Slate identifies new set of "lies!"

SATURDAY, MAY 2, 2020

No way out, Sartre said:
William Styron ended Sophie's Choice with a sad memorial to "the beaten and butchered and betrayed and martyred children of the earth."

Alan Pakula's 1982 film ends with a similar musing.

One such beaten child was Nathan Landau, a principal character in the book and the film. As we eventually learn, his lying and his gruesome behavior stem from the fact that he's been diagnosed, since he was a child, as "a paranoid schizophrenic."

Another beaten child was Sophie herself, who was confronted with a terrible choice after finding herself in the middle of one of the most savage episodes in all of human history.

In the months before she was faced with that choice, she had failed to behave as a true hero might have. In that sense, she was a regular human being—and she, in the end, joined Nathan in death.

They were just two in a long list of people Styron describes as among the world's beaten children.

Now we're engaged in a great civil war, attempting to find our way through the issues raised by President Trump and by an accusation against Joe Biden. As we watch our reporters and pundits fumble and flail with such assignments, we can't help thinking, again and again, that we have met the world's beaten children and the world's beaten children are us.

"No Exit," Sartre gloomily said, in a 1944 play. Two years earlier, Casablanca had turned that assessment on its head, confronting the gloom of nascent "existentialism" with American humor and the promises of redemption.

That said, history sometimes creates situations from which there really is no exit. As we watch our beaten children try to deal with current divisions, we can't help thinking that we've reached a point where we can't be saved, not even by brilliant comic relief.

We'll offer three examples:

Wallace and Bash: Yesterday afternoon, we watched a discussion between Nicolle Wallace and Jeremy Bash which was astonishingly bad. They badly misrepresented something President Trump had said about the possible or likely source of the coronavirus. They seemed to confuse the chronology, and the contents, of a recent statement about that question by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Wallace selectively quoted a front-page report in the Washington Post. Bash ran right alongside her. All in all, their discussion was terrible horrible classic "fake news." If MSNBC provided transcripts for Wallace's show, we'd show you what we mean.

Slate claims it hears a who: Yesterday, Kayleigh McEnany conducted her first briefing as Trump's most recent press secretary. Perhaps unwisely, she sampled Jimmy Carter, saying this to the assembled reporters:

"I will never lie to you:"

She told the reporters she wouldn't lie. Inevitably, this headline emerged at Slate:
New White House Press Secretary Vows “I Will Never Lie to You” Before Telling a Few Lies
In the article itself, Daniel Politi listed three examples of McEnany's alleged "falsehoods and lies." His analytical skills struck us as quite poor this day.

Below, you see his first example. To his credit, he calls the statement in question a falsehood, not a lie, though we aren't sure that we would even go that far::
POLITI (5/1/20): The first notable falsehood peddled by the press secretary was concerning the news of the day, former Vice President Joe Biden’s staunch denial of sexual assault allegations by Tara Reade. Trump had said Reade’s accusations were “far more compelling” than those made against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and McEnany was asked to comment. “I think it was a grave miscarriage of justice with what happened with Justice Brett Kavanaugh. There’s no need for me to bring up the salacious, awful, and verifiably false allegations that were made against Justice Kavanaugh,” she said. But of course, there’s no way you could actually accurately characterize the accusations against Kavanaugh as “verifiably false.
Sad! By normal rules of interpretation, McEnany hadn't said that all the accusations against Kavanaugh were "verifiably false," though she'd clearly said that some were.

Which accusations did she mean? If reporters had wanted to know, they could of course have asked her. (We'll guess she might have gone to Michael Avenatti's intervention in that discussion. As a general matter, Avenatti is a deeply embarrassing topic for our own floundering team.)

Were some of the accusations "verifiably false?" We don't know, but it's certainly possible.

Having said that, so what? Politi called this statement a falsehood, and some editor turned it into a lie. So it constantly goes as we the beaten keep revealing our tribal nature.

Politi never says which of his three examples constitutes a "lie." By his third example, he merely says that McEnany "wasn’t quite truthful" when asked about Michael Flynn and the FBI.

