re: #95 lawhawk

Greets and saluts from the NYC metro area as we batten down the hatches with the oncoming Nor’easter. The Hudson River is already angry with whitecaps and minor flooding is occurring in places. The Southeast has already been racked by storms and the death toll keeps rising as reports come in.

It’s also the first Monday since 45 was inaugurated. The lie machine was working fast and furious over the weekend, and this will be the pattern we’ll see from it and the GOP for the rest of our days.

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Why? Because the lies work. Too many people buy the baffling BS - and the media is complicit in this too. Far too many are unwilling to call lies for what they are. Alternative facts? Naw, Trump isn’t lying. He’s just exaggerating the reality around him.

Just look at headlines used to report on the marches/parade/inauguration crowd sizes. How many times did the media actually say that the administration lied in the headline? Not enough. And that’s just the point. Far too many read just headlines and don’t bother to pay attention to the rest of the story. You get “5 things that were inaccurately stated” instead of “Trump Admin lied 5 times”

Journalism and headline writers need a crash course on how to cover this administration. Blunt small words do better than evasive euphemisms.

So, when you’re about to say “Trump Admin exaggerated the crowd size” instead report “Trump Admin lied about crowd size because he’s tremendously insecure”

Etc.

Today Trump will start dismantling the safety net and undermine US economic policy that has stood the nation in good stead for decades. Undermining NAFTA because Trump thinks that this will bring back manufacturing jobs (reality is that the jobs aren’t coming back and manufacturing output hasn’t been higher in decades - mostly due to automation and productivity gains). Harming alliances and treaty obligations sends the dollar to new lows on market trades, making it more expensive to export (harming domestic corps). Etc. This is an administration that is incompetent and unprepared from day 1 to do anything other than dismantle govt. That was what they want to do, and they’ve got a Congress ready to take an axe to it, no matter the consequences.

It’s baby steps, and NPR isn’t using the L-word yet, but the segment they did about Trump’s alternate-reality weekend was encouraging. “Falsehood,” “not true,” “not accurate,” etc.