65 thoughts on “Why I Ignore The “Journalistic Fact-Check” Racket”

  1. What a low bar we have set for Trump that the NYT gives him props by acknowledging that his statements were based on facts.

  2. What a low bar we have set for Trump that the NYT gives him props by acknowledging that his statements were based on facts.

    Truthiness?

  3. Apparently, it’s beyond the Times’ ability to say “this is true, but how much it derives from Trump’s policies is obviously a matter of debate.”

    And Emery, it’s beyond “based on facts”, but rather factual. Really, if the Times wants to have any credibility in critiquing politicians veracity, they’ve got to start simply admitting that a claim is a fact when it is instead of filibustering around that fact. Otherwise they’re worse than any politician.

  5. With the closing of Barnum & Bailey this spring, Trump now wears the mantle of the Greatest Show On Earth. He is the best natural politician since LBJ. Conservatives, though, should worry that he will, like Ike, use his massive popularity to remain massively popular — rather than attenuate it to advance GOP causes

    I would give him another six months to see whether there is more to Trump than a brilliant showman. If, come Labor Day, he has failed by then to send well-crafted legislation to Congress then the rest of us will have to admit that the American people elected a carny barker. It could go either way.

  6. Emery Incognito on March 1, 2017 at 11:15 am said:
    What a low bar we have set for Trump that the NYT gives him props by acknowledging that his statements were based on facts.

    Obama: ‘If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan’

    Here are the 37 instances we could find in which President Barack Obama or a top administration official said something close to, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” referring to health insurance changes under the Affordable Care Act.

    http://www.politifact.com/obama-like-health-care-keep/

    The NY Times does not reference any of the 37 instances Obama or his surrogate used the phrase “if you like your health plan you can keep your health plan.” A quick search of the NY Times web site indicates that Obama has never lied.

    https://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/?action=click&contentCollection&region=TopBar&WT.nav=searchWidget&module=SearchSubmit&pgtype=Homepage#/if+you+like+your+health+plan+you+can+keep+your+health+plan/

  7. Emery, keep in mind that Obama failed to send well-crafted legislation all the way to January of this year.

  8. JPA: what about Yemen?
    The WH has said that to call the raid a “failure” is to dishonor the young man who died in it. But failure/success/in-between has no bearing on the honor of those who fought in it whether they were wounded, killed or unscathed.

    Honor and military success have only a tenuous connection. It is certainly especially honorable to achieve success, but to be wounded or killed in a war/battle/skirmish/accident that was unsuccessful is not dishonorable.

    For a ‘Chickenhawk’ President who hid from his generation’s war behind a probably non-existent “heel spur”, the less he says about honor, about heroism, about sacrifice and about war in general, the better.

    Furthermore, I don’t find anything like using Officer Owens widow as a prop very inspiring. Unless it inspires someone to be more careful with people’s lives; which I doubt.

  9. BB: that’s what you call a false equivalency. The GOP in 2017 controls the house, senate and presidency. I don’t believe Obama had that luxury in 2016.

  10. Translation of eTASS screeds: It is OK if libturds do it, but an anathema otherwise.

    Oh, and since when does an Executive branch craft legislation? Oh, wait, the 0bumbler WH did it then it must be right.

    What a maroon.

  11. OK, Emery, so for two years, Obama had Congress with him and still failed to send any substantive, well written legislation to them. You’re still admitting that you’ve got quite the bias.

    With regards to the heel spur and Trump’s draft deferrals, I have personally been through a DOD physical exam (I wanted to go to one of the academies), and if you’re saying that Army doctors are incapable of detecting a bony protrusion on the underside of the heel, fine with me, but in such a case, exactly why you’d fault anyone for not putting themselves under their care is beyond me.

    Really, though, what you’re doing is libeling Army doctors.