He closes with a sad and snarky remark: "For now at least, it seems McEnany will continue having the same complicated relationship with the truth as her predecessors." Almost surely, that is true, but then again so will we all.

Inevitably, we all have a "complicated relationship with the truth!" That's the nature of human discourse in a world where it's possible to describe various complicated states of affairs in wide arrays of ways—in a world where there's no perfect way to describe most situations.

We live in a complicated world, but we beaten children tend to flee to a simpler, tribal realm. The other people are constantly "lying." We ourselves are upright and pure.

Donald J. Trump's last stand:
As we noted on Wednesday, Olivia Nuzzi thought the cable networks did the right thing in airing Commander Trump's prime-time propaganda/misstatement storms.

Nuzzi seemed to think that we the people could sort through all the misstatements. Along the way, she mentioned the fact that she had asked a certain question at Donald J. Trump's last storm.

Below, you see the question Nuzzi asked, along with Trump's non-answer. This is the sort of monumental nonsense the cables insisted on airing:
QUESTION (4/27/20): If an American president loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died in the entirety of the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be reelected?

NON-ANSWER ANSWER: So, yeah, we’ve lost a lot of people. But if you look at what original projections were—2.2 million—we’re probably heading to 60,000, 70,000. It’s far too many. One person is too many for this.

And I think we’ve made a lot of really good decisions. The big decision was closing the border or doing the ban—people coming in from China—obviously, other than American citizens, which had to come in. Can’t say, “You can’t come in. You can’t come back to your country.”

I think we’ve made a lot of good decisions.
I think that Mike Pence and the task force have done a fantastic job.

I think that everybody working on the ventilators—you see what we’ve done there—have done unbelievable. The press doesn’t talk about ventilators any more. They just don’t want to talk about them and that’s okay. But the reason they don’t want to talk—that was a subject that nobody would get off of. They don’t want to talk about them.

We’re in the same position on testing. We are lapping the world on testing. And the world is coming to us. As I said, they’re coming to us, saying, “What are you doing? How do you do it?” And we’re helping them.

So, no, I think we’ve done a great job. And one person—I will say this: One person is too many.

Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you.
Stating the obvious, Nuzzi's question was really an opinion column in the form of a question. The commander responded exactly as anyone would have known he would—with greatest-hit excerpts from a stream of memorized monologues.

He started with the several million lives he has saved. He mentioned his heroic decision with respect to travel from China.

He mentioned his heroic action with regard to ventilators. He mentioned the way the Fake News refuses to talk about his great success in that area. He mentioned the miraculous work he has done with testing.

At another time, he might have orated at much greater length in response to that non-question question. He might have directed asteram of insults at Nuzzi herself.

Trump had behaved that way night after night. But this was the final question at his final prime-time briefing, the one which occurred last Monday in the Rose Garden.

Given the timing, he merely hit a few of his most familiar highlights, then said "Thank you" and left.

Does anyone know why a news channel would want to broadcast nonsense like that night after night after night after night, week after week after week?

Almost no information was ever provided at these ridiculous sessions. Instead, the public was assailed with repetitive strings of standard groaning misstatements.

News orgs have largely abandoned the task of attempting to identify and correct those endless misstatements. Many questions at these sessions were as pointless and unhelpful as the one Nuzzi tossed.

In our view, cable channels should have issued, and then reissued, detailed statements as to why they were airing these misinformation storms.

If they were going to air these storms, they should have created high-profile, nightly programs dedicated to assessing the misstatements they insisted on airing, full and complete total stop. No other "stories" allowed!

Major newspapers should, by now, have created dedicated daily pages which chronicle and assess the president's endless misstatements. No president in American history has ever come close to behaving in such a deeply disordered way. Our major news orgs, and journos like Nuzzi, have normalized this by now.

Casablanca said this:

After trying everything else, we the people will rise and sing the Marseillaise. After trying everything else, we'll stand and fight, with plenty of comic relief thrown in, derived from our essential good nature.

On the personal level, we'll even find a way to say that we'll always have Paris. We'll then move on with our lives.

