via means of begging is the last thing that dies.
Plato’s Republic was the very template of totalitarian government. It’s no guide to how to live.
Vic: Somehow the Greeks managed to find democracy…I remember Plato with his mirror lesson..then came the smoke! Best form of government will always be a benevolent dictatorship with checks and balances to keep the dictator honest…Sometimes throughout history the honesty factor was a poison in the cup./.
Dennis, indeed the Greeks did “find democracy”, although the word “find” is funny. No thanks to Plato however, who after all came pretty late in the proceedings.
Plato (and his idol Socrates) held Athenian democracy in contempt. But that’s okay with you:
“Best form of government will always be a benevolent dictatorship with checks and balances to keep the dictator honest” —- oh brother, a “dictatorship” with “checks and balances”??? When did this happen, ever??
A highly readable guide to the attitudes of Plato & Socrates is I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates – a great book from the late 1980s.
For the most influential critique of Plato as architect of totalitarianism, see Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies.
The “philosopher king” idea is and was cracked. In practice it looks more like the Khmer Rouge than heaven on earth.
I dislike pigeonholing an awful lot, but Popper’s ‘three worlds‘ view on reality offers a great set of tools; a worldview that seems grossly underutilized these days. Our pols are spending entirely too much time in world 2.
“No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.” – Karl Popper
That’s an interesting model & I hadn’t seen it before. Thought-provoking for sure.
World 3 constitutes a good challenge to overly mechanistic, deterministic, biologic models of human thinking — that’s the first thing I thought of anyway.
well said!
interesting picture. Indeed it is the inheritors of wealth and power that are always the most despicable types.
Absolutely but predictably so. They will never unplug unless they have something profoundly and demonstrably good to plug into. That is doable.
The current currency system is not designed for a good operating environment for human beings and shall be replaced by the new “christian monetary system”. The current tax system is designed to allow the hording of resources and shall be replaced by the new “christian recirculation system”. The current political system of politial representation is unsuitable for equality of power of individual persons and must be redresses such that representatives are required to vote by the will of the people. Furthermore the incentive bribery system of bills with bills with earmarks and riders is abolished. All this shall be placed into writing as an upgrade to the constitution as a second bill of rights and shall be deemed to be in effect contrary to the objections of those who are enable by corruption and shall be thusly defensible in self righteous fashion guaranteed to the citizens by existing rights.
I must confess I fell asleep right after Mrs. Clinton said, “How are you Donald?” But my impression was that Mrs. Clinton won the debate. Her bright red dress made a bold statement against the dark background, while Mr. Trump tended to just blend in with the decor. At least, that was my impression of the debate, before I found myself in the Super Bowl, trailing by four points with less than a minute to play, quarterbacking my team on a 90 yard drive which culminated with my one yard dive into the end zone as time expired. I hope that others enjoyed the debate as much as I did.
It’s too bad The Intercept did not allow comments on the Debate Live page, as I believe my insights into the debate are at least equal to any of the pundits on that page. I suppose they did not wish to be shown up, which is understandable.
“Mrs. Clinton won the debate. Her bright red dress made a bold statement against the dark background, while Mr. Trump tended to just blend in with the decor.”
At last a comment worthy of the MSM, pundits, candidates and situation.
It’s always a pleasure to share my keenest insights. Mrs. Clinton’s job in the debate was to appear healthy and Mr. Trump’s job was to appear not-crazy – and both largely succeeded. People look for appearance and ‘tone’ – the actual words in a debate are irrelevant.
I would like to read short outbursts from you in real time. Maybe they will let you do the Super Bowl.
I don’t think The Intercept knows what “live blogging” means.
Wakey, wakey, eggs and bacy.
I must confess I have Tremendous Stamina. I watched the whole damn thing.
*I also checked-in @ The Intercept, pre-game show, and TI said ‘Glenn Greenwald, Scahill and staff’ would be ‘live blogging’ that split screen Sadness, but didn’t see Glenn anywhere? *Mona must be hiding him …
I’m sorry you lack Tremendous Stamina and fell asleep:
p.s early bird gets the worm ~
Nothing wrong with my stamina; I can sleep through a Category 5 hurricane.
A perfectly predictable performance by Mr. Holt.
Let’s see, Holt works for NBC. Comcast owns MSNBC. Comcast gave 5+ million to Clinton’s campaign. Yes, it certainly adds up.
read:
On the eve of the US election debate: The politics of the grotesque
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/09/26/pers-s26.html
Clinton’s “values”: sodomizing leaders, raping countries, destabilizing entire regions, and supporting right wing terrorist groups and brutal regimes.
What a surprise. (Not)
Lester Holt, who made headlines recently because the two right wing politicians and their campaigns and media pundits were having a disingenuous discussion about whether Holt was supposed to be a referee and fact-checker, said nothing in response to the lies being told about Iran.
Holt let Trump get away with falsely portraying Iran as a threat and with falsely portraying the Iran “deal” as some kind of benevolent statecraft (rather than the unilateral threat from the psychopathic imperial power against a much weaker nonthreatening nation)
Holt let Clinton get away with lying about US imperial objectives in the Greater Middle East and the world.
It seems that the media is perfectly fine with promoting lies about Iran.
Both Trump and Clinton have forfeited any right to life by their aggression toward, and misrepresentation and demonization of Iran.
Clinton just mentioned the non-withdrawal from Iraq and the SOFA… but didn’t mention at all the role of Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks.
Yes, and she’s also touting her plan for targeted killing of al Baghdadi as key to defeating ISIS.
She wants to reprise her “We came, we saw. . .” performance — no doubt complete with the creepy cackling.
Except that I think she is more likely to target Assad and his allies than IS, whose FSA allies she has backed for a while.
Sadly, while Trump (or, at least,his noted guest at the debate) has criticized the disastrous backing of Islamists in Syria (which should ensure that Clinton gets a one-way ticket to FMC Carswell), a major advisor (the same guy) also holds to a crazy conspiracy in which Russia is behind a vast conspiracy to target the USA (which is only slightly less ridiculous than the Berezovsky Truthers and the claims of Russia being behind Islamist terrorists (See Alexander Litvinenko, Bloomberg News and GCHQ for examples)).
Her grotesque maniacal behavior following the murder of Gaddafi tells you everything you need to know about her. A mass murdering lying thieving criminal and a two bit carnival barker. Beyond the imagination of dystopian sci fi.
Trump-“almost 4,000 people killed in Chicago since Obama became president”
Chicago needs to fix Chicago.
I can remember Korea town in LA during the Rodney King riots. The Korean community came together and stopped the complete distruction of their part of LA. Chicago can do it too….
So far, the Graun’s livestream of the debate is much better and up to date — and comments are open.
Just in case anyone is interested. ;^)
I can’t comment at the Graun. It’s the only site that’s ever banned me. That’s because after Glenn left they stopped tolerating my frequent quotes of Max Blumenthal. Those asshats at CiFWatch lobbied for their deletion — on the grounds of “antisemitism” — and my banning.
Oh, I’m banned there, too. I think they have my digital DNA on a No-Post List.
I’m just cranky. But that’s not an apology, of course. ;^)
Finding this shit incredibly annoying? Here’s the antidote:
https://www.twitter.com/drjillstein
Yeah, Jill is worth spending time on Twitter.
An oasis of sanity in the media maelstrom.
The only sane voice in the bunch.
My studies have demonstrated that in the past century, the victor in the presidential election has always been the best liar.
i used to say it in jest, called it Elvis Syndrome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FO9GgysXlw
https://shadowproof.com/2016/09/26/police-exclusion-jill-stein-debate/
That’ll be worth comparing to the clown show hosted by CNN.
Police called to kick Jill Stein off campus:
http://www.bbc.com/news/live/election-us-2016-35404043
Best quote yet: “Let’s face it. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are two of the most despised presidential candidates most of us have ever had to choose from.” – J.D. Crowe
http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/09/2016_election_prediction_a_cre.html
Froomkin states:”Three things will happen tonight: Donald Trump will lie, Hillary Clinton will hedge, and The Intercept will call bullshit.”
