BREAKING: What you see isn't real, Donald Trump once said!

TUESDAY, AUGUST 21, 2018

"Press corps" keeps proving his point: We're going to start with Brian Williams, because Brian Williams went last.

All day long, cable pundits had staged one of their trademark stampedes/mental breakdowns. Yesterday's trademark mental breakdown concerned what Rudy had said.

Rudy had said it on Sunday's Meet the Press. Five minutes into last night's program, Brian presented Rudy's statement like this:

WILLIAMS (8/20/18): Robert Costa, we're going to play for our audience the moment heard around the world from Meet The Press this weekend. We'll talk about it on the other side.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GIULIANI: I'm not going to be rushed into having him testify so that he gets trapped into perjury. And when you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he's going to tell the truth and he shouldn't worry, well, that's so silly, because it's somebody's version of the truth. Not the truth. He didn't have a conversation—

TODD: Truth is truth. I don't mean to go, like—

GIULIANI: No, no, it isn't truth! Truth isn't truth!

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WILLIAMS: So Robert, is that just the era we've entered, where the president's lawyer can go on television and say things without consequence?

Truth isn't truth! How crazy! It was, in Brian's words, "the moment heard around the world."

As cable hacks had been doing all day, Brian chose to edit the video clip right there. It made for a wonderfully weird-sounding clip. The pundits all gamboled and played!

Of course, if you simply played the fuller clip from Meet the Press, Giuliani's actual point was perfectly clear. The fuller clip from Meet the Press even included Todd telling Giulinai that his basic point was right.

And the basic point Giuliani made was in fact perfectly clear. Here's how the fuller exchange really went if you didn't play the pundit corps' reindeer games:

GIULIANI (8/19/18): I'm not going to be rushed into having him testify so that he gets trapped into perjury. And when you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he's going to tell the truth and he shouldn't worry, well, that's so silly, because it's somebody's version of the truth. Not the truth. He didn't have a conversation—

TODD: Truth is truth. I don't mean to go, like—

GIULIANI: No, no, it isn't truth! Truth isn't truth! The president of the United States says, "I didn't—

TODD: "Truth isn't truth." Mr. Mayor, do you realize—

GIULIANI: No, no, no. Don't do this to me.

TODD: Don't do "truth isn't truth" to me.

GIULIANI: Donald Trump says, "I didn't talk about Flynn with Comey." Comey says, "You did talk about it." So tell me what the truth is.

TODD: Don McGahn might know.

GIULIANI: If you're such a genius—Don McGahn doesn't know. If that's the situation, where you have two pieces of evidence, Trump says I didn't tell him and the other guy says that he did say it, which is the truth?

TODD: At that point, you're right. Under two people. No. You're right. I don't read minds on that front.

Let me ask you this final question—

GIULIANI: No, no, no, no, let me finish. We have a credibility gap between the two of them. You've got to select one or the other. Now, who do you think Mueller is going to select? One of his best friends, Comey? Or the president who he has been carrying on a completely wild, crazy, unorthodox investigation?

Even before Giuliani said "Let me finish," Todd had said he was right. Beyond that, it was perfectly obvious what Giuliani was saying here. He was saying this:

Trump will say that he didn't talk about Flynn with Comey. Comey will say that he did.

Mueller will have to decide who's telling the truth. Because Comey is "one of his best friends," Mueller will say that Comey is telling the truth, even if Donald Trump is actually telling the truth.

There's nothing confusing about that. There's nothing crazy about that. It turns on the world's most obvious point:

Sometimes, when Person A tells the truth, Person B will decide that he is lying. In that case, the truth won't be accepted as the truth. How dumb does a person have to be to find this matter confusing?

In truth, a person doesn't have to be dumb at all; he or she merely has to be part of the mainstream press corps. They've gone on these stampedes of tortured interpretation and faux paraphrase many times before this, resulting in death all over the world.

They've done this many, many times. But nothing stops their reindeer games. They're Aristotle's pre-rational apes, right outta Harari's heuristic.

