It’s Wednesday, August 29th, 2018…but before we begin, writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty speaks irrefutable truth to Paul Krugman’s hyperbolic hogwash:
President Trump: The Fairest ‘Authoritarian Dictator’ of Them All
Could We Keep Our Criticisms of the President Tied to Reality?
Paul Krugman: “If Republicans retain control of both houses of Congress in November, we will become another Poland or Hungary faster than you can imagine.” He means “Poland or Hungary” in the sense of being undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian, and beyond the rule of law, not in the sense of hearty foods.
Krugman writes that the ruling parties in those countries have “destroyed the independence of the judiciary, suppressed freedom of the press, institutionalized large-scale corruption and effectively delegitimized dissent…we’re suffering from the same disease — white nationalism run wild — that has already effectively killed democracy in some other Western nations. And we’re very, very close to the point of no return.”
Does it seem like Trump has “destroyed the independence of the judiciary”? Do authoritarian dictators often find their proposals halted by the judicial branch, on issues such as a excluding transgender individuals from military service, limiting the power of federal worker unions, ending DACA, stopping grants to sanctuary cities, or even blocking Twitter users? Whether you agree with these decisions or not, don’t they dispel Krugman’s claim that the judiciary is losing its independence under Trump?
“Appointing judges that I don’t like and disagree with” is not a synonym for “destroying the independence of the judiciary.”
Does it seem as if Trump has “suppressed freedom of the press”? Have you noticed any lack of criticism of Trump in the media? Does it seem as if people are afraid to publicly criticize the president? If you pick up the Washington Post or New York Times, aren’t the pages full of articles lambasting the administration for all kinds of sins and foolishness, both real and imagined?
One can argue that Trump “institutionalized large-scale corruption” if one completely averts one’s eyes from the scandals of the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton, and/or ignores the fact that the Trump administration’s worst offenders…tend to resign in disgrace after a series of humiliating headlines. Would I prefer that the wild spending habits and shamelessness of Tom Price, David Shulkin, and Scott Pruitt never happened? Sure. But they all paid a price in losing their jobs. Perhaps not enough of a price, but it demonstrates that at least in some circumstances — such as generating enough bad headlines that even this nearly shameless president gets irritated — “large-scale corruption” is not institutionalized but shown the door.
Does it seem as if Trump has “effectively delegitimized dissent”? Trump’s job approval has consistently been in the low 50s in public polling. Do authoritarian dictators have their campaign managers convicted by juries? Do authoritarian dictators have their personal lawyers raided by the FBI, get indicted on multiple charges, and plead guilty to serious crimes?
Do authoritarian dictators often deal with a special counsel investigating their election campaign, potential ties to foreign governments, alleged payments to mistresses, and so on?
Do authoritarian dictators have their major legislative priorities, like a full repeal of Obamacare or border-wall funding, denied to them by the national legislature? Do authoritarian dictators find themselves frustrated by a filibuster?
Trump generates plenty of his own genuine scandals, problems, and embarrassments. Is it too much to ask that the public discussion stick to that, and not play-acting “the Resistance” against a fascist regime?
Krugman is proof expertise in one area (in his case, economics…
…which assumes a Nobel Prize in that field means far more than its peace equivalent) does not translate to even minimal mastery in another.
Now, since we’re on the subject of Progressive propaganda masquerading as unbiased reporting, here’s a special fake news edition of The Gouge!
First up, in the best tradition of Dan Rather, Brian Williams…
…and other proponents of political policies posing as reporters, here’s the latest unsupported rumor and innuendo from the cable news network which, as of late, has most consistently put the “fake” in fake news:
“Lanny Davis, the high-powered attorney of President Trump’s longtime “fixer”-turned-foe Michael Cohen, admitted Monday he was an anonymous source for a bombshell CNN story on the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting — after The Washington Post outed him as a source for its own story.