Why is a hedge not a lie?
This is what’s wrong with Schwartz’ piece.
Hedging is less than forthcoming, and may even rise to dishonest, by it is not lying.
And there’s little “wrong” with Schwartz’s piece.
It depends what the definition of is is.
“Hedging is less than forthcoming, and may even rise to dishonest, by it is not lying.”
Hedging is a form of obfuscation. The intent is to deceive. It is not forthcoming or honest.
Hillary is known to be dishonest. She does not tell the truth.
She is a serial liar.
That is the point Schwartz is not making.
Like when you finish eating a cookie you steal from a cookie jar and tell your mom that you didnt take a cookie from the jar – – but your sister took 2 and gave you 1 at your request. In the class of lies, a conjobs, a deceptions, a relationship violations, all springboards for liars. It’s like Adolf Hitler saying something like “I did not kill any jews” – – but his friends did. Like when Hellary says “everything is just fine” when America is floating on quicksand. Or when Hellary says “We need peace in the world” while she sells weapons for donations. Or when Hellary says “We need to promote democracy around the world” while she supports coups in Libya, Syria, Egypt and the Honduras and rationalises her invasion of Iraq. This article is a hair splitter. Hair splitting is very common with lawyers, politicians and propagandists. Defending this article requires some hair splitting
and like Hellary, the sentences need finishing.
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/26/donald-trump-leads-the-war-on-truth-but-he-didnt-start-it/?comments=1#comment-287444
Trump didn’t start the li-ar
… somebody who cares about that Billy Joel song finish the parody lyric for us
G’Night everybody! Don’t break your TV set during the debate, remember, it’s like shooting the messenger.
Perfectly appropriate in this case.
The medium is the message/mass age/massage.
No danger of that; our TV set will be off, or perhaps we will watch an old episode of Boston Legal on DVD. I like my outrageous characters funny. Denny Crane.
kinda busy but here is a start
REFRAIN
we came… we saw… he died
dou – ble u – md
the lies keep coming from media running
scams on A MER I CA
pro pa ganda wars no enda
cheney lied, thousands died
iraq invasion country fried
oil wars, torture scores
hillary, wants more
hillary, gets her way
lib y a, bombs away
gold plunder owns the day
TPP will make you pay
NSA, CIA
SPIES LIKE US, DISASTEROUS
weapons for, donations to
hillary, bengazi too
As if Trump’s lies are more dangerous than Clinton’s.
This smarmy article ends on an underhanded trick.
It implies the devious and indefensible ASSumption that there is
a possibility
that Clinton might not be a part of the predatory “status quo.”
Such speculation is right in line with those who this article is
supposeedly criticizing.
Sorry,
“supposedly”
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton represent the same compromised and corrupted establishment . Great care has been taken by politicians and the media to distinguish the two candidates with different types of smears, but ultimately the supposedly rival corporatist, multinational interests behind both have reduced the “choice” for president to these two diseased specimens because in point of fact whichever wins, all the “rival backers” in the elite and the ruling class as a whole can not fail to benefit.
Personally, I believe Trump is going to take a huge fall like a corrupt boxer (by which I mean he will deliberately sabotage his campaign sometime before the election, because he and the rest of the establishment all really agree Hillary Clinton must have the position. If this does not occur, the vote counts will probably be rigged as needed for Clinton’s victory.
There are some remarks below about bias at the Intercept. I think some of the writers here are gunning for Hillary Clinton and are just as intimidated by the “But Trump is the antichrist” meme that has besieged the rest of the pretentiously liberal set to which they oddly aspire, and I think sadly some writers here who are usually also way too fierce-minded to be swayed by that propaganda are being a tad subdued in their criticism of the Democrats right now because they want Snowden to be pardoned by Obama. Nonetheless, I doubt very much that Lee Fang, Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Cora Currier or Alex Emmons in particular are silencing themselves in either such way (I may have missed a name or two for that list). So the Intercept is a mixed bag that has unfortunately become a sporadically establishmentarian voice, but has not entirely sold out. In my opinion.
Pretty good summary. Some of the writers are constitutionally incapable of selling out. Some of the others don’t have to sell out, because they are more or less comfortable with the prevailing system and their interests are limited to tweaks and adjustments.
Even the most fiercely independent of the TI journalists, however, virtually never question the world-dominating socioeconomic structure of global finance-industrial capitalism and none of them ever address the inescapable reality of the ever-tightening constraints arising from a population of seven billion humans (and counting), technology and consumerism running wild, and energy and other essential resources at or very near absolute limits. I suspect they simply don’t understand or are unable to accept these realities.
Consequently, engaging and interesting as the material here can be, it doesn’t address the major issues facing human civilization. Unless and until that happens, it can’t really be more than a sideshow, even if it’s a very interesting sideshow.
Some people here think this is a pro-Hillary article. Perhaps they have mercifully not been exposed to what truly pro-Hillary articles look like. Perhaps they might not understand that the above Intercept article would be regarded, weirdly, as Hillary CRITICISM because it is insufficiently slavish, says nothing specifically positive about Hillary Clinton, and goes so far as to suggest that not just any criticism of Donald Trump comes from Hearts of Gold Who Want Good Things For Everyone.
no laughing now:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/26/taking-selfies-hillary-clinton-not-narcissists#comments
What Vic said. Some here must not spend much time on Twitter. If they think the above is an in-the-tank for Hillary piece, they don’t know how those people actually operate.
OMG! The horror! ;^)
I get that, Doug, believe me. But really, Twitter can be extremely useful if one is savvy in whom one follows. The links I get are often gold.
I understand, Mona. I think my inability to synchronize myself to the 140-character universe is just a symptom of advancing curmudgeonliness.
As long as I can stand to come here, I can trust you and a few other to monitor the Twitterverse and point me to the important revelations. And I appreciate it.
Sam Kriss, who writes good long articles too, is a genius at Twitter:
https://twitter.com/sam_kriss/status/780591337624174592?lang=en
Hillary doesn’t lie. Give me a break
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbkS26PX4rc
http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/…/dont…/ideas/nexus/
Trump’s a “hedgehog” (“a fox knows many things but a hedgehog knows one important thing”). For example: as the link above suggests, Trump has the only sane view on U.S.-Russian relations (as between himself and Hillary), on which the survival of the planet depends (the U.S. is currently in a “Dr. Strangelove 2.0″ era as last Sunday’s and yesterday’s 60 Minutes segments unintentionally starkly demonstrate). In sum, Trump wants to get along with Russia and ally with them in extirpating the scourge of radical Islamist militancy.
OTOH, Clinton and the Dems are despicably ginning up antagonism with Russia and its democratically elected and popularly supported leader for domestic political gain. At least when the Republican right demonized Russia and the Dems for insufficient vigilence against them during the Cold War, Russia was Communist and did (at least theoretically) threaten democratic capitalism and our way of life. Today the Dems attack on Trump for his sane position on Russia is a propaganda ploy, whereby one attacks an opponent for his strengths and not his weaknesses.
To cite one more example, Trump is similarly hedgehog-like on the issue of unwinding “globalization as we know it” vs. putting the best interests of “Americans first”.
What Hillary and the Dems and their establishment media presstitutes are doing is mischaracterizing their philosophical and policy differences with Trump as some form of deceit by Trump. It is unedifying at best and projection at worst.
To date, the general election campaign as depicted by the mainstream media has been a very bad show: the Dems and their kept journalists have dwindling time to try to dispute Trump on the wisdom of his hedgehog world views, ones the American people are finding very refreshing and appealing.
Eric C. Jacobson
Public Interest Lawyer
One of Trump’s hedgehog like views that runs as a current through almost all of his ideas and statements is white supremacy. Whether it’s “brown people from Mexico are mostly criminals,” or “a ‘Mexican’ judge doesn’t have the right to judge me,” or “we need to bring back stop and frisk (obviously this will be applied in neighborhoods of color) or his focus on the danger of islamic terrorists in the U.S. (even though the vast majority of murders in the U.S. are committed by Christians), etc., The people who find Trump’s views “refreshing and appealing” are mostly white males who are threatened by a perceived new world order (in which white males don’t have as much power as they used to). Polls show that is where the overwhelming amount of his support is coming from.