  13. Perhaps you’ve seen the link to the “20 Diversion Tactics Highly Manipulative Narcissists, Sociopaths And Psychopaths Use To Silence You” on Thought Catalog. Reading through the list I see many common “debating” styles from Comment sections, but what I realized is that between Trump and The Media we really have two heavyweight “manipulative narcissists” duking it out with each other with our brains as the battleground. The first 10 tactics are:

    1. Gaslighting – or, “Who are you going to believe – me, or your lying eyes?”
    2. Projection. – see Berg’s immutable laws.
    3. Nonsensical conversations from hell – word salad, projection, ad hominem attacks, gaslighting
    4. Blanket statements and generalizations – I’m not going to Google it for you
    5. Deliberately misrepresenting your thoughts and feelings to the point of absurdity – smoke screens and squid ink
    6. Nitpicking and moving the goal posts – not even sure what game we’re playing anymore
    7. Changing the subject to evade accountability – oh yeah, what about the time when you….
    8. Covert and overt threats – but what else would you expect in a declared (or undeclared) war
    9. Name-calling – or it’s cousin, drive-by mental health diagnoses
    10. Destructive conditioning – getting you to question your thoughts and actions in terms of what they might do as a result

  14. Trump’s address should remind us all, once again, that no one yet has gotten rich betting against him. I have no idea whether Trump will succeed — whatever “success” means to him. I think that people who underestimate him are the same sort who give away their social security number over the telephone when a stranger calls and says it is needed “for our files.”

  15. The election of Donald Trump is a reprieve, not a rescue.

    America dodged the bullet, temporarily, when The Lizard Queen failed to ascend to the Rose Garden Throne. But that did not revert America back into its earlier earthly paradise. It simply halted the decline, for now.

    Even if Trump sends legislation to Republicans in Congress, the Never-Trumpers will be the ones chin-pulling and I-don’t-knowing reaching across the aisle to make the proposed legislation more palatable to their mortal enemies.

  16. Powerline’s Scott Johnson pointed me to this Weekly Standard “Fake News Check” of an Atlanticarticle: http://www.weeklystandard.com/fake-news-exposed/article/2006996. The Atlantic article is here: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/rumana-ahmed-trump/517521/

    I read the article a few days ago, and multiple “bullshit” alarms went off.

    Alarm One: The article’s author was its subject: The Atlantic gave carte blanche to a highly partisan person to write her anti-Trump, pro-Obama story. No editorial oversight. This gives the Atlantic‘s editors space to back away from any falsehoods she has written. It is “her story”, not theirs. After Rolling Stone lost the suit over the U Va rape story, I think that you will see more of this. In today’s media, the need to push a narrative over rules the need to tell the truth, editors are trying new strategies to print lies and not be held responsible for their content.

    Alarm Two: She worked for Ben Rhodes. Rhodes is the failed novelist and van driver who oversaw the rollout of the Iran nuke deal. Rhodes bragged about rolling the media on that story. Ben Rhodes is also the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes. It is not unreasonable to believe that Ben Rhodes used his media contacts to get Ahmed’s story placed in the Atlantic.

  17. SSOLSEmery puked: “Furthermore, I don’t find anything like using Officer Owens widow as a prop very inspiring.”

    That’s Chief Petty Officer Owens, you mewling fuck.

    Not that I’d expect a scumbag describing a U.S. Navy SEAL as a “prop” to have the common decency to at least acknowledge his rank.

  18. Trump using CPO Owens’ widow as a prop was getting in the way of the Democrat’s using CPO Owens’ father as the new Cindy Sheehan.

  19. Trump using CPO Owens’ widow as a prop was getting in the way of the Democrat’s using CPO Owens’ father as the new Cindy Sheehan.

    Yep.

  21. ( looking for eTASS posts of condemnation any time progressives vilified, berated, and otherwise blamed the military. Nope, no such thing ).

    Maybe Mitch can change the script to make sure every post by eTASS begins with ( rank hypocrisy alert ) banner.