Davis told BuzzFeed News Monday night he regretted being the anonymous source as well as his subsequent denial. The CNN story, which cited multiple “sources,” claimed Cohen said President Trump knew in advance about the Trump Tower sit-down. “I made a mistake,” Davis told BuzzFeed.
CNN, which has stood by its reporting, did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment…”
As the Daily Beast notes, Davis insists he didn’t lie, but rather “unintentionally misspoke.” We don’t know which is worse: that Davis would believe anyone would buy his excuse; or, despite rivaling his close confidants the Clintons as a serial liar, he will continue to be regularly featured on CNN, MSDNC and Hannity as a source deserving consideration?!?
Next up, since, with apologies to Samuel Langhorne Clemens, there are lies, damned lies…then there’s the MSM…we call your attention to a couple of related items.
First, as featured in the German edition of The Local, Jörg Luyken wonders…
“...On August 16th, its [ADR’s] Tagesschau evening news bulletin chose not to mention a grim murder in the central German town of Offenbach. A doctor had been stabbed to death in his practise that morning with no obvious explanation for why. Hours later police arrested his suspected murderer – an asylum seeker from Somalia who arrived in the country in late 2015.
After receiving complaints from the public for its decision not to cover the crime, Tagesschau’s editor-in-chief Kai Gniffke publicly justified the decision. He explained that Tagesschau only reports on news that has “a societal, national or international relevance – things that are meaningful to the majority of the 83 million Germans.”
Murders committed by refugees would only be relevant to the whole country “if refugees are over-proportionally likely to be involved in committing homicide,” he argued. “As far as we can tell from our research, this isn’t the case – therefore we decided not to report on the crime.”
There is a clear logic here: refugees are no more likely to murder than other members of society, therefore any national media outlet that reports on murders by refugees while ignoring other murders is giving the false impression that refugees are more dangerous than Germans.
So is that it settled? Well, no. A closer look at the national crime statistics shows that Mr. Gniffke’s conclusion is fairly wide of the mark…”
As an aside, while we’re no fan of public broadcasting, we have to grant NPR its due for accurately reporting the facts on a storyline we know they were aching to be true:
“How many times per year does a gun go off in an American school? We should know. But we don’t.
This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, “nearly 240 schools…reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” The number is far higher than most other estimates.
But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened…”
“In their concern that all Hispanics who are in the country unlawfully as well as the U.S. Hispanic community as a whole will be tainted by the revelation that Mollie Tibbetts’ murderer was a Mexican national who was unlawfully present in the United States, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists has issued a rather disturbing call for censorship, calling on media outlets to withhold referencing “race and citizenship status” when reporting on suspects involved in crimes.
“While this information from these trusted news sources may be true, this is an inaccurate representation of an entire community,” the NAHJ declared, as if the public is not capable of distinguishing the difference between “bad hombres” who commit crimes and the vast majority of “good hombres” who do not, much less understand that violent criminals make up a small minority of every ethnic, racial and legal status component of U.S. society.
However, the fact of self-confessed murderer Cristhian Bahena Rivera’s illegal status in the country is indeed germane to the ongoing U.S. public debate over the nation’s current immigration laws, policies and enforcement matters.
As the NAHJ sees it, “the subject’s immigration status is irrelevant to the crime that was committed and by referencing the two in conjunction, the press is condemning an entire community of crimes that an individual committed.”The reality is that in this case the subject’s immigration status is relevant to the crime that was committed, since had Bahena Rivera not been allowed to live illegally in the country in the first place, he simply would not have had the opportunity this summer to kill Mollie Tibbetts.Tibbetts had only one life, which was snuffed out by Bahena Rivera.
