David Leonhardt of the New York Times has evidently lost his patience with the lies that are coming out the president’s mouth and the mouths of his spokespeople and surrogates, and so he’s abandoning his reservations about applying the ‘L’ word to politicians who tell big gigantic consequential whoppers.
…the current president of the United States lies. He lies in ways that no American politician ever has before. He has lied about — among many other things — Obama’s birthplace, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Sept. 11, the Iraq War, ISIS, NATO, military veterans, Mexican immigrants, Muslim immigrants, anti-Semitic attacks, the unemployment rate, the murder rate, the Electoral College, voter fraud and his groping of women.
He tells so many untruths that it’s time to leave behind the textual parsing over which are unwitting and which are deliberate — as well as the condescending notion that most of Trump’s supporters enjoy his lies…
…As Comey was acknowledging on Monday that the F.B.I. was investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, Trump was lying about it. From both his personal Twitter account and the White House account, he told untruths.
A few hours later, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, went before the cameras and lied about the closeness between Trump and various aides who have documented Russian ties. Do you remember Paul Manafort, the chairman of Trump’s campaign, who ran the crucial delegate-counting operation? Spicer said Manafort had a “very limited role” in said campaign.
The big question now is not what Trump and the White House are saying about the Russia story. They will evidently say anything. The questions are what really happened and who can uncover the truth.
It’s refreshing to see a New York Times opinion writer state things so frankly, but it’s also a disturbing sign of the times we’re living through. No one seems to know quite what to do when the country is being run by people who will lie so brazenly and unapologetically that there seems to almost no agreed facts upon which you can have a conversation.
The FBI confirms that they’ve been running a counterintelligence investigation on the Trump campaign’s possible coordination with Russian hackers and senior Russian intelligence officers since last July. We know that some of the main subjects of that investigation are Michael Flynn, Carter Page, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort. The administration says that Flynn was merely a volunteer on the campaign, rather than the man they installed as our National Security Adviser. Roger Stone and Carter Page were just “hangers-on” rather than active participants who traveled tirelessly to help the campaign. Manafort had a limited role for a limited time despite being the chairman of the campaign who herded the delegates for Trump at the convention. Three of these men have already been fired after their too-close connections to the Russians were exposed.
The FBI Director says that Trump’s claim that President Obama ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower has no basis in fact and that the Russians absolutely did influence the election and that they clearly preferred that Trump win in large part because of Putin’s dislike of Clinton. National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers says he agrees with the British that it was “utterly ridiculous” for the White House to allege they had spied on Trump Tower at Obama’s behest. The president insists that Comey and Rogers testified to roughly the opposite.
If you want to know what the intelligence community really thinks, you should go to NSA Director Rogers’s deputy, who is retiring shortly and seems to have less reticence about telling it like it is than his boss.
Allegations from the United States that British spy agency GCHQ snooped on Donald Trump during his election campaign are “arrant nonsense,” the deputy head of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) said in an interview on Saturday.
President Trump has stood by unproven claims that the Obama administration tapped his phones during the 2016 White House race. On Thursday his spokesman cited a media report that Britain’s GCHQ was behind the surveillance.
Richard Ledgett, deputy director of the NSA, told BBC News the idea that Britain had a hand in spying on Trump was “just crazy.”
“It belies a complete lack of understanding of how the relationship works between the intel community agencies, it completely ignores the political reality of ‘would the UK government agree to do that?’” Ledgett said.
There would be no advantage for Britain’s government in spying on Trump, given the potential cost, he said.
“It would be epically stupid,” said Ledgett, who is due to retire shortly.
The core of the problem here is that one side is conversing normally and the other side is responding with “ridiculous nonsense.”
And it isn’t just the Russia question. It’s everything. When the White House determines that health care reforms will cost 26 million people their health insurance, the administration says that they think their bill will actually cover more people.
You can’t even argue with that level of dishonesty. All you can do is step back and try to draw a breath.
“No one seems to know quite what to do when the country is being run by people who will lie so brazenly and unapologetically that there seems to almost no agreed facts upon which you can have a conversation.”
This assumes a majority of us are not ok with the lying. But about half of us are — or have been. (OK, not half, but close.) Only when his approval gets and stays low for a little while will our choices emerge. Until then, this is just politics…
Good to see recent polling suggesting that at least some of us are changing our minds about Drumpf and his GOP pals…
It’s not a matter of being ok with lying, it is a matter of trusting the Conservative Media Complex and disregarding the NYT, WashPO, CNN. etc. It is disagreeing about who it is that lies, and there is no cure for gullibility.
