Republicans and right wing media normally do soundbites and branding better than anyone but this might one of the best of them all.
#IANWAE
The Fake News Media, working in close conjunction with Big Tech and the Radical Left Democrats, is doing everything they can to perpetuate the term “The Big Lie” when speaking of 2020 Presidential Election Fraud. They are right in that the 2020 Presidential Election was a Big Lie, but not in the way they mean. The 2020 Election, which didn’t even have Legislative approvals from many States (which is required under the U.S. Constitution), and was also otherwise corrupt, was indeed The Big Lie. So when they try to sell the American people the term The Big Lie, which they do in unison and coordination, think of it instead as the greatest Fraud in the history of our Country! An even greater Hoax than Russia, Russia, Russia, Mueller, Mueller, Mueller, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, or any of the other many scams the Democrats pulled!
Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful, light and I think you said that hasn’t been checked and you’re going to test it. and then I said suppose you bring the light inside the body which you can do either through the skin or in some other way and I think you said you’re going to test that too. sounds interesting (doctor says something). then I see the disinfectant knocks out in a minute and there is a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because as you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs it would be interesting to check that use medical doctors but it sounds interesting to me….
… I once mentioned that maybe it does go away with heat and light and people don’t like that statement very much because the fake news didn’t like it at all I just threw it out as a suggestion and it seems like that’s the case
We saw it with David Norris here in Ireland in 2011, when the Irish mainstream media took a letter of clemency the progressive candidate wrote 10 years previously as an excuse to associate his name with the word “pedophilia” on virtually a daily basis until he withdrew from the campaign.
It happened to Jeremy Corbyn from the moment he became the Leader of the Labour Party in 2015, with the tactics remaining more or less the same (although much of the attacks came from within his own party) although you can replace the word “pedophilia” with “Antisemitism” and it contributed greatly to an embarrassing election defeat last December
Now with Bernie Sanders showing himself to be leading the polls in Iowa, CNN is doing it to him, just a day before the last Democratic debate before the first caucus takes place.
The stakes were high when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren met at Warren’s apartment in Washington, DC, one evening in December 2018. The longtime friends knew that they could soon be running against each other for president. The two agreed that if they ultimately faced each other as presidential candidates, they should remain civil and avoid attacking one another, so as not to hurt the progressive movement. They also discussed how to best take on President Donald Trump, and Warren laid out two main reasons she believed she would be a strong candidate: She could make a robust argument about the economy and earn broad support from female voters. Sanders responded that he did not believe a woman could win.
The key words in the above quote are in the headline – “sources say”. To be fair to CNN, they at least tack them on, although being at the end, they could well be ignored. There is certainly nothing in the opening passage of the article itself to suggest that they are second (third? fourth?) hand reports of a private conversation.
As you can see, MJ Lee categorically states at the end of the quote : “Sanders responded that he did not believe a woman could win.”
They do include a response from Sanders himself, albeit halfway down the page :
“It’s sad that, three weeks before the Iowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff who weren’t in the room are lying about what happened. What I did say that night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could. Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course! After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016.”
They do walk it back slightly today, quoting Warren herself who claims : ‘I thought a woman could win; he disagreed‘. An important distinction, yes? That immediately throws into question how this exchange was interpreted. HOW did he show his disagreement, Senator Warren? Did he actually say “I disagree”? Did he actually say something along the lines of “I do not believe a woman can win”? Or, as I suspect, did he happen to be shaking his head right after you said “I think a woman can win”? That COULD suggest disagreement, but it could also suggest he was shaking his head while forming his thoughts. We don’t know.
Whatever the strategically planted attempts to be ‘fair’, there is no doubt that the overwhelming slant of these articles is that there is a suggestion that “misogynist” is to Sanders as “antisemite” supposedly was to Corbyn (you hear nothing about it now he has said he’s stepping down as leader) and “pedophile” supposedly was to Norris (he’s still a Senator!).
The Young Turks, who are Bernie backers, offer this take on the story :
All of this leads me to believe that Bernie shouldn’t be the nominee, but only because I fear that if that were the case, the US corporate media would then consider Trump the lesser of two “evils” and continue to give the president’s rhetoric infinite free air time much as they did in 2016.
Since I primarily want that orange moron out of the White House, and it seems that the Democrat darling is Joe Biden, I would probably be supportive although I reckon it would be a smart move to nominate Warren as his VP, while publicly promising to adopt some of the progressive platform in the first term as a sweetener.