The NAHJ is also engaging in misdirection by affirming that ‘the race and immigration status of these individual’s (sic) do not play a role in the motivation for the crime and is irrelevant for the part of their identity to be tied in with the crime committed.” No one has suggested that ethnicity and immigration status are themselves proof evident of criminal intent. But immigration status is absolutely germane to coverage of these stories, just as it was germane to report that several of the 9/11 terrorists overstayed their visas…”
And as today’s edition of the Environmental Moment demonstrates, The Left’s concerted effort to censor the free flow of information isn’t limited to Google’s biased search results, let alone refusing to report the immigration status of murderers:
“A bit ago, I wrote here that it is a huge advocacy mistake for global-warming alarmists to refuse debating their opponents. After all, if global catastrophe is really coming, one should accept any and every opportunity to persuade doubters.
Now, global-warming public intellectuals have warned the media that if they allow skeptics to have a voice in stories, they will boycott giving comment. From the open letter appearing in the Guardian:
Balance implies equal weight. But this then creates a false equivalence between an overwhelming scientific consensus and a lobby, heavily funded by vested interests, that exists simply to sow doubt to serve those interests. Yes, of course scientific consensus should be open to challenge — but with better science, not with spin and nonsense. We urgently need to move the debate on to how we address the causes and effects of dangerous climate change — because that’s where common sense demands our attention and efforts should be.
Fringe voices will protest about “free speech”. No one should prevent them from expressing their views, whether held cynically or misguidedly. However, no one is obliged to provide them with a platform, much less to appear alongside them to give the misleading impression that there is something substantive to debate.
This “We are too right to debate” variation is also folly. Pressuring media to only present the alarmists’ side of the case — which already happens much if not most of the time anyway — will not change minds. To the contrary, it will raise the acute suspicion that they are silencing dissenters because their their hypotheses are actually very debatable and they can’t stand the contest…”
But as this forward from Jeff Foutch and Watts Up With That demonstrates, the presentation of fake news as fact isn’t limited to representatives of the Fourth Estate, as NASA presents…
“…My wife and I spent over ten years on the island of Hispaniola, where both Haiti and the Dominican Republic are found. I am personally very familiar with their agricultural system having organized several humanitarian projects that furthered agriculture there.
I was surprised by the image presented by NASA:
In the image above, splashed across the front pages of the world yesterday, we see, circled in white, Hispaniola, covered in red — indicating fires (day and night) on 22 August 2018.
Always alert to bias in journalism covering science issues, I took a bit of a closer look…literally…
In a close up of the island of Hispaniola shows how many fires and the extent of the fires — I’ve circled every one in white — had I not, they would be too small to see.
It is August and time to burn and then harvest the sugarcane fields….the pungent smoke will be rising from fields all over the DR and blowing on the gentle trade winds wafting a distinctive burnt sugar aroma across the island.
“Sugarcane is harvested by hand and mechanically. Hand harvesting accounts for more than half of production, and is dominant in the developing world. In hand harvesting, the field is first set on fire. The fire burns dry leaves, and chases away or kills any lurking venomous snakes, without harming the stalks and roots. Harvesters then cut the cane just above ground-level using cane knives or machetes.”
In an earlier career, I designed and built web sites for major sporting events and by necessity learned the fine art of photoshopping to improve the quality and appearance of images on the web. One problem almost impossible to overcome, especially back in the 1990s, is “monitor pixel size” — the size of individual dots on your computer monitor. Monitors are vastly improved today, but the problem persists for web graphics. This is the true source of A World On Fire.
When NASA wants to present an image of where the fires are, each fire must be at least one pixel in size — you can’t really make the data point any smaller. When presenting the whole world view, each little burning field requires one bright red pixel. Thus, the three dozen burning cane fields in the Dominican Republic, when shown on the world map, cover the entire island of Hispaniola.
It’s all in the pixels.
And the politics!
Here’s the juice: Donald Trump isn’t an answer, rather he’s an inevitable response. The inevitable response of everyday Americans who, while perhaps lacking the advanced degrees and Nobel Prize-approbation of Paul Krugman or the other educated idiots populating The Left, nonetheless are possessed of the common sense to demand Progressives…
…particularly when their bias is so blatantly barefaced.
Finally, we’ll call it a day with The Lighter Side:
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