Casablanca's optimism laughed in the face of existentialist gloom. At present, are we beaten children of the earth possibly confronting a difficult storm from which our limited abilities will really provide no exit?

65 comments:

  1. "All in all, their discussion was terrible horrible classic "fake news.""

    What liberal seconds Trump's usage of the term "fake news" to describe media reporting he doesn't like? None -- this phrase is part of Trump's attack on the media.

    So, why does self-proclaimed liberal Somerby now use that term himself, ignoring the political meaning of those words? He is no liberal these days, if he ever was one.

    His daily essays do not promote any cause that liberals would recognize as part of our platform. He is furthering conservative goals and we need to be aware that ideas coming from Somerby need to be examined with extra care because you cannot trust his labels.

    ReplyDelete
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    1. He uses "fake news" to try to jar Anonymous Ignoramuses like you into some kind of awareness. What a fool's errand that's turned out to be.

      TDH promotes a liberal cause that I endorse: a vigilant free press that checks its facts, does its homework, doesn't indulge in controversy for its own sake, eschews both-siderism, and stands up to fakes and tyrants. YMMV and evidently does.

      Fortunately, you don't get to say who is and who isn't a liberal.

      Everybody's ideas need to be examined with extra care. And if you just found this out, then ask to borrow DAinCA's conical hat and sit in the corner for an hour.

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    3. "He uses "fake news" to try to jar Anonymous Ignoramuses like you into some kind of awareness."

      There you go, deadrat, mindreading Somerby again.

      Delete
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  2. "By normal rules of interpretation, McEnany hadn't said that all the accusations against Kavanaugh were "verifiably false," though she'd clearly said that some were."

    This is called weasel wording. Somerby uses this to get a Trump appointee off the hook, after she said she would never lie. She was in the midst of peddling the right's contention that Kavanaugh was mistreated during his hearing. Somerby thinks that because one of the accusers (who was not part of the hearing) was discredited, all of them were and it is OK to claim Kavanaugh was mistreated, even though McEnany never included the word "some" much less "some not all" in her statement. Somerby is quick to leap to her defense.

    And then he calls this "normal rules of interpretation". Nope. No one thinks like a lawyer and people don't parse anybody's words that strictly, to support a preferred meaning. Normal people recognize a manipulation and call this weasel-wording. It is one of many reasons that lawyers are not respected in everyday society. You can't trust what they say because their fingers are crossed behind their backs. And today Somerby crows "ha ha, fooled you".

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    1. Well I'm a lawyer, and I can tell you that thinking like a lawyer is a superior way of thinking. Basically, you weigh both sides of a question, realize that there are strengths and weakness (usually) on each side, and evaluate objectively, something that you aren't doing here. (Of course, lawyers advocate for their clients, but there are certain rules that apply.) Let's see if you ever get in trouble whether you'd appreciate having a good lawyer on your side. As far as Kavanaugh goes, I think the liberals and democrats handled it badly. The evidence against Kavanaugh was quite weak - based on something murkily remembered from decades prior. You probably aren't aware how memory fades in time, His accuser wasn't especially credible. There was no evidence that Kavanaugh was going around assaulting women in the years of his adult life. (I would add that neither you nor I know what happened in the alleged incident).I wish he wasn't on the Supreme Court, but not because of his alleged high school jumping on top of someone at an alcohol flowing party. Because of the stupid way the Kavanaugh accusation was flogged to death, to let Biden off the hook now (on what apparently is a highly devious sounding accusation) is going to strike lots of people as hypocritical. If democrats could ever be smart, maybe we wouldn't have the senate controlled by McConnell, and we'd have a different president than we do now.

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    2. Don’t forget, @AC/MA: liberals are also lazy and they exude a moral squalor. Plus, they are virtue-signaling elitists who don’t really care about poor people, black people, education, the white working class, you name it. According to this blog.

      Actually, it might be useful to remember TDH’s 20-year-long blogging about how the mainstream media consistently undermines liberals, how they engaged in a 25 year misogynistic jihad against Hillary, culminating in the atrocious coverage in the 2016 campaign. Couple that with Bernie and his unbridled attacks against the “Democratic establishment”, Comey and Russian ratfucking, and it’s hard to say simply that Democrats haven’t been smart enough.