  22. Ok, what’s the new “no go” word? Got stuck in moderation and I did not use anything offensive.

  23. Let me get this straight. President Bonespur wants a military victory for his big speech and it goes sideways, a soldier gets killed, Trump then blames the generals and takes no responsibility himself, but still uses the dead soldiers widow for political theater. And nobody here thinks there is anything wrong with that? At least Carter took responsibility for his failed mission in Iran.

  24. EI, you go wrong in your first sentence. You’re assuming that the mission was approved because Trump wanted a military victory for his speech. Evidence for this?

    Now granted, everybody wants a victory, and timing for the speech can be good as well, but what you’re arguing is that Trump more or less gave a flawed plan the go-ahead–and the generals agreed to it–for a despicable motive.

    So while I don’t like publicly blaming the generals, I think you’re way overstating the case. Unless, of course, you can convince some intelligence officials to commit another felony and reveal it to the Washington Post, which will publish it without giving a rip about who might die as a result of revealing classified information.

  25. Push that narrative Emery! It won’t get anywhere if you don’t push it!
    BTW, Emery, you seem to be working from “alternate facts” pushed by the MSM.
    Hey, how much time did Obama spend in the military?
    Zero?
    And he got us involved in how many wars?
    How much time did Bill Clinton spend in the military?
    Zero?
    And he got us involved in how many wars?

  26. Here is how a narrative is crafted.
    Our example is the NY Times. The NY Times has mastered the art of pushing a narrative on the elites, giving them talking points, and setting the bounds of political conversation.
    Here is the NY Times headline:
    Key Republicans Ask Jeff Sessions to Recuse Himself in Russia Case

    This is about supposed contacts between sessions and the Russian ambassador during the Trump campaign.
    So you read, first, a rehash of every wild accusation made by anyone about the Russians interfering in the campaign on behalf of Russia, including the discredited and, frankly, surreal story that Trump had hired Russian prostitutes to urinate on the bed once slept on by the Obamas.
    This, BTW, is the opposite of the narrative pushed by the Times before the election, when they (like virtually everyone else) expected Hillary to win.
    In those days, just four months ago, the Times reported that although the Russians were interested in the US presidential election, they were interested only in discrediting the presumed winner (Hillary), to reduce the legitimacy of her (presumed) election, and the Russians had no interest in affecting, or ability to, affect the election’s outcome.
    Half way through the article you get the meat of the story:

    But the Justice Department acknowledged on Wednesday that Mr. Sessions had twice communicated with the Russian ambassador last year. The first time was in July, at the Republican National Convention, after he gave a speech at an event for ambassadors sponsored by the Heritage Foundation. The second time was a visit to his office by Mr. Kislyak in September. The Washington Post earlier reported both encounters.

    While confirming the conversations, the department played down both. Of the Heritage Foundation encounter, a Justice Department official said the Russian ambassador was among a small group of diplomats who approached Mr. Sessions as he was leaving the stage. The ambassadors, the official said, thanked Mr. Sessions for his remarks and invited him to join them at various events they were sponsoring, but he made no commitments to do so.

    Of the office visit, the official said, the discussion focused on relations between the United States and Russia and issues the two countries were facing, although the department left open the possibility that there had been “superficial” comments about news related to the election.

    A spokeswoman for the Justice Department, Sarah Isgur Flores, said “there was absolutely nothing misleading” about Mr. Sessions’s answers at his confirmation hearing. She said that Mr. Sessions, as a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had at least 25 conversations with foreign ambassadors, including those from Australia, Britain, Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Poland and Russia.

  27. You know, when Bubba ordered a cruise missile strike on what turned out to be an Sudanese aspirin factory, I had some friends who suggested he did it to take the attention off his cigar humidor girlfriend.

    I told them that if they really believed a U.S. President would to that, it was their duty to pick up a rifle and remove him from office, and if they didn’t have enough trust in their conclusion, or balls to act upon them, they should shut the fuck up.

    That goes double for you, SSILSEmery, you cowardly, big mouth piece of shit.

