Monday, April 3, 2017

Reminder to Myself

To read all in the LA Times series of editorials on Dear Leader. Day two is today. Lies and damned lies.

But he is not merely amusing. He is dangerous. His choice of falsehoods and his method of spewing them — often in tweets, as if he spent his days and nights glued to his bedside radio and was periodically set off by some drivel uttered by a talk show host who repeated something he’d read on some fringe blog — are a clue to Trump’s thought processes and perhaps his lack of agency. He gives every indication that he is as much the gullible tool of liars as he is the liar in chief.

He has made himself the stooge, the mark, for every crazy blogger, political quack, racial theorist, foreign leader or nutcase peddling a story that he might repackage to his benefit as a tweet, an appointment, an executive order or a policy. He is a stranger to the concept of verification, the insistence on evidence and the standards of proof that apply in a courtroom or a medical lab — and that ought to prevail in the White House.

President Bannon has done well attaching himself like a lamprey to Trump's prodigious back-side.

Our civilization is defined in part by the disciplines — science, law, journalism — that have developed systematic methods to arrive at the truth. Citizenship brings with it the obligation to engage in a similar process. Good citizens test assumptions, question leaders, argue details, research claims.

Investigate. Read. Write. Listen. Speak. Think. Be wary of those who disparage the investigators, the readers, the writers, the listeners, the speakers and the thinkers. Be suspicious of those who confuse reality with reality TV, and those who repeat falsehoods while insisting, against all evidence, that they are true. To defend freedom, demand fact.

Be a good citizen. Dissent often. 

5 comments:

  1. I read the first and second installments of the LATimes report and can only shake my head in disbelief that such a flawed and corrupt person, a colossal liar, could be elected president. All men are flawed and many are subject to corruption, but it is the sheer volume of Trump's lies that astound. Just recently he tweeted that he never asked for Trumpcare to be voted on by the House, when just a few days before that tweet it is documented that he absolutely DID call for a vote.

    Either he is the pathological liar that many who've studied his personality believe he is, or he truly is suffering early of dementia. Either case is a disaster for America.

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  2. That should read "early onset dementia."

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  3. The good news is he probably won't be around for the whole four years. The bad news is President Pence. Hopefully, we can make a case that Pence should be tossed for gaining the job as the result of "fruit of the poison tree" or some such.

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  4. "Pence should be tossed for gaining the job as the result of "fruit of the poison tree" or some such."

    Then we'd have Ryan, The Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver! Let's face it, the GOP is loaded with horrible choices.

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    1. Don't suppose there's a Democrat anywhere in the line of succession.

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