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    3. Nicely stated, AC/MA, although I’ll have to remain officially agnostic on whether you’re really a lawyer. I think you mean “a highly dubious sounding accusation,” mostly because the accuser seems to me to be so clumsy, which sorta undercuts any deviousness.

      I think lawyers have traditionally been disrespected because in virtually every legal conflict, at least one party leaves dissatisfied.

      I think lawyers are currently disrespected because Trump puts weasels in charge. For instance, Barr is a lawyer and he’s repellant on every level, but the latter is independent of the former.

      Delete
    4. dixkrat: ascertain the relevant portions of the statute and file a report. upload it to cloud for further review and interlibrary loan.

      Delete
    5. Deadrat, you'll have to trust me about distinctive status as a lawyer - have been for more than 40 years, and still at it. Can't afford to retire. plus probably would get super bored. Yes, 'dubious' is the right adjective.

      Delete
  3. "In the article itself, Daniel Politi listed three examples of McEnany's alleged "falsehoods and lies." His analytical skills struck us as quite poor this day. "

    This is all quite simple, dear Bob.

    Dembots don't have analytical skills. All they need to know is Orange Man Bad. That is all.

    As for the dembot named Nuzzi, she appears to be one of the psycho-dembots akin to the constantly confessing psycho in these here comment threads.

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    1. Mao, while we're speaking of Sartre, the Frenchman once wrote that "Hell is other people," probably having you in mind.

      Delete
  4. "By his third example, he merely says that McEnany "wasn’t quite truthful" when asked about Michael Flynn and the FBI."

    There is a public record about Flynn. Why should the reporter try to summarize a complicated situation and plea deal that is part of everyone's history. The news is that Trump seems to be trying to rehabilitate Flynn in order to pardon him. McEnany is doing her duty for the President, and her lies serve a purpose, but she is lying.

    Somerby will never use the word "lie" applied to a Republican. Only when it comes to Stormy Daniels. If McEnany weren't working for the President, he would be at the top of his list of targets. She has all the right qualities: female, young, from an elite school (Harvard law) and worked for the media (CNN before Fox). By rights, Somerby should be targeting her, but he has switched sides temporarily because she is now a right-wing apologist and Somerby has his marching orders.

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  5. Sorry, Somerby, but I am not a beaten child. I prefer to leave that phrase back in the context in which Styron used it, and not widen it to include everyone.

    Somerby might as well have come right out and said, "We are all Anne Frank now, staring out of our attic windows as life passes us by." Utterly trivializing the Holocaust by omitting that majorly important event from the metaphor.

    There is an actual symptom of schizophrenia that consists of "loosening of associations" which means that everything is seen as related and connected to everything else. It makes thinking difficult and encourages paranoia, as innocuous things, such as placement of street signs, seems part of a plot against you (schizophrenics are also fearful, so harm is seen everywhere).

    Today Somerby wants us all to see "beaten children" everywhere, in all of us. It isn't what Styron meant and it isn't an appropriate way to see the actions of others, especially a president who was elected to direct the actions of our government, and his press secretary, who is supposed to tell the truth (without announcing it as if it were unusual to do).

    American philosophy did take a more optimistic turn compared to European philosophy, largely because the war wasn't fought on our home territory and no one in America suffered as horribly as Europe, even during the years of famine immediately after the war ended. Perhaps Casablanca exemplifies that, and perhaps it is just a romantic movie about the nobility of self-sacrifice and the futility of falling in love with someone else's wife. None of that has anything to do with "beaten children", Bogey wasn't beaten, and neither are the rest of us here (you can speak for yourselves since I don't know who else that might be true for). Somerby shouldn't assume he knows anyone here, any more than I do. But I won't be gaslighted into thinking of myself or the US as "beaten" just so Somerby can think of himself as poetic when he is coming across as demented.