People, can we talk? If you have two IQ points to bang together, Giuliani's basic point wasn't confusing at all.

It wasn't hard to see what he was saying. Todd quickly acknowledged that:

"At that point, you're right," Todd said. "Under two people. No. You are right."

Todd was saying he understood what Giuliani meant. But as they did when they spent two years inventing all the crazy things Candidate Gore was said to have said, they wanted to gambol and play and behave like all-around fools.

Guest hosting on MTP Daily, Katy Tur even said this:

TUR (8/20/18): Gosh, I felt bad for Chuck Todd this weekend, guys. I wanted to give him a hug, because the idea of somebody looking you in the eye, through a camera or not, and saying "truth isn`t truth" is just completely absurd.

Rudy Giuliani tried to clean it up by saying he wasn't talking about moral theology, which I don't know what that is.

Poor Katy! She doesn't even know what that is! Plus, she wanted to hug poor Chuck!

Katy Tur isn't even remotely stupid. Plainly, though, she's prepared to play stupid on TV in her role as a big cable star. (In effect, she aped the many former athletes who go on TV and pretend they can't understand three-syllable words.)

That said, this whole episode turns on what Williams did. The whole episode turned on cutting the videotape before Giuliani makes his explanation, which isn't confusing at all.

Once he makes his explanation, his point is perfectly clear. "At that point, you're right," poor huggable Chuck even said.

(That doesn't mean that Trump's denial would actually be the truth, of course. It simply means that Giuliani's point was perfectly clear.)

Before we close with something truly egregious, let's recall our own larger point. At the start of the year, we told you it's all anthropology now. In part, we meant this:

There's no point in expecting these puzzling people to perform their important roles in an intelligent fashion. All that's left is the attempt to explain why they behave as they do.

Our explanation is this:

They're Aristotle's apes! They're the slightly modified "great apes" described as part of the instructive Harari heuristic.

These utterly silly folk aren't "the rational animal" at all. They're unintelligent tribal players, whose ancestors developed the abilities 1) to gossip and 2) to invent and believe group "fictions" 70,000 years ago.

They're going to clown and stampede on a regular basis. Truth to tell, they aren't especially bright, and they aren't especially honest. They're the ancestors of great apes who, through a set of chance mutations, gained the abilities to gossip and traffic in fictions.

In this case, their stampede turned on stopping that videotape before Giuliani explained his point. It turned on cutting the tape right where he said "truth isn't truth."

You had to cut the tape right there, so that's what these idiots did. (This used to be known as "the Maddow edit.") At that point, the apes began to fling their poo all about, just as they've ever done.

The whole thing turned on pretending that Giuliani didn't explain what he meant. That brings us to Steve Kornacki, who cable news finally owns.

Does anyone ever escape from "cable news" with his soul intact? Yesterday, Kornacki guest-hosted a podcast at Slate. Disgracefully, here's what he said:

KORNACKI (8/20/18): It happened yesterday on Meet the Press. Rudy Giuliani said something that absolutely lit the political world on fire.

He said, "Truth isn't truth."

[...]

If you happened to blink on Sunday and miss it, though, here is the full exchange:

GIULIANI: And when you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he's going to tell the truth and he shouldn't worry, well, that's so silly, because it's somebody's version of the truth. Not the truth. He didn't have a conversation—

TODD: Truth is truth. I don't mean to go, like --

GIULIANI: No, no, it isn't truth! Truth isn't truth! The president of the United States says, "I didn't—

TODD: "Truth isn't truth," Mr. Mayor, do you realize what—I, I, I—

"Here is the full exchange," Kornacki said. Then, he played that one small part of the exchange. That's where he clipped the tape.

That's the essence of cable news, indeed of our mainstream journalism. For at least the past thirty years, people like Kornacki have agreed to play the public in these brain-dead ways.

People are dead all over the world because of what these amended great apes have done. But they do it, and they do it, and they do it again. Yesterday, they did it all day long, ending with Brian's edit.

Nothing ia going to make them stop. It's all anthropology now!