  28. MP: Have you ever listened to a fringe conservative? Their whole worldview is shaped by conservative dogma. Kansas slashed taxes for the rich. So therefore Kansas has a booming economy and very low debt – and anyone who says different is fake news that doesn’t know how to read statistics. Australia implemented strict gun control laws. So therefore Australia is now awash with blood and violent crime has never been higher — and anyone who says different is fake news that doesn’t know how to read statistics. England let in Muslim refugees. So therefore there are now entire Muslim neighborhoods where Christians are terrified to even step foot in — any anyone who says different is fake news that just stages fake videos. 
    You get the picture.

    ‘Mastery of Parsing’ must be the most valuable and sought after skill in Politics. Certainly this administration from the beginning shows they have recruited heavily for this talent. In the world of non-parsing, that is called lying.

  29. Has anyone ever thought of forming their own opinion based on their own knowledge, experience and history? Or, would that require the deconstruction of an entire industry?

  30. Emery Incognito on March 3, 2017 at 6:21 am said:
    MP: Have you ever listened to a fringe conservative? Their whole worldview is shaped by conservative dogma. Kansas slashed taxes for the rich. So therefore Kansas has a booming economy and very low debt – and anyone who says different is fake news that doesn’t know how to read statistics.
    I don’t believe that what you have described is conservative dogma, Emery.
    There are fringe people on the Left and Right. If you listen to people on the Left, all of the Right is made up of a lunatic fringe. If you listen to the right, all of the left is made up of a lunatic fringe. What is your point?

  31. Dear God.
    Here is Milbank’s column of 22 Feb., its subject is the rise of anti-Semitit incidents since Trump’s election:
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-could-do-with-acting-a-bit-more-vice-presidential/2017/02/22/470cb15e-f951-11e6-be05-1a3817ac21a5_story.html

    Milbank holds Trump and his supporters responsible.

    Here is a report on the arrest of the person who seems to have been behind most of this “rise in anti-Semitic incidents”:
    http://fox2now.com/2017/03/03/st-louis-man-charged-with-making-threats-to-jewish-community-centers-nationwide/

    Who is Juan Thompson?

    http://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2016/09/19/disgraced-reporter-juan-thompson-hired-fired-from-new-writing-job

    He is a disgraced Lefty “journalist”, and a Bernie supporter.

    Milbank’s current column about the rise of fascism in the US in the era of Trump is here:
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/under-trumps-command-the-skies-become-decidedly-less-friendly/2017/03/01/7a1d9126-fed3-11e6-99b4-9e613afeb09f_story.html

    The US and the president of the US is doing just fine. It is people like Milbank who are in serious need of a mental health intervention.

  32. Regarding Trump and anti-semitism, you might as well accuse his predecessor of intentionally discriminating against african-americans as accuse Trump of anti-semitism. Ivanka for one might have something to say about that, to put it mildly.

    I dream of, but do not anticipate seeing, the day when the left will join the reality-based community.

  33. I am going to post this largish quote from Althouse because it seems to catch the historical moment.
    Althouse is a moderate who voted for Obama in ’08 and (I think) ’12. Althouse is no conservative.

    I’m missing the sense that I’m getting the normal news. It seems unfair and shoddy not to cover the President the way you’d cover any President. What looks like an effort to stigmatize Trump as not normal has — to my eyes — made the media abnormal.

    I know some journalists argued that the normal approach shouldn’t apply to covering Trump, because Trump is not normal, but that’s not my idea of professionalism. Even if they were to regard professionalism in those terms — if the object of the news goes low, journalism should go low — they’d still be on the hook to continually maintain the perception that their antagonist really is low, and if they use their pages to strain to portray him as low to justify their continual debased presentation of the news, they’re self-dealing and double counting.

    The more seemingly normal Trump becomes — as with his speech to Congress the other day — the more the anti-Trump approach of the news media feels like a hackish alliance with the Democratic Party in its sad, negative, backward-looking effort to disrupt the President the people elected.

    http://althouse.blogspot.com/2017/03/do-democrats-see-their-only-hope-as.html

    If the people made a mistake in electing Trump, the people will deal with it. You are neither a small-d democrat or a small-r republican if you believe that the media should override the choice of the people.