Just what benefit is there to America to let in a whole bunch of illegal uneducated,caudillo worshipping day laborers other than to undermine the American peoples job security,wage security and the expense of trying to educate and indoctrinate such people into American Constitutional values unheard of and unwanted in their native lands?
I guess when its the lawyers,teachers and educated who’ll illegally enter America,the yuppies will take notice.
And when the yuppies themselves choose to live in the barrio and ghettos among these immigrants,instead of their isolated white communities of exurbs and suburbs and high rises,maybe other Americans will believe in those yuppies nobility,and pureness of heart.
Maybe.
Some self-appointed long-term, Greenwaldian serial apologists seem to believe that it is their function to control and direct the flow of the ever-emerging reader response narrative by questioning the “reader comprehension” of those who comments threaten to expose the article’s intended affect. In keeping with the established modus operandi of this agenda, the queen bee of Greenwaldian apologetics, Mona, has taken upon herself to capture the top of the thread with the “express” intention of correcting any misinterpretation that Mr. Swartz’ thesis amounts to a hit “piece” on Donald trump. In the doing however, she chose to link to an article on the “New republic” website that was actually intended to multiply the effect of that very narrative. “The [New Republic] magazine’s outlook is associated with the Democratic Leadership Council and “New Democrats” such as former US President Bill Clinton and Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, who received the magazine’s endorsement in the 2004 Democratic primary.” (Wikipedia: New Republic). It has become abundantly clear that the Intercept has adopted a strategy of providing Hilary with a back handed endorsement – thus assuming the specious role of the “neutral arbiter who washes its hands while crowning the narrative that is intended to frame Trump’s thorny fate.”
Different day, same old bullshit eh Mona? Look at the bright side, you will not have to drag this comment to the top of the thread in an attempt to control the emerging narrative.
Thank you. It has been somewhat common for people to note that Glenn and I have similar styles and attitudes. But he, of course, is much smarter than I am by many magnitudes. (I don’t feel too bad about that because it makes me no different than %99.99 of the rest of the population.)
At any rate, it’s odd to see a compliment from a wingnut idjit like you, so thanks again.
Your welcome. I aim to please. There is a lot more where that came from. Until later then…
“But [Glenn], of course, is much smarter than I am by many magnitudes. ”
That should read:
But [Glenn], of course, is much smarter than I am by many orders of magnitude.
An ‘order of magnitude’ is a multiple of 10. You can have orders of magnitude. Three orders of magnitude is 10^3 or 1000.
The plural of magnitude is rather meaningless; it’s more than one scalar.
i see, so Hellary does not lie like The Donald lies.. Hellary’s half truths are not lies?
Hillary Clinton Has A New Plan To Jail Bankers
https://thinkprogress.org/hillary-clinton-has-a-new-plan-to-jail-bankers-8f64b8c79b08
right. she will protect mainstreet from wallstreet cons and thieves
theintercept*dot*com/2016/08/26/clinton-foundation-spin/
People can judge me for what I’ve done.
huffingtonpost*dot*com/riley-waggaman/hillary-clinton-is-living_b_10862558.html
Hellary, promises one thing then stabs you in the back.
“The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and New Yorker have all drawn up detailed anthologies of Trump’s lies.”
But – and this is the kicker – since they haven’t also drawn up comparable detailed anthologies of Clinton’s lies, Trump can merely say, “one-sided political partisanship from media outlets” and, gosh, well over half the electorate will nod their head and say, “He’s got a point, doesn’t he?”
It’s also utterly impossible for Clinton to differentiate herself from the status quo, no matter how many puff pieces are written on her behalf by liberal news outlets financed by private wealth. Sometimes, the money factor just doesn’t work; look at how Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio went down like lead weights despite all the money poured into their campaigns?
And look, we all know, the reason the Intercept is refusing to run anything about Jill Stein is because its owner, Pierre Omidyar, is backing Hillary Clinton and is afraid that positive articles about Jill Stein will draw political support away from Hillary Clinton; but that also means that Omidyar is using this news outlet as a platform to promote his own personal views and agenda, and this is why the billionaire-owned media platforms always degenerate into this kind of biased non-independent performance.
To avoid this outcome, you’d have to have long-term contracts and guaranteed expense budgetsfor news editors and reporters; I suppose it would be fair for the owner to have an op-ed column to make his views known, instead of using sock puppets like Robert Mackey, but it’s all become rather painfully obvious, hasn’t it? It’s understandable, of course – if I was the sole financier of a internet news outlet, I’d want it to reflect my views, too. But in the end, this results in a lack of independence; what we really need in a democratic system of government are reporters and editors who are not beholden to any outside interest, who will take a factual approach to both Clinton’s and Trump’s record.
Don’t they teach this in high school anymore, i.e. the importance of a free and independent press, which will impartially monitor the centers of political power on behalf of the general population, as a critical component of any democracy?
A press that would “impartially monitor the centers of political power on behalf of the general population” has never existed and likely never will. Let’s not have high schoolers taught about any more things that never happened than they already are, okay?
Well, you did get some reporters who take their work seriously; Robert Fisk (who bounced around from the Time to the Independent while delivering accurate reports from Beirut, Afghanistan, Iran/Iraq, Turkey, etc.) is one of my favorite examples. But would he have been given a job today in this online media environment? I kind of doubt it. Who would pay his travel expenses? So instead we get random “social media” reports, such as cell phone footage of dubious provenance from Syria, state-run PR ops feeding videos to online commentators for distribution. Again, there are a few exceptions today, too.
It also helps to have 100 millionaires owning 100 different media outlets, rather than five corporate conglomerates controlled by five billionaires owning all those media outlets – much more room for competing alternative views – which is why media antitrust laws are so badly needed; breaking up the media conglomerates is just as important as breaking up the “too big to fail” banks.
Perhaps it’s not as bad as the old Soviet Union – there, you just had one conglomerate, not five, but really, it’s not that different. Ultimately, it becomes a situation where people believe their own PR, totally divorced from reality, with disastrous long-term consequences:
http://www.politicalirony.com/2016/06/21/believing-your-own-bullshit/
Big yes on media anti-trust laws!
In fact, that should be a cornerstone demand for whatever next “political revolution” comes along — not because that solves it, but because it’s a beginning: demands affect mass consciousness.
Oddly enough, it seems to me that a media that needs to get attention, rather than just coast as a loss leader in a megacorp, is more likely to occasionally bring attention to things that deserve it, in addition to the usual task of spreading lies, starting wars etc.
It’s why Hearst and Pulitzer have mixed records rather than just one long litany of terribleness — they ALSO sold papers by highlighting injustice, not just making things worse. Today I get the sense that nothing that upsets the applecart gets past because it isn’t really the function of the media to maximize interest; they are more like The Company Newsletter.
And I know with certainty,that if the MSM was totally pro Trumo instead of pro Clinton you’d be screaming at the propaganda,and saying the opposite of your BS.
The MSM used to be a somewhat neutral observer of politics,with both democratic or republican loyalties and viewpoints in different outlets,but today its all zion,all the way,and f*ck US.
dahoit, you need to lay off the airplane glue. Seriously, you’ve been posting here for months. And you STILL can’t remember who is who, who they support, and who they don’t.
Come on dahoit. Even a 50 cent junkie like yourself can do better than this. Try to have some standards. Focus. I don’t like Hillary Clinton. mmm-kay?
you fucking idiot. You and your zion zion zion, it’s like you’re a goddamn religious fanatic in reverse. It’s like if there were no zionism somehow the world would be utopia and everybody would be nice to everybody.
It’s like as if….if there were no zionism, somehow you wouldn’t be a moron. But you would still be a moron, with or without zion. Now go huff some more fumes you braindead disgusting excuse for a human being.