    There is a similarity between schizophrenia (which includes a neurotransmitter imbalance in the frontal lobes) and dementia (which often includes deterioration of the frontal lobes, which shrink in old age in nearly all people). The frontal lobes are the site of the central executive, where rationality, planning, understanding of complexity occur. If Somerby is losing his capacity to think clearly, that may make him a beaten child in the same sense as Styron used the term, but it doesn't make all of us similarly deficient. But that raises another issue -- are Republicans what Democrats become as they lose their mental faculties?

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  6. There is just as much optimism in The Plague, by Camus (an existentialist classic), as in Casablanca.

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  7. Off topic here, but I moved this here to be sure deadrat would see it. Yesterday deadrat said:

    "Have you found the place in California licensing law where the APA code of ethics has been incorporated? Because I’ve had no luck finding it."

    Here it is:

    From the CA.gov Dept of Consumer Affairs, Board of Psychology:

    "The 2019 Laws and Regulations book contains provisions from the California Business and Professions Code, Penal Code, Welfare and Institutions Code, Evidence Code, Civil Code, Family Code, Health and Safety Code, the Title 16, Division 13.1 of the California Code of Regulations relating to the profession regulated by the California Board of Psychology, the Board’s Disciplinary Guidelines and the American Psychological Associations Ethics Guidelines."

    Also, applicants for a license must, among other things:

    "e) Take and pass the Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP) and the California Psychology Laws and Ethics Examination (CPLEE). For further information about the EPPP please visit http://www.asppb.net/?page=FAQs. For further information about the CPLEE, please review the Examinations section of the Board's web site at http://www.psychology.ca.gov/applicants/index.shtml"

    Note the law and ethics exam. It is based on the APA ethics. These are also taught as coursework in getting a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, which is also required for licensing. Hours of ethics training are dictated by the APA for accreditation of doctoral programs.

    Additionally, when receiving grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, professors, staff and students working on that grant must take additional ethical training and ongoing ethics training is also part of the continuing education requirement for maintaining licenses in CA.

    ReplyDelete
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    1. Ethics for researchers in psychology are NOT dictated by the APA guidelines (because the APA is a clinical psychology organization primarily and does not focus directly on research except clinical research). The go-to organization for psychological research is the Association for Psychological Science which covers most subfields of psychology research. Nearly all researchers also belong to one or more specialty research organizations, such as the Psychonomics Society for cognitive research or the Society for Social Psychology and Personality. These hold conferences and support journals that publish peer reviewed research articles. Ethics in research is supervised by universities and corporations and governed by granting agencies, including the US government via NSF, NIH, NIMH and other agencies. APA has nothing to do with that but each university or organization has an Institutional Review Board which oversees and monitors adherence to ethics by researchers, in addition to internal and external auditors.

      The APA was initially founded by research psychologists but its focus changed with WWI and WWII which created the field of clinical psychology to deal with war trauma and the need to classify and train people in the armed forces. After that, the APA was increasingly dominated by clinicians who didn't understand the different needs of researchers, so the APS was formed and many researchers left APA to join APS and other specialist professional organizations.

      This is important because when anyone says the word "psychologist," the general public thinks of clinical psychologist (or Dr. Phil/Dr. Laura) and doesn't understand that research psychology exists and is different, focused on normal behavior and ways to improve all people's lives, not just abnormality.

      Delete
    2. My response from Saturday:

      deadrat May 2, 2020 at 6:31 PM
      The actual source is here. But your cite took me there. Thanks. I was skeptical, but you're right for values of P="Psychological" in APA.

      Delete
  8. The problem with the Slate article, the section about Kavanaugh, is a bit worse than even Somerby says. They misquoted McEnany.

    They have her saying this:

    “There’s no need for me to bring up the salacious, awful, and verifiably false allegations that were made against Justice Kavanaugh,”

    She actually said:

    “there’s no need for me to bring up some of the salacious, awful, and verifiably false allegations that were made against Justice Kavanaugh.”

    Now, it’s doubtful that she would have actually answered a question pressing her about this. She was evasive at another point in the briefing, when Kristin Welker tried to press her about Trump’s firing of Flynn; McEnany simply called on someone else.