  34. Wooly, don’t forget, eTASS does not believe anti-Semitism exists. According to him, it is all part of Hasbara!

  35. The largest Jewish “problem” in the USA is that they’re being whittled down by intermarriage with Gentiles. When Jews marry Catholics, the kids grow up to be Catholics who take their lawyers to Confession.

  36. Mamm, the PR wing of the reprobate Democrat party is sink-holing the “Trump hates teh Jewz” meme as fast as possible because of that story. SSOLSEmery is just slow on the uptake, Q.E.D.

    Notice, also, that the reprobates have pretty much squelched Juan Thompson’s leftist back story; not even their own packs of flying rats are clued in. That’s also why we see the wretched SSOLS continue to dance in his dirty diapers here.

  37. Tom, you’ve passed “verge” 100 miles back and are now speeding toward Tin Foil Hat City with the pedal to the metal.

    When you elect a clown you get a circus. What else were you expecting?

  38. The DC circus seems to have pitched its tents at 1301 K Street and not on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  39. Washington Post will never investigate Obama for it’s many plots and schemes. I caught Obama red handed one night trying to break into my gun safe and steal my guns, and Eric Holder was his lookout and holding the flash light, I sent the info to WaPo and they did nothing. Totally in the tank for Obama. ;^)

    I hate to give Trump too much credit, but clearly, it’s a distraction (Trump’s new shiny object) to distract the press and reduce the discussion of Russia undermining the democratic process

  40. The WaPo passed on, without question, Ben Rhodes’ admiited lies about the Iran nuclear deal.

    In the narrative that Rhodes shaped, the “story” of the Iran deal began in 2013, when a “moderate” faction inside the Iranian regime led by Hassan Rouhani beat regime “hard-liners” in an election and then began to pursue a policy of “openness,” which included a newfound willingness to negotiate the dismantling of its illicit nuclear-weapons program. The president set out the timeline himself in his speech announcing the nuclear deal on July 14, 2015: “Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not.” While the president’s statement was technically accurate — there had in fact been two years of formal negotiations leading up to the signing of the J.C.P.O.A. — it was also actively misleading, because the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the “moderate” camp were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The idea that there was a new reality in Iran was politically useful to the Obama administration. By obtaining broad public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in the regime, and that the administration was reaching out to moderate-minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their neighbors and with America, Obama was able to evade what might have otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy choices that his administration was making. By eliminating the fuss about Iran’s nuclear program, the administration hoped to eliminate a source of structural tension between the two countries, which would create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey. With one bold move, the administration would effectively begin the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html

    Note that the above Obama lie storm took place in 2013, and that the NY Times only caught onto it in 2016 because Rhodes told them then that he had been lying about the Iran nuke deal back in 2013.
    Watchdogs of democracy, indeed.

  42. Trump is inadvertently right about the parallels between Nixon and Watergate, and Trump himself. It was Nixon’s paranoia that led to his downfall.

    Here’s the root of Trump’s problems — he lies. All the time. He lies about big things, little things, everything. I and much of the world believes nothing that comes out of his mouth, or his administration’s mouth. It (coupled with his campaign’s collusion with the Kremlin) will be his downfall.

  43. Perhaps one day I will live to see the WaPo headline “Ex-president Obama states, without giving proof, that Obamacare was good for America.”

  44. Obama’s master plan:
    1) Wiretap the opposition
    2) Gather damaging info
    3) Say nothing
    4) Let him win
    5) Ride off into the sunset

  45. We need an investigation, don’t we, Emery?
    Obama was doing some odd things with the intelligence services in his last days in office.

  46. Here is an interesting bit of “fake news.”
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/gun-sales-have-dropped-since-trumps-election-except-among-people-scared-of-his-administration/2017/03/05/03f5b522-ff6a-11e6-8f41-ea6ed597e4ca_story.html?