When i was a kid, if i lied, i got a mouth stuffed with a bar of soap. Lying and cheating were sins. The laws of the US are the implementation of biblical prescriptions. Remove the bible and suddenly you get orphaned laws in the wind and law writers writing prescriptions for another power.
houston?………… houston? …………….
So how old are you pretending to be barabbas? Either you had an unusually harsh upbringing for the mid 20th C., were raised by weirdo fundamentalists, or are just making shit up.
good and fair question. As i may have knowledge of wallstreet crimes and criminals who would rather i were dead, it is hard for be to provide that much color. But i cannot lie. Ivory soap.
No, he was just brought up in the Midwest part of the US. I had my mouth washed out with a bar of soap on more than one occasion. Standard practice for Midwesterners…..;)
So, Barabbas….where did you grow up?
respectfully, TMI. but hey, as bad as it tasted, it rinses out well and also cleans teeth. In fact, even tho i only lied a few times, i developed a taste for it and can rub the toothbrush across the top and scrub my teeth real good.
Ivory soap is also good for cleaning dentures,it gets the glue off well.
Washing mouths with soap for bad speech or behavior is more than likely a worldwide obsession.
As far as banning,many sites hate my truths,and the Graun kicked me out years ago for questioning the holocaust,the lie that brought us to the present day of serial lies.It’s illegal to question that shibboleth in GB,that bastion of free speech.Which of course means that any real examination of it would collapse their bogus narrative,and make the Israelis, the serial lying thieves, less able to snow the world.
It’s good to be the king.
Never watched a debate in my life,they are punch and judy show nonsense,and of course all the usual suspects say the Hell Bitch won,but the people will decide our future,and they don’t believe anything from the MSM,unless one is a halfwit.
I want to apologize to everybody else for having honored dahoit with insults. It won’t happen again.
Some commenters seem to have issues with reading comprehension. ChasDokus claims:
Schwartz couldn’t have been clearer about Kristof and the NYT’s crimes against truth:
That is not, to understate, citing Krisof and the NYT as “exemplars of truth.”
Nor is the above a “hit piece” on Donald Trump. Donald Trump is, in fact, a relentless liar — or actually, he’s beyond lying. The article is, as much as anything else, media criticism.
If there were anything such as a honest independent major news source left in the United States, what they’d do is assign one team of five reporters to ferret out all the Trump lies and mistatements, and another team of reporters to do the same with Clinton, each overseen by an editor and a pair of fact-checkers to vet their reporter’s conclusions. That’s a lot of money – ten reporters, two editors, four fact-checkers, on salary, plus expense accounts, etc. Assuming a living wage, office space, etc., for the whole campaign, which goes on for like two years? Well, that’s into the millions, isn’t it?
Just a tiny fraction of any billionaire’s net worth, though – but the American billionaires, like the Russian oligarchs, are not interesting in relinquishing control of media narratives to independently-minded editors and journalists, are they? But that’s why people have such a low opinion of media in the USA these days – the top-down plutocratic control of narrative has become too obvious.
Nobody in the old Soviet Union took their media seriously, either; for the same reason, really. The press is good for cat litter and wrapping fish, not much else. And yes, a ban on comments would not be surprising, either . . . it’s all about controlling the narrative. /snark
Americans have spent decades congratulating ourselves that our press is free, and we don’t have Pravda. That’s blinded far too many to the corruption in the “objective” corporate media that makes it almost impossible to effectively challenge power. Much less have a discussion that exceeds the “acceptable” boundaries set by the two main parties.
This is good pushback Mona. Perspective as ever is lacking; I think some of the commenters need to meet more serious Hillbots before they start confusing this author with one. Commenters are going out of their way to avoid this excellent transitional statement that has more to do with the thrust of the article than what they are concentrating on:
“But there is something patronizing and hypocritical about the media’s sudden interest in Trump’s deceptions, as though his lies were larger and more harmful than anything in recent memory.”
Coming on the heels of The Move To Rehabilitate The Memory of George W. Bush Just Long Enough That We Can Defeat Trump, this bit of nuance from Mattathias Schwartz would be more than enough to get the guy virtually lynched from the cyberrafters of the Hillary fan site, and labeled a secret Trump supporter for an epitaph.
Vote for me I will set you free. I am TheWay. Change you can believe in.
Write in TheScaleman.
Ah yes… Truth and consequences. Okay then, let’s begin with consequences and backtrack to truths. Every time that an Intercept author links to a NY Times or Washington Post article, Intercept readers are forced to choose whether, or not, they want to subscribe to those sources. Does the intercept get a click fee for every person who follows those links? Absent a subscription, is the reader of Intercept articles intentionally being deprived of the finer nuances of articles such as this? Or, has the Intercept now come to think of itself as partner to these prestigious shape-shifting opinion shapers? On to finer distinctions…
Nicholas Kristof is an active member of the Council on Foreign Relations and thus shares an interventionist global vision with its neoliberal wing – so much so in fact that this “Rhodes Scholar” and “honorary African” makes South African bishop Desmond Tutu weak in the knees. Framing debates in context to desired outcomes is the primary function of CFR establishment Journalists. But hey, he won two Pultizers – a prize that is named after a man who embraced yellow journalism as a necessary mean to increasing circulation of newspapers he owned and the advertising revenue derived from it (a business model that seems to have been adopted by the Intercept as of late). Any criticism of Trump’s visceral appeal to the knuckle dragging, bible-thumping wing of the conservative establishment automatically invites like comparison of Kristoff to the Man in the Yellow Hat. Yes, there is “ample evidence” that the meme of Donald Trump’s “messianic” pretensions is merely a scripted foreshadowing of the Crucifixion that must follow in the wake of such narratives. Having established who Judas is, I am left wondering what journalistic functionary will cast himself as the neutral arbiter who washes his hands while crowning the narrative that is intended to frame Trump’s thorny fate.
I, too, have noticed the “messianic” theme in a growing number of articles related to trump. I just assumed that it is a product of the echo chamber. When I googled the terms “Trump” and “messianic” however, a plethora of websites were making the allusion including Salon, RealPolitics, MSNBC, Briutbart, WashingtonPost, WeeklyStandar, Politico, TimesOfIsrael, Jewsforjesus, theAtlantic, Huffingtonpost, Variety, LATimes, and Slate. Weird shit. The trump camp was actually concerned that he was not an ideal fit with conservative evangelicals during the primary. Maybe this is just a case of “the devil you know…”.
I am not sure how Mr. Schwartz can write this blatant hit piece against Mr. Trump without uttering word one about Hillary Clinton’s history of lying. Here is but a small sampling of her lies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dY77j6uBHI
It goes beyond that for me. Schwartz also implied that TI staff are not behaving the same exact way as the mainstream media on this subject.
“But there is something patronizing and hypocritical about the media’s sudden interest in Trump’s deceptions, as though his lies were larger and more harmful than anything in recent memory.”
Anybody who reads TI regularly knows that Trump’s deceptions are trumpeted here daily and that he is described as being more harmful than anything in recent memory here also.
What’s worse is Schwartz’s exemplars of truth’s defenders: NYT, LAT, WaPo, Kristof…
A most telling video about who Hillary Clinton is and who she works for is from Dec 2014, when she passed the Wall Street loyalty vetting process, and had this public interview with a State Street executive:
http://archive.boston.com/business/news/2014/12/07/hannah-grove-interviews-hillary-clinton/e359opxEQlRmCZtS1aqa6J/video.html
State Street is among Wall Street’s biggest players in investment capital – here are their top 20 investments, just as an example:
The point is, Hillary Clinton will be there to maximize share price for these interests, whether it means outsourcing manufactuing to China, jacking up prescription drug costs, promoting wars and foreign arms sales, sticking more students with debt, screwing over homeowners, promoting fossil fuels over renewables – a full-scale assault on the middle class, maintaining domestic surveillance, poisoning the environment, and with foreign wars to top it off, all so Wall Street can accumulate more profit. And who really controls Wall Street these days?
strategic-culture.org/news/2015/05/15/banks-rule-the-world-but-who-rules-the-banks-ii.html
Now, the billionaire-owned media is obviously NOT going to be reporting on this issue, since this is where their money is parked, be they of the liberal or conservative persuasion – but that’s who Hillary Clinton is working for, certainly not for the American public. Everyone benefiting from this system lives in “Green Zone” wealth enclaves scattered here and there around the country; mass poverty is the growing norm everywhere else. That’s the status quo that Hillary Clinton represents. And that’s where Trump’s allure is so obvious – even if he’d be a disaster, it’d be a different kind of disaster.