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    1. Ok, I rechecked to make sure Somerby didn't delete those two words, but "some of" was not in the Slate story.

      But I have to ask, how many lies does she have to tell before her promise is broken? Somerby didn't discuss her lie about the accusations of sexual assault against Trump. Apparently, he can't dispute it (or he would have). Doesn't that lie count too?

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    2. The question to McEnany was “What about the allegations that were raised against him, however?  Why should the public — or what makes them any less credible than the allegations from Tara Reade?” (“him” meaning Trump.)

      McEnany’s answer:

      “The President has swiftly denied all of these allegations that were raised four years ago.  He has always told the truth on these issues.  He’s denied them immediately.  And you’re bringing up issues, like I said, from four years ago that were asked and answered.”

      What she said, about Trump denying the allegations, was true. He did do that.

      There was no follow-up from the reporter to ask about the E. Jean Carroll allegation, which was more recent than four years ago.

      I would classify McEnany as evasive. She’s very skilled at it. She parses, splits hairs, answers questions that weren’t asked. But there isn’t an outright lie here (unless you think “He has always told the truth on these issues” is a lie.)

      I get what Somerby is saying. The reporters are not calling her evasions out.

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    3. "The problem with the Slate article, the section about Kavanaugh, is a bit worse than even Somerby says."

      Well, clearly our dear Bob did notice the falsification of the quote ("though she'd clearly said that some were.")

      But being a liberal in good standing, it is, of course, inconceivable for dear Bob to accuse a fellow dembot of a straight-up fabrication (which is what it is).

      The maximum our dear Bob can do in this situation is lamenting about said dembot's lack of "analytical skills".

      Ha-ha: "analytical skills". Funny.

      ...and sad. But alas: not surprising at all.

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    4. He has always told the truth on these issues.

      That is not being "evasive", mh. That is flat out lying. She had no way of honestly vouching for Trump's statements.

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    5. Kegstand Kavanaugh can't even remember details of those years. How would the blackout drunk remember anything about the accusation?

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    6. mh says: "The reporters are not calling her evasions out."

      They don't have to call them out during the press conference. The purpose of such a conference is to collect information, not confront people.

      The reporters can call out McEnany later, when they write their articles. This is what they have been doing.

      Delete
    7. Well, Slate wrote a report later, and misquoted McEnany! And wasn’t there one accusation against Kavanaugh that was verifiably false?

      The Slate article also didn’t mention her claim about Trump: “He has always told the truth on these issues.” (It was in a tweet from Aaron Rupar that was included in the article.)

      I think Somerby was unimpressed with their examples of her lying...?

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    8. The one put forward by Avenatti seemed baseless but it never got much scrutiny by the time he started talking about it. It wasn't verified as false to my knowledge.

      Somerby always defends Trump people when someone calls them liars. Somerby doesn't believe that the L word should be used against anyone, since we are not mind-readers. But it doesn't stop him from doing his own mind-reading about Trump's craziness. Somerby is an ass.

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  9. Reade's case is stronger than Ford's, because
    1. Reade definitely worked for Biden. There's no evidence that Ford ever met Kavenaugh
    2. Reade had a specific date and a specific location. Ford had neither.
    3. Reade's allegation was of something done by an adult sitting Senator. Ford's allegation was of something done by a teen-ager.
    4. Several witnesses are willing to testify that Reade told them about the incident at the time it happened. One plans to vote for Biden, but says she is committed to the truth. No witnesses were identified who could confirm Ford telling them about the incident at the time it happened.

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    1. David,
      You're still going to vote for Biden, though, right?

      Delete
    2. Now to get to those 25 sexual harassment/ assault accusations against (self admitted sexual assaulter) Donald J. Trump, which David and the liberal (LOL) media have shrugged off.

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    3. I agree with you 7:49. The media shugged off the many sexual claims against Trump. They will shrug off Reade's claim against Biden. I think they're right to do so. Being President is an incredibly difficult job, and more so during this crisis. We need the most capable person, regardless of something he did many decades ago.