I don’t know if you should call this gullibility. I have friends on Facebook who I thought were reasonable rational people. I worked many years with a few of them. I can tell you they believe it all, starting with Hillary’s e mail and the idea she should be locked up. There is nothing, I mean nothing you can say to change their minds and a few of us have, with links and logic and pleading. The only “cure” is to disengage to retain your sanity. Besides we get tired of being cussed at and called fools.
So, yeah, it is damn well time to call them liars.
Both sides and the middle as well.
That’s right…cabron!!!
Yup.
Cabrones todos!!!
Booman writes:
Well…yes.
But…
When you step back and try to draw a clean breath, you will find that the air has been so polluted previously by PermaGov liars from the same sources that are now supposedly telling the truth, that almost all of the as yet un-lied oxygen in the room has already been transformed into CO2 by the prosecutors of this particular little package.
I am sorry…I believe none of it.
Not Trump, not the NSA, not Obama, not the FBI, not the CIA, not GCHQ, not the other Brits, not Russia, not Putin…none of it.
All lies all the time, and may the best liars win.
At least they’ll be the smartest cabrones in the room.
What joke this country has become.
Sigh…
Later…
ASG
This is just disguised both-siderism.
You win a Broder Award.
Nothing disguised about it.
No, Booman.
It is neither-siderism.
And is is not “disguised.”
Just disgusted.
Truly disgusted with our so-called choices.
AG
It’s not that both sides are equally bad, it’s that neither side is significantly better.
An unfalsifiable article of faith.
Sorry, Steggies. Too much parsing.
Rotten is rotten.
Eat it and die.
The only real difference?
A slow or a fast death.
AG
Life is a slow death, AG. Murder is a fast one. I guess that’s ‘too much parsing’ again, but the world requires parsing at a more complex level than ‘they’re all bums!’
What bugs me is that I often enjoy your lively contributions, but you’ve trapped yourself in an understanding so simplistic, and nihilistic, that it’s made you boring. That’s a real pity.
Are you bored by what is happening in front of your eyes, Steggies?
Two sets of criminals…three if you count the PetrmaGov as two competing criminal families…vying for control over your life and every else’s as well?
Because that is exactly what is happening.
Do you find survival “boring?”
I don’t.
AG
But he said it in Spanish so it’s cool.
the troll-rating wars need to stop. I can’t take the whining about it, first of all. But secondly, if I’ve allowed someone to be on this site for a decade, then they’re not a troll. So, except in extreme circumstances, don’t go mega-trolling longtime users because you’re annoyed or don’t like their arguments.
We have a ‘2’ warning rating if you think someone is being abusive or a prick, and we have the lower ratings for clearing out spam and identifying and spiking malicious intruders.
Only if you think someone is worthy of banning should you be dishing out donuts.
And if someone does troll rate you. for fuck’s sake don’t write a whining diary about it.
Lemme translate this:
“You kids don’t make me come back there!”
I am going into our Democratic Party congressional rep’s office today here in WA County Oregon. We are delivering a letter on Russia’s involvement in our political system and collaboration with Trump admin. We are telling her we want an independent prosecutor to investigate.
Given the one-sided dynamic you describe, can you and others here offer up some ideas on what else we might ask of our rep (Bonamici) that might help change the dynamic?
We meet in 2 hours….
Is she Catholic? (ISounds like an Italian name…)
I initially read your first line as “I am going into our Democratic Party confessional rep’s office today here in WA County Oregon.” (I have an excuse…I am practicing a very effortful wind instrument at the moment. Oxygen deprivation and/or overabundance do strange things sometimes.)
If she is Catholic and she was in any way part of the execrable Dump Bernie movement that was spearheaded by the DNC last year…even in a passive sense…maybe you should suggest to her that she should go to confession and get some absolution first.
Then…as penance…she should call up the highest ranking DemRat she knows and tell him or her to either cooperate in an effort to not only appoint and independent prosecutor but watchdog that person’s ass like a sonofabitch until some close version of the truth appears.
Or…you could give her a nice letter which will disappear into the wastebasket of one or another Dem functionary as soon as you are safely out of the building.
Your choice…
ASG
sorry i couldn’t reply in time. I’m interested to hear what happened, hope you’ll post a comment at least about the meeting.
I always thought during the Bush years that it would have been nice to watch a press conference and when whoever was giving the press conference (preferably W) that someone in the press corps would break into hysterical laughter and add after the laughter, “that’s a good one, that is really a good one.” And, if the rest of the press corps had any integrity, they would have joined in with more laughter until whoever was doing the lying walked away. This is good time to try it.