Of course, if the corporate media and Wall Street and the DNC hadn’t sabotaged Bernie Sanders in a rigged primary, he’d be beating Donald Trump hands down right now – but instead we have neck-and-neck Clinton/Trump. And in that matchup, it is really really hard to predict which would do the most damage; but there is this: if Hillary goes down in flames, it would make room in the Democratic Party for more Bernie Sanders-type candidates, as the corporate Clintonites would be forced to retire.
whoa! (catching my breath, picking myself up off the floor) whoa!
roughly $230 billion there.
Cash removed from RE-circulation and placed into LOAN-circulation by the wealthers who have accumulated this amount in their hord – and that is just State Street!!
Houston….. All kidding aside, when you say something about increasing their price share, America needs to understand that valuations based on cash in circulation and democratic affordability are different than valuations created by conjecture and the need to exploit more people and more places.
THE ALARM BELLS NEED TO BE RINGING IN A LOUD AND PRESENT DANGER. Because, feeding the wealth monster interest money is no longer a matter of receiving a cash flow from cash in circulation, but instead cash resulting from a resale of some investment from borrowed money created by lower fed-interest-rates in a giant ponzi fashion. Many call it a gain, some would call it price inflation, i call it price fraud.
Many thanks for your wake-up post as i am too busy at this time to discover these gems.
wow. My name is BARABBAS. Gee. I must be a LIAR like Trump.
TWO THINGS.
1. Lies and white lies are not the same. For instance, “nobody can rip Hellary Clinton a new one better than me on this board.” – a flat out lie. Or “I never implied that Hellary Clinton would the worst president in the history of the US.” – another lie. IF you ever ran a business or were responsible for the success of a business, you would know that when your business dwells in the field of liars, it is pretty tough not to one up them. Donald Trump was in the business whose axiom is, Buyers and Sellers are liars and Builders are Whores.
2. White lying is not the same as DO LYING which is a BETRAY OF RELATIONSHIPS that Hellary Clinton exhibits. For instance, If Hellary said
Trump said he wouldn’t be the initiator of nuclear weapons use.
No comments from the haters?
Some are overly hostile to the above article, reading pro-Hillary motivation I don’t see. The author writes:
That’s simply a fact. Hillary Clinton very conspicuously did not play to the growing anger at the elite oligarchy running the country. Not until Bernie Sanders forced her to mutter a few such insincere statements during the primaries. (And having secured the nomination all she’s done is play to the right/Republicans.)
Moreover, Donald Trump doesn’t simply lie, he does it as a matter of course. As do all of his surrogates.
They don’t even try to stay on message and to make sure they are all on the same page, because coordinating campaign themes and positions doesn’t matter when even the appearance of truth-telling doesn’t matter — that appearance doesn’t matter to Team Trump. Hillary Clinton and her team do care about message discipline and the appearance of honesty.
My one quibble with the author is this closing sentiment:
It should have read: “Trump’s lack of respect for the truth may not matter, because Clinton cannot differentiate herself from the status quo.”
Even if she said words meant to do that, who other than party hacks would even pretend they believed her?
“and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, designated experts with the authority to call a lie a lie”
i dont know if im going to puke or to laugh!
this is outrageous… is there a better definition of BS?
How dare you challenge the authority of Bezos-blessed fact checkers?!?!
Not that I support Trump or Clinton, but one of Trump’s political strategems that’s been highly effective is that he has tapped into widespread distrust of press outlets on the part of the majority of Americans; trust in media (according to Gallup polls) is at record historical lows.
As far as dishonest candidates, Trump and Clinton both have major problems in that area – for example when Hillary Clinton says she won’t back TPP as President, she’s lying; when she says she’ll address the massive student debt burden on young people, she’s lying; when she says she’s concerned about global warming and will promote renewables, she’s lying; when she says she supports returning manufacturing jobs to the U.S., she’s lying. She is indisputably Wall Street’s candidate and will make her appointments based on Wall Street agendas.
What’s she’s not lying about is what’s most troubling – forming an alliance with neocons, increasing military spending, and pushing for more regime change wars, conflicts with China and Russia, all across North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Now, is Trump lying when he says he has a different foreign policy agenda? Hard to tell, since he’s brought on neocon James Woolsey; all in all, he’s not trustworthy either.
Who isn’t lying? Who is spelling out a policy that they’d actually adopt once in office? Jill Stein – the only one who would eliminate student debt (Wall Street howls at having to absorb a $1 trillion write-off notwithstanding), a green New Deal for domestic infrastructure and manufacturing financed by cuts in the bloated military-industrial complex, elimination of fossil fuel subsidies and promotion of domestic renewable energy – what the Washington Post editorial board called a “fairy tale,” right before calling for the prosecution of Snowden and more NATO military spending.
Jill Stein, of course, has been locked out of the debates by such corporate media interests. And that’s an important point – even though Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have record unfavorables among the American public for Presidential candidates, well over 50% negative, the corporate media has something like a 75% negative rating in opinion polls – a complete reverse from the late 1970s, when media approval was at 75%.
Again, if Trump has done anything clever politically, it’s that he’s tapped into this massive distrust of media narratives by the American public. In fact, harsh media denunciations of Trump – as compared to balanced perspectives on Trump vs. Clinton – are likely working to increase his support, not diminish it.
Yes, excellent post.
I second that.
She is indisputably Wall Street’s candidate and will make her appointments based on Wall Street agendas
O YEAH
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/22/good-as-goldman-hillary-and-wall-street/
woops! havent woke up yet – meant to get this link
https://theintercept.com/2016/08/16/hillary-clinton-picks-tpp-and-fracking-advocate-to-set-up-her-white-house/
“Again, if Trump has done anything clever politically, it’s that he’s tapped into this massive distrust of media narratives by the American public.”
Great observation.
Great, a choice between cyanide, and diet cyanide…..
Notwithstanding the above, Mackey’s latest piece on the video from the Charlotte police killing of Keith Scott has been displayed among the “Top Stories” on TI since Sep. 24 2016, 4:20 p.m., and comments have been closed since shortly after posting. The effect, almost certainly the intended effect, was to kill the spirited discussion about the incident that had been ongoing here.
Questions to the author have gone unanswered.
Shades of The Guardian.
“Questions to the author have gone unanswered.”
well, to be fair, NYT Bob has never answered a question regarding his offerings.
Stop implying an unanswered question is something new …
The author may have inadvertently toggled the comment enable function. Does anyone follow him on Twit? That seems to be his wheelhouse.
Tell him you have a scoop on the latest Trump turd; he’ll bite and chew.
I’m not sure what to make of those closed comments. But it may be that some are considering closing comments altogether here. And I have to say I wouldn’t oppose that, not given the almost total lack of moderation.
Too often threads get destroyed by persistent trolls who, even when an author takes the time to ban and/or delete, they just sign up again. Ever since the site opened we’ve been told there would eventually be some moderation rules (the sort of limited rules Glenn had always enforced) and some enforcement, but — as with the promises of improved commenting software — it never happened.
Many sites have started closing comments rather than spend the money on moderators, because in their absence the conversation turns into a YouTube-comments cesspool. And studies show a lot of rancid, fuckwitted comments affect reader perception. This is what Scientific American stated in their announcement they were closing all comments:
We’ve lost a lot of the old regulars because they cannot abide the invasion of fuckwits and trolls (and they hate the commenting software). As I said, I’d rather close them down than see comments persist as a space where such excellent commenters won’t stick around.
Well, I have to say that I’m having a hard time sticking around, too.
