The thing about contradictory storylines that can never be made to meet, in any detail, is that Americans today will believe one or the other depending on the color of the hat on their head. There is no convincing anybody who is undyingly loyal and determined in their true beliefs, no set of facts that will change anybody’s mind about these irreconcilable narratives. It’s sad as hell, but there we are.
Every “fact” you can produce to make a persuasive argument is now instantly met with a “counter-fact” from the equally compelling world of “alternative truth.”
It makes people feel good to be right, and, say what you want about him, it’s never been easier to be right than in Donald J. Trump’s America.
There’s been a lot of buzz about Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage, based on hours of recorded interviews with the president and his indispensable minister with many portfolios Jared Kushner. Apparently many inside the White House urged them not to speak to the dogged journalist whose reporting brought Nixon down, but they felt they had nothing to hide and had confidence that they could easily out-maneuver the liberal hack.
On recordings most of us have heard snippets of by now, Mr. Trump candidly tells Woodward, on February 7, more than a month before he ordered the limited national pandemic emergency in mid-March, that he knows how much deadlier than the flu Covid-19 is, five times deadlier, and highly contagious through the air. “But I don’t want to create a panic” says Mr. Trump to Mr. Woodward. This conversation about how deadly this infectious airborne disease was happened in early February, then the president continued to tell the American public that the China Virus, no more serious than the common seasonal flu, was a Democrat HOAX, a made up story to bring him down, and crash the greatest economy America has ever known, to damage him in the upcoming election.
The shocking revelations in Woodward’s book (and shame on him for not reporting these months ago when they happened, another John Bolton… preserving maximum books sales trumps trumping Trump…) will cause no ripples among the die-hard 39% who love Mr. Trump no matter what. The president speaks their language, he’s crude, he’s spicy, sometimes nasty, he honestly tells it like it is, like he believes it is, he’s not afraid to be “politically incorrect,” he’s not a pussy, he may lie, as do we all, but always in the name of a higher Truth.
Let’s take a quick look at a few facts and counter-facts.
Fact: the president’s weeks-long delay in declaring a national emergency when Covid-19 hit, and his failure to use his powers to produce and distribute desperately needed protective gear, cost thousands of American lives.
Counter-fact, this is part of a lying hoax, fake news, a false narrative spread by traitors wildly determined to hurt Trump (and who also, by the way, did nothing to stop the spread of the virus). The US did a great job fighting the pandemic, better than almost any other country in the world. They have statistics to back this up, too, you can ask the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, he went to Yale and Harvard and has all the granular numbers for you science worshipping pinheads.
If you’re following the president’s current story, we can all relax about this pandemic, because we’ll have a patented American Covid-19 vaccine in record time, an amazing achievement only possible because the president is the greatest man in history. Problem solved, by Election Day, even though it’s already not a problem, since the administration took such strong, decisive early action to defeat the China Virus — the same China which is illegally helping Joe Biden, by the way, along with Iran.
Or, as government epidemiologists repeatedly tell us, as well as several of our largest drug companies, in an unusual show of noncompetitive unity, it’s almost impossible that sufficient tests will be done to ensure the safety of any effective vaccine to have it ready for use before Election Day, as the president keeps promising. Also, Russian electoral interference on behalf of Trump in 2016 and 2020 is well documented by numerous investigations, including a Republican-chaired Senate investigation; China’s and Iran’s efforts to hurt Trump in 2020 are not nearly as well-established.
Counterfact: the president’s first national security advisor, Mike Flynn, fired by the president for lying to the Vice President, and then lying repeatedly to the FBI, who pleaded guilty for telling these lies, was actually innocent. Yes, he was framed by vicious partisan members of the Deep State who set him up, lured the innocent patriot into a “perjury trap” and then savagely “unmasked” him. Then, when the Department of Justice, under patriot Bill Barr, finally sought, in the interest of justice, to belatedly make the unfair case disappear, a judge, also from the Deep State, refused to follow the law. A coup d’etat by an overreaching judge who illegally insisted on usurping the power of the Executive Branch. The appellate judge who ordered the usurping judge to obey the law and immediately dismiss the case ruled that there was no reason for a hearing, since this is not the unusual case that merits special scrutiny before dismissing it.
