Friday, March 24, 2017

Finally Someone Takes On Trump For His Lies

 
That Trump is a professional peddler of smears and conspiracies has been clear from the outset. After all, we’re talking about a man who built his political name around the nakedly racist and utterly false claim that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. And yet he ran a whole campaign, was elected president, and spent more than two months spouting whoppers from the White House before some of the nation’s largest media outlets began to call him for what he is. And he did it all while branding his opponent as “crooked Hillary,” a ploy by which he manipulated much of the media and the public into minimizing his own misdeeds by mentioning hers in the same breath. (To be fair, some major news organizations, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, have been duly documenting and highlighting Trump’s dishonesty since long before he was elected. That they’ve often been reticent to apply the “L-word” speaks not so much to cowardice as to the high bar they’ve set for deploying such a freighted term. Hearteningly, these publications have become much better about not letting Trump’s false claims stand unchallenged, even in headlines.)

 
 

2 comments:

Debra She Who Seeks said...

That Time cover mirrors the famous and controversial-in-its-day Time cover "Is God Dead?"

Cal's Canadian Cave of Coolness said...

I remember that cover. I found a collection of old time and national geographic covers in a huge file in the Coronation School Library and decorated my classroom with them as a cool timeline of the 20th century. That was one cover that got a lot of comment from the Holy Rollers who wanted it taken down instead of using it to spark discussion. That's when they knew I would be a blind follower of their balloon juice.