“We’ve lost a lot of the old regulars because they cannot abide the invasion of fuckwits and trolls”
I love how a diverse set of opinions being discussed = fuckwit troll to you!
The comments section is not so that people like you can just agree with the author 24/7. Comments are open to those with other ideas as well.
Fortunately this decision is not up to you. I hope the comments section remains open, with or without moderation.
By the way, if we do get moderation some day, I hope they add gratuitous personal insults as being against the rules. That is not one of your endearing qualities, mona.
You’re a wingnut troll, but you don’t crapflood, so you would not be banned under rules as Glenn Greenwald has always had. Different viewpoints — including hostile ones — have always been present in his commenting space.
Personal insults will never be banned. A troll who does little but that, and in inordinate volume, will be.
When I call you a “wingnut troll” that is not an insult — it’s an accurate descriptor. You are also an idiot whose facility with facts is absurdly poor. That is a fact — if it insults you to see it stated, that’s too bad.
If one couldn’t comment on the BS they serve up here(other than GG)why would anyone come here?
It’s the strength of the site,as the authors here mostly suck.
And yes,mona has a potty mouth,a most unattractive attribute,but usual for propagandists,usually the commies,although of course the fascists are good for a smear or two also,a sign of ideological twins separated at birth,different only in their hatreds,but alike in lies.
And because of that never happening and still not happening, any useful and effective moderation isn’t possible. When Glenn was at Salon and at The Guardian he had contracted to not be under the power of the Salon moderation team and their rules, or by The Guardian team and their rules. All other contributors to those websites had their comment sections under the control of the teams and the website rules.
But another big difference between now and back then is that during those periods on Salon and on The Guardian, Glenn, judging by how much he interacted in comments, had the time and took much more of his time then than he does now interacting in and attending to the comment sections. So, because of that, he was able to personally refute some of those who were trolling and or lying about something he’d written in a current post or in a previous post. He also had the benefit of the software at Salon and at The Guardian to, if he really thought necessary, delete any specific comment, and also to permanently or, if he so chose, temporarily, ban the few commenters he would finally decide needed to be banned for whatever reason. Some very few of those were banned were a combination of internet savvy enough, and personally lacking in any self respect enough to re-register under another name. But here it seems that anyone is capable popping back in with another and another and another name. Having trolls and pathological liars on the honor system, and hoping that they will have enough self respect not to re-register after being banned, is, to understate, not a dependable system to live by.
So, as things stand here at The Intercept there is no hope that the overall commenting quality will ever improve unless or until some workable system is in place. There are at least a few major stumbling blocks for that ever happening. One is that I doubt Glenn will ever have the time again as he did before to attend to his own comment section. Another is that I doubt most of the numerous other authors here will be willing and or able to take the time to do that. Another is that I have lost confidence that, for whatever reason, The Intercept will do whatever it is that they need to do to provide software which would help make light moderating even possible. I honestly don’t even know what that software is or how complicated that would be, so I’m going easy with my criticism about that. But, damn, could that at least provide an edit function and a few other niceties to make things a little more pleasant and a little less aggravating? That much shouldn’t be too much to ask.
Amen. One of those poor, sick “Targeted Individuals” has explicitly said he will never respect his multiple bannings — he will continue to make new accounts no matter what. And he has.
As you note, Glenn just doesn’t have time any longer to participate in his comments to the extent he once did, or to significantly moderate. One author here has told me he won’t moderate a tall, as he believes it is not his job to do so.
We had such a great commentariat at blogger, Salon and even managed to do it at Comment is Futile. But it’s just gone way, way downhill here for all the reasons we’ve both addressed. (And how funny a few of the pests think it is “personal insults” that is the problem — we always had those. Indeed, Glenn could be the king of them. But the discussion was outstanding.)
C’mon Mona? Commenters who stop commenting because they don’t like the responses shouldn’t be posting. Your silver tipped tongue has produced some doozies! That’s better than not having the ability to state your mind.
People are very revealing even though their identities are hidden. They are less inhibited and as result the comments and responses are more spirited. Closing comments is a bad move for the intercept.
“As I said, I’d rather close them down than see comments persist as a space where such excellent commenters won’t stick around.”
You would do that, wouldn’t you. Your “wretched” posts offer no improvement. go find some Humanitarian aid cause, please.
She certainly has a high opinion of herself,that’s for sure.
When people try to limit free speech,they expose themselves,disgustingly.
That is likely because the police video edited out the portion that reveals he had no gun and the one placed there by police was in the video part they cut out. We live in a police state like the egyptians and palestinians.
I love these revolutionary posts. Do you remember what happened in Egypt after Arab Spring? Recall who got elected in the aftermath of the revolution?
So before you grab your gun and start your one man revolution, you may want to factor history into your plan.
Also, we do not live like Palestinians. Life is relatively comfortable and safe here.
Morsi,whom we helped depose and imprison,as Israel hates freedom for their victims to protest their obvious hatred of Israel,as all their neighbors do.
We like the Sisi,the little king of Jordan,but hate Assad,the only leader left standing who opposes Israeli hegemony.
Perhaps because Clinton is, in fact, one of those who is a part of the elite network of self-dealing oligarchs running the country…
Of course Clinton is part of the 1%. Nearly everyone who is running for President is part of, or aspires to be, part of the 1% (except for Bernie). And once elected, you will be part of the 1% no matter who you are.
That Trump can disparage his own economic status with impunity is amazing. Anyone else would be called a hypocrite. That you think you can attack Clinton on this status while leaving Trump alone is just as amazing.
I leave Trump out of this comment because, unlike Clinton, he has not been a part of the ruling elite. My point is that, of course Clinton is not going to play to that growing sense, because she’s been part of the problem. Neither praise nor criticism of Trump is being implied here.
You know what isn’t “amazing,” John Kauai? That you deliberately avoid noticing the very next sentence of the article.
No, that’s depressingly normal.
I hate partisans of either of these awful candidates. It’s one thing to be a coward and feel like you “must” vote for someone with a “chance.”
It’s quite another to actually show up to run shit for one of the two crap candidates.
here is a list of persons who actively demonstrate that bribery and corruption ae now legal in the US thanks to Hellary http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-13/how-much-it-costs-get-ambassadorship-guccifer-20-leaks-dnc-pay-play-donor-list
I think the loss of a distinction between truth and lies started in business. You simply get to the point where claiming that you have a thorium powered car or you’re going to send a reality TV show to Mars or that you can cure diseases with super diluted water becomes a valid business model, one that survives and yields dividends year after year while the honest Joes have to go around telling their creditors they are bankrupt and won’t be paying. It took a while, but now the politicians also see that you really can lie to all the people all the time and come out ahead.
The standard for political rhetoric has been lowered to new levels since Bill’s presidency and Hillary masterminded some of it or most of it.. If I had influence with trump, after he secured the nomination, I would have told him to make outrageous untrue statements as true statements up to the first debate. Get the crowd (voters in America) talking about those statements, spending time on them and tracking that time. At the first debate I would use the tracked data of time wasted against Hillary as an indicator of how the public servants have spent their time on our dime. How stupid they think we are. It would further support his narrative of the “rigged” nature of politics. There is so many things he could attach to that. The impact of it on national tv would be incalculatable. Of course this would be just one bullet in the box.
I want Trump to focus inward. We need to get our country working much better within. I want a politician to say that foreign policy is important but only after domestic policy has been fixed.
As a lair, Hillary matches Trump tit for tat. It seems to me, as a progressive, that she is the female version of Trump’s male version. They are counterparts; each other’s doppelgangers. My question is which of them is the biggest threat to the status-quo more and which is more likely to implode it? Faced with bad choices, which is most likely to change “the present order?” With the number of status-quo elitists lined up behind Ms. Clinton, from the Bush clan to ex-CIA it would seem they feel they have far more to lose with Trump than with Clinton. The main threat to the established plutocrati, would seem to be Trump. If both lie equally (which seems the case) then which is most likely to fell the house of cards? True progressives should vote accordingly.