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    4. "I agree with you 7:49."

      On this I hope: "the liberal (LOL) media"

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    5. My party is calling on us to forget that our nominee penetrated his victim with his fingers against her will, when he was a Senator and she was a young employee, because it was a long time ago.

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    6. 11:05,,
      Your party is making you forget that your nominee penetrated his victim with his fingers against her will, because you're a pedophile, who like having sex with 5-year olds on. a daily basis.

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    7. Biden denies the accusation. Unless some evidence is turned up after investigation, this is just an allegation. @11:05 does seem to get off on the details.

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    8. From The Hill:

      "Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer who has alleged she was sexually assaulted by former Vice President Joe Biden, told The Associated Press that the complaint she filed 27 years ago did not explicitly accuse the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee of sexual harassment or assault."

      She says she felt "uncomfortable" reporting him and "chickened out." In other words, there is no evidence to be found in the National Archives supporting her claims. Note -- not even an accusation of harassment, much less assault.

      Biden was also vetted by a team of attorneys prior to his nomination, who found no evidence supporting Reade or anyone else.

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    9. The only evidence we have is numerous contemporaneous statements from friends, acquaintances, and family, and a call on national television by her distressed mother.

      Biden is toast.

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    10. Biden won't be toast when Reade herself is walking back her statement.

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  10. David, this stuff isn't true. Just because Kavenaugh denied Ford's recollection doesn't mean she didn't recall where and when it was. Further Kavanaugh's calendar substantiated her recall. Further, even teenagers know not to assault women. Ford also had people she told at the time, such as her mother who couldn't testify because she was deceased. Your list is Republican propaganda.

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    1. The blackout drunk Republicans put on the Supreme Court, couldn't recollect the incident.

      Fixed for David.

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  11. Trumps armed mob will eventually turn to deadly violence and David will be the chief apologist.
    Nothing is too much.

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    1. "Nothing is too much."

      Even David has a point where it's too much. Say Trump's armed mob was all black people...

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    2. Trump has the blood of tens of thousands on his hands after downplaying the virus and doing nothing about PPP for all of February and half of March.

      He was always incompetent in private life and of course now his incompetency has basically ruined America forever.

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    3. You're too harsh on Mario's son Andrew, dembot.

      But sure, I can understand your bitterness: 40% of all US of A deaths in the state he 'governs'. Ruined indeed.

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    4. It will be interesting when Trump is dragged in front of a tribunal and questioned as to why he didn't address the PPP stockpile in February and early March and instead held rallys and told people not to worry about the malicious and vindictive
      pandemic that would kill 10s of thousands only a few weeks later.

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    5. It's sad that instead of making America great again, Trump actually made America an incapacitated and ruined shadow of its former self.

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    6. The pandemic Trump told us not to worry about and neglected to adquately prepare for is still killing literally scores of Americans every hour. And of course the economic aftershocks have not even started. Cities and states will be bankrupt. Life will never be the same.

      Why didn't he replenish the stockpiles in February or early March?

      The only answers are incompetence or an intentional desire to destroy America.

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    7. Yes, my dear soros-dembots, you've convinced me that Mario's son Andrew Cuomo is indeed motivated by "intentional desire to destroy America".

      It's all become crystal clear to me now. Your insights are truly amazing, my dear dembots.

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    8. Trump will have to explain to a grand jury and to the families of the 10s of thousands of dead American citizens, and the citizens that remain in the country he ruined, why when his administration did the first tests for coronavirus, South Korea had already done 200,000 tests.

      After all, both counties got their first case on the same day.

      One country performed massive testing and is no longer dealing with it.

      Another waited weeks and weeks and weeks to perform even one test while its leader held huge propaganda rallys calling the virus a hoax.

      And now that country is forever ruined, still has someone dying of the disease every couple of minutes, and has no plan for what to do next.

      Trump will have to explain the logic behind oafish and cowardly lack of initiative and his deceitful attempts to cover it up after the thousands and thousands and thousands of dead Americans began clogging the morgues.




