Greets and saluts from the NYC metro area as we batten down the hatches with the oncoming Norāeaster. 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.
Itās 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 weāll see from it and the GOP for the rest of our days.
Theyāve been doing this since day 1 of campaign. Admin will do this every time theyāre confronted with inconvenient data.
ā lawhawk (@lawhawk) January 23, 2017
Their lies already costs lives. Thatās what GOP has done since ACA/Obamacare enacted. Failing to expand coverage costs lives. #GOPDontCare
ā lawhawk (@lawhawk) January 23, 2017
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 isnāt lying. Heās 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 thatās just the point. Far too many read just headlines and donāt bother to pay attention to the rest of the story. You get ā5 things that were inaccurately statedā instead of āTrump Admin lied 5 timesā
Journalism and headline writers need a crash course on how to cover this administration. Blunt small words do better than evasive euphemisms.
So, when youāre about to say āTrump Admin exaggerated the crowd sizeā instead report āTrump Admin lied about crowd size because heās tremendously insecureā
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 arenāt coming back and manufacturing output hasnāt 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 theyāve got a Congress ready to take an axe to it, no matter the consequences.