I really only plan on watching the debate tonight because a Twitter rumor said Greenwald and Scahill will be live blogging during it, here at The Intercept.
I’m hoping they can keep me from yelling at the TV.
Greenwald and Scahill ought to be moderating in lieu of Lester Holt. That would be TV worth paying for!
Subject of piece: Truth vs. lies WRT 2016 presidential candidates.
Number of words: 1,049
Number of times “Clinton” appears: 4
Number of times Clinton’s name is associated with a question or comment regarding her truthfulness: 0
Lame.
Who are you to say what the “true” subject of this article was? In any case you didn’t get it right.
Why do you think counting words and mentions counts as useful analysis? It doesn’t.
You just feel compelled to argue with me, don’t you, Vic?
Unintentional irony.
Did some one tell you that I thought that? Do you know the difference between analysis and observation?
You just feel compelled to argue with me, don’t you, Vic?
I argue with everybody Doug. I argue with my cat. I have had serious disputes with my pillow.
Anyway….no, the subject of the piece is not “Truth vs. lies WRT 2016 presidential candidates.” It’s about nothing so sweeping as that. Demanding the author write about Hillary Clinton’s lies here is silly.
In several mystical paths, like the various forms of Sufi Islam, the striving (in Arabic, Jihad) is to groom the self so that it reflects the higher qualities, such as selflessness, love, peace, generosity, humility, forgiveness, compassion, and TRUTHFULNESS.
Lying is the opposite of truthfulness and is a quality of the lower self (aka consciousness).
Justice comes when the higher qualities are optimally reflected.
And the more the higher qualities are perfected, the more enlightened a person is considered.
Christ is considered a being in whom the higher qualities are perfected the most. Not only an individual is encouraged to strive to reflect his perfection, groups of people (small groups to nations to civilizations) are also encouraged to reflect those qualities collectively.
So it is surprising that a person would claim to consider Christ as the most inspiring philosopher; yet, he’d carry out certain actions that are based on falsehood and deception, as well as a severe lack of love and compassion and selflessness.
Sufi makes an appearance.
And here I thought my cyber threat speech drove him away.
Nothing more pathetic than cyber war,and I apologize for my stupidity,but not my attitude re 9-11.Its a third rail,and not to be touched re dumb comparisons.
Nowhere does the author present any evidence that Trump is lying more than Hillary. This reads like a partisan commercial for liberals. How Ironic, Ed Snowden was taken down by a Democratic president and all the Intercept can think to do is shill for the warmonger Hillary by parroting the findings of her supporting liberal media like the Washington Post which has openly admitted extreme bias towards Hillary and, ironically, recently railed against any idea of giving Snowden a pardon.
Hillary Clinton’s lies regarding Libya, the Ukraine, and Syria go far beyond anything Trump has said; because, for one, they are war crimes. What happened in those countries violated the most basic principles of Nuremberg. Hillary and Obama should be tried at the Hague … as should Bush/Cheney.
Regurgitating liberal ‘fact-checkers’ who endorse Hillary is not proof that Trump lies more … it is proof the Intercept is not out to expose the deep state but instead is supporting the preferred candidate of the deep state, who would have been ecstatic if Snowden had been captured or murdered.
Why doesn’t the Intercept point out that the McCarthyite attacks on Trump are very similar to Hillary’s attacks on Ed Snowden:
“”I have a hard time thinking that somebody who is a champion of privacy and liberty has taken refuge in Russia under Putin’s authority.”
The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!
“Those who are calling Trump out as a liar are right. He is a liar.”
When a TI “journalist” says the accusations are true for one candidate and implies they aren’t true for the other, despite the massive evidence of Hillary’s lies, I see absolutely no difference between TI and the corporate media.
What is also omitted despite the reference to the liars in the Bush admin about Iraq, is that Hillary not only repeated those lies from the floor of the Senate, she repeatedly went on TV to spread those lies to help sell the illegal war… despite information being publicly available at the time that what she was saying were in fact lies.
And, it seems like a lie of omission to bring up the intelligence committee lies about Snowden without pointing out that many of the 24 are Democrats.
An overtly partisan article serving the establishment is not what we expect here.
Posting one while criticizing other media outlets for their failures to challenge lies is also pure hypocrisy.
This was an unfortunate statement and I had the same reaction, but this is no Trump hit piece or a pro Hillary piece. The author just made a mistake including that sentence in the story. I’ll assume that the author is a young guy and will learn better, but a pretty good piece of writing overall, I think.
It’s not a good piece of writing at all. Whatever the intention of the author, addressing the lies of one candidate but not the other, when both are inveterate liars and the subject is allegedly “the nature of truth itself” as it applies to US national politics, makes it very poor journalism.
“It’s not a good piece of writing at all. Whatever the intention of the author, ”
The author notes that stenography is not journalism but this line is rather Freudian.
So a politician is respected because she has “some regard for the truth”.
Obviously she’ll only lie on small matters and tell the truth when it counts …
I think the author knows something is not right but he’s comforted by respected politicians who have some regard for the truth.
You can’t be this stupid, nuf said.
Nicholas Kristof did not write this article on the Intercept. But Nicholas Kristof did make the claim you italicized.
It’s not on Mattathius Schwartz to defend or criticize this remark. He just included it as a way of introducing us to the claims of the laughable Mr. Kristof.
So what are you complaining about exactly?
“So what are you complaining about exactly?”
I have read the piece several times now and it is clumsy in its awareness of something horribly wrong.
others have noted this line should read something like
not unless Clinton can differentiate herself from the status of Secretary of Lies.
Clinton’s involvement in the attack on Libya is little different than GWB selling us on Iraq. It is quite recent yet the author looks back to Bush. (away from Clinton).
Excuse me, but where in this article did the author imply that Hillary Clinton is NOT a liar?
“Those who are calling Trump out as a liar are right. He is a liar”
No comparable statement about Hillary was made, thus implying she is not a liar.
I don’t think it was a coincidence that he also referred to “fact checkers” who think Hillary is like Honest Abe either, but that’s just icing on the cake.
I believe you are being too generous in assuming he wasn’t implying exactly that, and that you are assuming a lack of bias despite the authors record here.
“No comparable statement about Hillary was made, thus implying she is not a liar.”
AUUUUUUUUGGGGHHHH!
NO. I do not honor your binary thinking.
Also, what makes you think I even care who the author supports? This is the death of the mind right here. Partisan bullshit. Fuck that crap. Fuck all election year stupidity.
“No comparable statement about Hillary was made, thus implying she is not a liar.”
AUUUUUUUUGGGGHHHH!
Vic, it IS painful. My long ago college logic teacher would flunk altone for writing that. Then again, not everyone takes a logic class.
You know I’m not happy about it, but the current mainstream narrative is that voters face a binary choice… as the exclusion of other candidates from the debate stage demonstrates and the way third party voters are cast as Trump supporters.
The title suggests the article is a look at the historical record of lying by our politicians compared to what Trump is doing.
In the context of that narrative, excluding the only other person on the debate stage from scrutiny despite Hillary’s readily available record of lying jumps out as an obvious and intentional omission to me. I’m not sure how my criticism of partisan bullshit and election year stupidity is in your mind partisan bullshit and election year stupidity.
The authors very short track record here is relevant due to his obvious preference for Hillary and the binary narrative.
@altohone “No comparable statement about Hillary was made, thus implying she is not a liar.”
My college logic teacher would flunk you for that.
How do you think your “college logic teacher” would feel about the logic in the article?
At least you get the impression with Trump that he believes his own words.
Shillary sounds like she’s trying to convince herself as well as the public.
I’m reminded of the 60 Minutes interview in 1990 when Bill, with his shit-eating grin, told America that his marriage to Hillary was strong , despite his wanderings. I said, “What a fucking piece of work she must be to stay with that shit-master.”
My opinion of Hillary ‘What, wipe it with a cloth’ Clinton has only diminished.
Jay Rosen — a smart journalism prof who self-describes as “a close reader and critic of campaign coverage American-style since 1988″ — has a good piece out: Asymmetry between the major parties fries the circuits of the mainstream press.