    Gun sales seems to be down, and the reporters gives hard numbers on stock prices, number of background checks, etc.
    When the writers (T. Rees Shapiro and Katie Zezima) expand on the second half of the headline (“except among people scared of his administration”) that they get anecdotal. They talk extensively about the growth of a gun group called “National African American Gun Association,” without mentioning that it did not exist until two years ago. There is an interview with its founder at the NRA web site, here: https://www.nrablog.com/articles/2016/3/celebrating-the-national-african-american-gun-associations-one-year-anniversary/
    NAAGA has received very positive press from the second amendment crowd.
    This CNN story from Feb. 27th this year says that NAAGA currently has 18,000 members:
    http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/27/us/african-american-gun-club-trump/
    There are about 38 million non-Hispanic Blacks in the Uinted States.
    The WaPo article includes this line:
    ” In February he [Trump] repealed an Obama-era measure to bar gun sales to certain mentally ill people.”
    Trump repealed nothing, The authors need a lesson in civics. The Obama era regulation was an executive-order ban on certain SS recipients passing background checks, and it was not put into effect until late December of last year, w/o public review or a vote, or course, and when Obama was the lamest of lame ducks, and he knew that Trump would lift the order.
    What a real newsy would have done is explored what the Obama ban did, and why, if it was so important, he couldn’t get it past congress and implemented it in the dying days of his administration.
    But the WaPo narrative demands that trump be depicted as handing out guns to the mentally ill, so this is what we get.
    I would challenge anyone to justify the story’s headline based on the “facts” it contains.
    BTW, one of the co authors is an education reporter, and the other was a White House correspondent during the Obama years. Neither has any particular expertise in guns or the second amendment.

  47. Ten Questions for President Trump
    1) Are you making the allegation that President Obama conducted electronic surveillance of Trump Tower in your capacity as President of the United States based on intelligence or law enforcement information available to you in that capacity? 
    2) If so—that is, if you have executive branch information validating that either a FISA wiretap or a Title III wiretap took place—have you reviewed the applications for the surveillance and have you or your lawyers concluded that they lack merit?
    3) If you know that a FISA wiretap took place, are you or were you at the time of the application, an agent of a foreign power within the meaning of FISA? 
    4) Was anyone else working in Trump Tower an agent of a foreign power within the meaning of FISA?
    5) If you know that a Title III wiretap took place, are you or were you at the time of the application engaged in criminal activity that would support a Title III wiretap or might you have previously engaged in criminal activity that might legitimately be the subject of a Title III wiretap?
    6) Was anyone else working in Trump Tower engaged in criminal activity that would support a Title III wiretap or might another person have previously engaged in criminal activity that might legitimately be the subject of a Title III wiretap?
    7) If you were tweeting not based on knowledge received as chief executive of the United States, were you tweeting in your capacity as a reader of Breitbart or a listener of Mark Levin’s radio show?
    8) If so, on what basis are you confident the stories and allegations in these august outlets are true and accurate vis a vis the activity of the government you, in fact, now head?
    9) If you learned of this alleged surveillance from media outlets, did you or anyone on your staff check with any responsible law enforcement or intelligence officials or agencies before making public allegations against your own government?
    https://www.lawfareblog.com/ten-questions-president-trump

  48. Uh . . . a twitter storm is subject to a witness stand deposition?
    Watch twitter’s stock tumble further . . .

  49. Via Paul Mirengoff at Powerline I learn that Trump has appointed harsh Putin critic Fiona Hill as his Senior Director for Europe and Russia:
    http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/02/trump-taps-putin-critic-for-senior-white-house-position/
    Calling Hill a Putin critic is an understatement. She considers Putin to be a KGB agent turned mafia don.
    My own Trump narrative, which is not informed much by what I read in the MSM or see on the nightly news, is that Trump is aggressive, loyal to his voters, lacks discipline, lacks patience, seems always to be stumbling, but comes to his feet when it counts.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.