I would be satisfied with such an arrangement, although my ideal choice would have to be Bernie. It’s just a shame that the only reason not to have a Progressive government is that the corporations wouldn’t be agreeable. Even if it’s not in my lifetime, I hope a day will come whereby their objections won’t matter. JLP
Yes, we know we’ve been out of commission for a while – there are good reasons for that but we choose to invoke Executive Privilege when it comes to posting them…
Whether or not Donald Trump personally colluded with the Russian government in their interference with the 2016 US Presidential election, the fact that he has done nothing to stop them doing it again since arriving in the White House is greatly worrying to say the least.
Article by Jan Wolf in Reuters on Friday, February 16, 2018
“While they went to great pains to say they are not indicting any Americans today, if I was an American and I did cooperate with Russians I would be extremely frightened today,” said former federal prosecutor Patrick Cotter.
The White House took a different view, issuing a statement saying that Trump had been briefed on the matter and was “glad to see the Special Counsel’s investigation further indicates there was NO COLLUSION between the Trump campaign and Russia.”
Rod Rosenstein looked so scared making his announcement you’d swear Trump was standing right in front of him. I suppose you have to hand it to the President for at least being that intimidating.
Knowing full well his boss wants to fire him, Rosenstein had the unenviable task of explaining the latest move by the Mueller investigation to the media, namely that Russian citizens were being indicted for operating things such as ‘troll farms’ to sway public opinion.
When I was growing up I seem to recall Russia as being an enemy of the USA. I’m not saying I was ever happy about that state of affairs, but one thing I know for sure is that it was the Republican Party pushing that line more than any other.
Now we have concrete evidence that they [and by they we can only assume the orders came from the very top] have been meddling in the democratic processes of supposedly ‘the land of the free and home of the brave’, we have to assume that the priority of the US government is to punish them and make sure it doesn’t happen again?
Of course not. All Trump cares about is himself. Is that just my opinion or do I have proof? What say we examine his first tweet since the announcement of the Russian indictments…
Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong – no collusion!
Great, Mr President – so it looks like you’re in the clear [even though the announcement proves nothing of the sort]. Glad to see you have your priorities straight. Who needs to worry about the Russians having an ‘anti-US campaign’ anyway? Not the President, that’s for sure. No doubt if challenged you’ll point to the fact that Obama did nothing either, even though he did and at the time you said it was bullshit.
As always, we can only scratch our heads as we try to figure out the mental capacity of, not the President himself, but the citizens of Utrumpia who swallow his every word hook, line and stinker. That’s not a typo. JLP
On Tuesday evening the Vice Presidential candidates in the US election, Senator Tim Kaine (D) and Governor Mike Pence (R) squared off in a debate at Longwood University in Virginia, which is curiously Kaine’s home state.
There are two other candidates running for President who are on the ballot in enough states to have a “realistic” chance of winning the election outright – Jill Stein of the Green Party and Gary Johnson of the Libertaians, but their VP choices were excluded from the debate.
For three election cycles up until 1984, the series of debates was organised by the totally non-partisan League of Women Voters but when they started to insist on “third-party candidates” being included in the process, the duopoly of Republicans and Democrats came together and forced them out, setting up instead their own organisation called the Commission for Presidential Debates that has rules which virtually guarantee just the two participants in each debate.
One of our top sources for “non-mainstream” media coverage of US affairs is Democracy Now!, hosted by Amy Goodman which has been running for around 20 years. As the two VP candidates slugged it out during the debate, Goodman had Green Party VP nominee Ajamu Baraka in studio to offer real time responses to the questions as though he were in fact part of the debate. Libertarian nominee William Weld was also invited but apparently they offered no response.
The show recently did something similar for the first Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Secretary Hillary Clinton, with the Green Party’s Jill Stein giving her responses, also in “real time” as the feed from the main debate was paused.
What Baraka proceeds to do is highlight the similarities between the two on-stage combatants, like on the subject of war where both Republicans and Democrats come from a position of war as an inevitable option – he presents the Greens as the party of peace. Whether or not you agree with this stance, true believers in democracy have to appreciate the opportunity to know the option is there on their ballot paper.
Here at FPP we would love to see this method employed during the course of an Irish election campaign given our ever-expanding selection of parties and platforms. We too have a duopoly that very much needs breaking…only in our case they are pretty much indistinguishable from each other in terms of political outlook.
So we’ve finally seen the two candidates on the same stage at the same time – how did they get on?
It’s quite simple…Trump got in some shots and had his opponent under pressure in the early stages but Hillary came storming back, easily got under his skin and forced him into some ramblings which I doubt even he could translate into understandable English now.