The Trump phenomenon challenges the corrupt, symbiotic relationship between corporate media and establishment politicians. This relationship has long been deeply harmful to the body politic; if there is one good thing to emerge from the Trump candidacy it’s that he threatens to blow it up. But that would harm Hillary and the establishment-loyalists in both parties, and cost journos their coveted “access” if calling out politicians on their lies became a big thing– so what oh what are they all going to do?
That statement about not being the Encyclopedia Brittanica was a joke; a straw man. Trump’s lies are way below that standard, and are intended to meet the Cokie Roberts dictum of now “being out there”.
There are other things that have not been fact-checked in the past. We heard about Bush’s lies about Iraq WMD, but what about (Bill) Clinton’s lies? He was saying the same things in 1998 (around the time of his impeachment), and as Duelfer, Kay and others documented, Iraq’s WMD were destroyed by then. (It doesn’t help that Clinton cited Hussein Kamil as evidence when Kamil told the UN and CNN that said WMD were destroyed.)
Of course, the media are more than willing to spread their own lies, or at least engage in wild speculation. One example is the recent Bloomberg reporter asking Clinton if she felt that Russia was behind the New York/New Jersey bombings, or the recent news story saying that a Russia-linked hacker group (despite their website being registered in France) were the ones behind IS’s hacking arm, based solely on the word of GCHQ/the Chindits.
The saddest part is that even the fact checking websites like Snopes and Politifact have become biased shills. There are instances of two candidates making the exact same statement and getting different ratings.
Care to show us the example of two of the same claims being rated differently?
Politifact is imperfect like everything else (except Trump), but the best available
Who is worser for our countries. Trumer or Temp? It´s too difficult this choice. The truth is that both of them are much more than a tragedy, they can take us to the hell.
Unmentioned in this article: the fact that Hillary Clinton is a career pathological ljar herself.
So true!!– but the difference between her and Trump is –is that she lies in an “acceptable fashion”.
Her way of lying is the political beltway elite method– obfuscate, platitude things away, ignore the question etc. , get someone else to do your dirty work and talk tough–keep those hands clean!, not the tough developer world of NYC- where you clearly wing it and bullshit and push your way through.
The court jesters (i.e. the MSM) can’t STAND Trumps way– too low brow . You can see that view coming through as contempt for him. Thanks for making very clear the hypocrisy of Kristoff(who I have personally boycotted for YEARS)– talk about bourgeois– he takes the cake (so to speak)
She lies for Zion,who own all the media.
Trump tells truths they hate,hence their total opposition.
Simple as pie.
American Circus presents the two most popular clowns: Trumpkostzky and Clinton the Liar. Enjoy the show to night.
Once we face up to the actual truth: this whole process is bullshit from top to bottom, we can see it for what it is. It is a carnival of lies aimed at conning people into believing that some person sitting in an office in DC is going to solve their problems. Neither party ever really cared about the poor – nor will they ever.
They will continue to do what they have been doing since the inception of the republic: protect with tooth and nail the interests of the powerful and the owners of capital.
Clearly Trump is dangerous, more so than Clinton, only because while she represents the status quo, he represents a return to feudalism. Change in reverse.
The real question we should all be asking ourselves is why we still waste time believing any of it. Clearly we are not thinking clearly.
It is easy to understand why the MSM are ganging up on Trump: he is an outsider, and although his values correspond nicely with those of the0. 1%, they have a problem with him: he wants it all for himself, wants to turn the 0.1% into the 0.000000001%, and they fear being left out. Nothing like greed to motivate US politics and “journalism”!
As for the debates, they have been a sham for quite some time. It is interesting to recall the devolution of the concept from the time when the League of Women Voters ran it, then disassociated themselves from it when the two branches of the Party started seriously interfering with the rights of moderators to ask whatever questions they though fit to ask, to the situation we have today, in which the debates are run by a corporation that is owned by the two branches of the Party. The Party sets the rules for how the debates are conducted and what may be asked. They will not tolerate fact checking because it is harmful to both of their candidates. They maintain a transparent facade about the debates being open by setting thresholds for third parties that are set so that none can qualify. Believe me, if Gary and Jill were polling at 15% the threshold would be set higher. The entire system underlying the debates is a paradigm for how the rules are made in the US.
To talk about “the growing sense that the country is run by an elite network of self-dealing oligarchs” with reference to Trump is an absurd insanity, since he has no intention to alleviate the problem, but simply wishes to become part of it.
Meanwhile Forbes, WSJ, etc. run pieces informing folks that: no fortune 100 CEOS are backing DJT.
Are they or aren’t they? This is the tuff spot on politics today; who do you trust to tell you the truth?
I’m sure the headline has a some kind of net effect.
Back in the day, the Federalists and anti-Feds were concerned w/ a bunch of stuff; one of them may have been rich running for office.
All it says is that those people are not complete idiots. It tells us nothing about the hypocrisy of basing a campaign on attracting anti-establishment sentiments, while craving recognition and acceptance by that same group of people.
Trump need be evaluated by his statements and by the opinions he represents, not by his demagogues stance about elites – demagogues both for its lies as for his will to belong, not dismantle.
So? Don’t they all? And what is the Clinton Foundation about then? To do good in the world?? LOL!!
Remember HRC said they were bankrupt— hmmm sound like someone wanting to do good in the world for others or herself? My southern US friends (democrats) have told me for YEARS that is exactly what the Clintons have craved– legitimacy in the 1%
The only difference between HRC and Trump is one is more honest about it. And yes its not HRC.
Trump has based his entire campaign on the notion of attacking the elite, the political establishment; and this you call “more honest”? Seriously?
So attacking a bunch of serial lying warmongering ziowhores is dishonest?
The funniest part about the mainstream media’s sudden interest in telling the truth is the calls for fact-checking during the debate.
Right, right, as if that wouldn’t hurt Hillary Clinton as much as it would hurt Donald Trump. The minute the email scandal popped up—which it will, either because Trump raises it or the moderator does—tens of millions of people would be reminded that Clinton has lied about it from the very beginning.
Trump certainly lies MORE, but he lies about things he said while running for public office and things he did while a private citizen. Clinton lies frequently about things she said and did while (nominally) working for the public, which significantly increases the damage of those lies in the eyes of Americans, as it should.
Exactly– well said! They are both liars they just do it differently.
Here is a comparative sampling of Clinton’s lies vs Trumps. They are both liers, but Trump is far in the lead.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/lists/people/comparing-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-truth-o-met/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jb0vpAA3s8
It’s Giant Douche Vs. Turd Sandwich. The Showdown
“… not unless Clinton can differentiate herself from the status quo.”
I’d say not unless she can demonstrate that she’s any more truthful than Trump is, but there’s no way for her to do that without blowing up the whole campaign. She doesn’t lie as brazenly and stupidly as Trump, doesn’t make nearly as many factually disprovable claims, but still most of what she says publicly is bullshit. And that was true of all the Democrats and Republicans in the primaries (save possibly Sanders), as it’s true of most of our national two-party politics. All that crap about fighting for the middle class, the terrible threats we face overseas, not letting the elites get their way, etc. You can’t call any of that theater truthful. That’s why Clinton can’t get any traction by calling out Trump’s nonsense. And I can see how the media would have a problem addressing the lies after they’ve been spreading the bullshit across the landscape for decades now. Watch the debate and its media coverage tonight and you’ll choke on it.
They violently agree with each other on Israel. Why don’t they discuss why that is so important to the American way of life?
“Why don’t they discuss why [Israel] is so important to the American way of life?”
That would be antisemitic, don’t you know.
The Jewish state; just what the world needed, a theological nation, run by nut-jobs, with nukes.
If you don’t give us $38 billion we might use one.
The only difference is Trump thinks Americans more important than Israel,while she thinks Israel more important.
How the hell do racist scumbags have any relation to the Constitutional USA,and our way of life,other than as bad acts to follow?
Clinton would love to put the emphasis on Trump’s lies, it would leave hers on the back burner. It won’t happen, she’s got too many to juggle with.