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    9. 3:42 Trump's reaction to the widely expected pandemic has been extremely unusual. I agree it will be interesting to hear him explain himself under oath.

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    10. These people actually think Trump will be answering in court for his excellent leadership during a pandemic caused by China and exacerbated by Democrats fighting against travel bans from China and Europe.

      Is being batshit crazy a prerequisite for becoming a Democrat?

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    11. Mao,
      I'm sorry. Which one of us was rubber, and which one of us was glue, again?

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    12. Well, I'm pretty sure soros-dembots aren't necessarily 'Democrats', or even Americans, for that matter. It's a paid service: spread dembottery, get paid.

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    13. There will be time enough to reverse engineer Trump's failures and have him answer for them but first we have to just get out of this situation without too much further permanent damage to our once great county.

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    14. Clearly the first step will be to vote Trump out in November which shouldn't be difficult as by that time the economic ripple effects to Trump's inept,incompetent and really, inexplicable response to the widely expected and predicted pandemic will be hitting American citizens, the ones who are not dead, very hard in the pocketbook, hurling vast numbers into poverty and dissarry which will only further illuminate and call into question Trump's bizarre actions and statements like "don't worry about it, it will magically go away.".

      That's going to be a very strange statement to explain to the millions of unemployed and newly poor American citizens.

      The ones that aren't dead.

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    15. 5:20

      Given the mistakes and bad decisions Trump has made from the start of this and his clear, unimpeachable overall failure of leadership, it should probably be expected we will still be battling the virus next November.

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    16. There seems to be a misconception among the remaining, delusional and quixotic Trump failure denialists that the European travel ban had a positive effect on combating the virus and is some sort of ostrich plume in the cap of Capatin Ahab Trump, some sort of indication of good leadership and vision.

      Au contraire rhum baba face!

      I regret to inform you: citing Trump's European travel ban is a reinforcement of the clear truth that Trump came to this virus way too late. The European travel ban came in March, WAY, WAY, WAY too late to have an effect. The virus was already here and spreading and killing. It had no effect.

      European travel ban is a reinforcement and example of Trump incompetency. From the beginning, world-renowned epidemiologists pointed out the obvious - that it was much too little, much too late and that the disease had already spread to America and millions would die European travel ban.

      I'm just telling you so you know. So you are not surprised when Trump doesn't use it as a defense in his eventual tribunal and so you can recognize when the people to who you turn to for information are getting it wrong.

      Don't take my word for it of course. Take 14 or 15 seconds to look it up on Google.

      No, the 2nd week of March, when Trump was telling American citizens the virus was no big deal, was not the time to institute that measure. The time for that was January. The time to replenish PPP stockpiles was January, not April. You can go on and on and on. The time to plan a way to deal with our new country, our new post-COVID culture was April. But Trump didn't do anything really about that. Some! But not enough. No, Trump is late to that too.

      It's too bad because he really has shown he is not the person to lead the country under these circumstances. It's like going to war with Beaky Buzzard as your commander. At other times under other circumstances, maybe. Under these circumstances ... well, he has shown us and he continues to show us.

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  12. Is it too late to recruit Avenatti? Can he run from prison? Did he rape anybody?

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    1. Is it too late to find better trolls? Probably not.

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  13. Reade is like the majority of accusers. Not credible and seeking attention.

    Her friends have been paid off to lie about Biden or they have psychological problems of their own. There is no evidence her mother was talking about Joe Biden or even that it was her mother on the call.

    Look at her. She's a middle aged feminist looking for attention just like Ford. It was only a matter of time before the "me too" exploded when a man the feminists liked was on the chopping block. We told them all along NOT to believe women because women lie about this all the time for attention or money.

    Accusations against powerful men should be dismissed unless you're on the jury and at that point must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

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    1. Feminists liked Al Franken but they didn't accept his behavior, so efforts to portray feminists as hypocrites don't hold water.

      "believe the women" means investigate the allegations. It doesn't mean women are always telling the truth. It means investigate, not dismiss out of hand.

      In studies women lie about 20% of the time, usually in the context of divorce cases. That is pretty far from "all the time."

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