But amid all the rhetoric and back-and-forth on tax returns, emails, calling women Miss Piggy and bringing up Bill’s affairs by saying you won’t bring them up, was there much actual talk about, oh I don’t know, what they’d do as President?
Sure, there was a bit about jobs, a bit about trade and a bit about secret plans to beat ISIS, but even then it was more about how bad the opponent was rather than what each candidate would do themselves.
Yet the American mainstream media lapped up the verbal mud wrestling and proceeded to make the focus of the post-game all about “who won”.
A week before the debate,Comcast-owned NBC announced the topics, and one could already tell we weren’t going to be in for a substantive evening: “Achieving prosperity,” “America’s direction” and “securing America.” This generic approach lead to a generic debate that focused mostly on horserace disputes and vague, open-ended questions about taxes and jobs.
What I find amusing is how Americans can be so bent out of shape about their media making it all about personalities when they have over 300 millions people, just two main parties (well actually there’s four but they keep the Greens and Libertarians away from these debates), and election campaigns that last well over a year.
Here in Ireland, with a humble 5 million people, we have an ever-growing amount of political parties and campaigns squeezed into just under a month, so while the “Yanks” have plenty of time to talk about issues and seem to choose not to, here our media has so little time all they get to focus on is what would the inevitable coalition look like after the unnecessarily over-complicated voting process is done.
Democratically held elections for government should be about issues not egos, but as a general public we seem content to have them portrayed like “reality” TV shows.
They say in sporting circles that attack is the best form of defence. In politics, more often than not from the “right”, they tend to take it one step further…not only should you defend yourself by going on the attack, you should also do so by accusing your opponent of doing exactly what it is that you are known to do. Donald Trump has been a master of this in his presidential campaign.
He attacks Hillary on her health…not only in recent days when she actually had some issues in that area, but also well before she was confirmed as the Democratic nominee, giving out about her arriving late on stage when debating Bernie Sanders. Since then there have been a string of ridiculous conspiracy theories from the extreme right suggesting everything from using body doubles to actually having mental problems.
If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency
Next up we have his childish name-calling…a supposedly serious candidate for President resorting to calling his opponent “Crooked Hillary” or “Hillary Rotten Clinton” in numerous speeches.
Well if she’s crooked, Donald, why don’t you show us your tax returns so we can be sure that you aren’t?
My personal favourite has been his attacks on the Clinton Foundation. It ties in to the the “crooked” theme I know, but the persistent questions raised by Trump and his campaign which centred on the charitable organisation so much that you could only assume that the entity known as The Trump Foundation HAD to be beyond reproach. Not the case at all. In fact, if anything, the allegations on his side of the fence are far worse.
And they keep on coming. The Clinton Foundation was accused of accepting charitable donations in return for access to Hillary as Secretary of State. In Trump’s case, at first he was apparently using funds to help Republican politicians’ campaign in order to keep them sweet.
While New York’s attorney general was investigating Trump University in 2014, Donald Trump’s foundation donated $100,000 to a conservative group that sued that same attorney general, according to a Yahoo News report Friday.
It all seems to lead to a simple Rule of Trump – if he accuses you of something, be sure and investigate him for that very same thing…you are bound to strike gold.
Here at FPP, as things stand right now, our plan is not only to vote for Hillary Clinton but also to keep the pressure on her to come good on hers and the DNC’s pledge to adopt at least some policies from the Progressive platform during her administration.
Or to put it another way, we fully acknowledge that whatever we may say against her opponent, she herself is by no means perfect and her biggest pressure points in this campaign have been the seemingly never-ending amount of State Department emails and the suspicions surrounding The Clinton Foundation.
Naturally Donald Trump has been at pains to attack these pressure points, though rarely by being too specific…either he resorts to name-calling like “Crooked Hillary” or “Hillary Rotten Clinton” or he makes vague references to her alleged “terrible crimes”.
Trump has been quite candid in his explanations for why he made so many political contributions to so many candidates and office-holders. “I’ve given to everybody,” he boasted earlier this year. “When I want something I get it. When I call, they kiss my ass. “It’s true. They kiss my ass.”…
…So the question in the Bondi controversy is obvious: was his $25,000 contribution an investment to an official he “needed something from”?
What particularly catches our attention is the contribution in the video from the WaPo’s David Fahrenthold who says that Trump stopped giving his own money to charities, even his own, back in 2008, ironically when Barack Obama was elected. Maybe he was too busy paying people to look into the President’s birth certificate? And maybe it helps explain why he won’t show us his tax returns?
If ever a story invited the saying “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”…
First Person Plural 