Or, it is actually a highly unusual case, a defendant, fired by his boss for lying, who twice pleaded guilty to a felony count of “willfully and knowingly” making false statements to the FBI, having his case suddenly dismissed by the DOJ without reason or a hearing — (and yes, Barr made a call on the “materiality” of Flynn’s lies, so there is a rationale, if not a nonpolitical reason.) The appellate judge who ordered the trial judge to immediately dismiss the case without a hearing was rebuked by the full panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, who vacated her order and found her ruling legally incorrect by a vote of 8-2.
Similarly, when the president calls a woman who accused him of rape in a Bergdorf-Goodman changing room a liar and claims he never even met her (in spite of at least one photo showing them together), and she in turn brings a defamation suit against the president, the Department of Justice steps in ten months later to make that case go away.
If Barr hadn’t stepped up to take the case the other day, under a fanciful interpretation of a Federal Tort law (that will be litigated and appealed for months, if not years, like Barr’s novel, flimsy but effective ‘blanket protective immunity’ claim for everyone who ever worked for President Trump), the president was in danger, weeks before a hotly contested election, of having to submit DNA to prove it wasn’t traces of him on the woman’s clothes — along with possibly being deposed in that case in a certain “perjury trap”.
You remember Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress? That was case closed for Lyin’ Bill Clinton. Even Slick Willie couldn’t lie after his DNA matched dried spunk on that blue dress, yo. This would be worse, because the woman (like all the others who accuse the president of similar things) is a liar and, besides that, a dog someone of Mr. Trump’s famously good taste in the ladies wouldn’t molest with Mike Pence’s dick.
Fact: more than twenty women accused then-presidential candidate Trump, who bragged about being able to “grab women by the pussy” because he was a star, of various sexual trespasses. Trump threatened to sue all of them, dogs and skanks one and all — and attention seeking liars — he promised he’d drag them all into court right after the 2016 election (along with providing a great, much more affordable and comprehensive health plan once he abolished Obamacare). None of these gold-digging partisan liars were sued (and no health plan was ever offered).
Counterfact: this lying, homely woman is just looking for a big pay day, and is probably already on the payroll of George Soros and the rest of the cannibal pedophiles Q has been warning us all about.
But here’s the thing that bugs me in this perilous moment, the consolidated media, run by advertising dollars and owned by very wealthy, connected corporate men, continues to pretend that cutting the baby in half is the way King Solomon would do it– if he was beholden to advertisers and wanted to maintain his access to the president’s administration. They have absolutely no sense of irony about this baby cutting they reflexively do, or any recognition that Solomon did not actually cut the baby, he only used the threat to be fair and chop the baby in half to learn who was the real mother. Or, more to the point, they don’t care about cutting your baby in half if there’s profit in it.
Here’s the Grey Lady on Barr’s sudden decision to intervene to make sure Trump doesn’t have to give DNA or be deposed in a defamation suit he brought on himself by publicly insulting a private citizen and calling her a liar from the bully pulpit. The headline repeats Barr’s claim that this is it unprecedented for the DOJ to step in and defend an American president in a civil suit — anything whatsoever that the president says in the course of his presidency is protected absolutely by this doctrine — ask Alan Dershowitz, nothing the president honestly thinks is right can be wrong:
Sure, perfectly normal. Presidents are regularly defended by the Department of Justice in defamation suits. It happens all the time. It could have been phrased “Barr defends unprecedented DOJ intervention as Normal” but that would only piss the administration off– and for what? What reminded Barr to take the case after so many months had passed?
Normal, you know. Not the sort of unusual, never seen before kind of case that merits any kind of close scrutiny. Happens virtually every day. Obama, yeah, he used it, sure he did, why wouldn’t he?
Perfectly normal, in Trump’s America. And you chumps can take that to the ballot box. Right after you get your vaccine, which will be safe, effective and free to everyone the day it is released.
