CSotD: The Things That Are Not
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If you’ve read Gulliver’s Travels, you’ve encountered a verbal nicety of those days, which is that nobody calls anyone a liar. Rather, they accuse him of “saying The Thing That Is Not.”
You would also encounter such roundabout language throughout the D’Artagnan Romances, although, in those stories, people skirt the word “liar” narrowly, not to avoid offense but to force the other person to be the one who challenges to a duel. It was a practical matter: The person slapped with a glove had the right to choose weapons and other conditions of the duel.
Tom the Dancing Bug suggests that Donald Trump suffers from dementia, the defense to which is that he can remember and repeat five words in sequence, a defense undermined by his insistence that it is an IQ test. Bolling mounts a convincing array of evidence for dementia, but it doesn’t entirely rule out either stupidity or intentionally saying The Thing That Is Not.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Dear Leader has somehow become convinced that white farmers in South Africa are being persecuted, robbed of their land and sometimes murdered, and so has given them preferential refugee status for immigration to the United States.
Reynolds, who lives there, doesn’t bother with verbal runarounds beyond the nicety of an asterisk in his assessment of the claim, while Kearney makes a more pointed accusation, tying it to the white supremacist aura surrounding the Trump White House.
Kearney’s point is harder to prove — though verifiable persecution and murder of brown people merits no such privilege — while Reynolds’ is harder to trace. Either way, it’s based on Dear Leader having said The Thing That Is Not.
Is he delusional or deliberately lying? Given his ability to frame national policy, what difference does it make? We still have to live with it.
However, it might be constructive to trace how such provably untrue beliefs get into his head.
While I’ve got a suspicion hanging around with Elon Musk might have given Trump the false notion about South African white people, his equally nonsensical idea of Nigerian Christians being persecuted apparently stems from his watching a slanted, hyperbolic story on Fox that made the claim.
Similarly, his easily-debunked belief in Portland riots stems from a Fox report that, according to Pro Publica, deliberately presented video from the 2020 George Floyd disturbances as if they were happening now and in response to current ICE raids.
I guess paying $787.5 million didn’t deter them from broadcasting Things That Are Not.
Fox has long been accused of broadcasting to an audience of one, and things said on that network have a disturbing tendency to pop up on Dear Leader’s social media postings, in policy statements and in press briefings by Karoline Leavitt, who was apparently hired to say The Thing That Is Not, which she does with admirable insistence if not admirable logic.
Again, whether she believes the obvious falsehoods that come out of her mouth seems irrelevant, though a truly religious person might be waiting for the cross she wears around her neck to begin making her blouse smolder.
Then there is the issue of things any attentive high school student should know but that Wharton’s self-proclaimed valedictorian and honor graduate seemingly does not.
His continuing insistence that tariffs are paid by exporting nations is blatant nonsense, and Wiley’s taco seller could make a good living explaining how tariffs actually work to gullible MAGA types, if they were only skeptical enough to ask.
And Dear Leader’s ridiculous, paranoid belief that trade imbalances are some sort of plot against America is similarly unanchored to the term’s meaning.
But his latest foray into the exciting world of Things That Are Not is the preposterous notion that instituting 50-year mortgages would benefit anyone but the lenders, and, thank heavens, it is getting pushback from everybody who is at least as good as ciphering as Jethro Bodine, including some in his own party.
McKee points out that it would take 50 years to pay off a 50-year mortgage, which seems evident enough, though his idea that 25-year-olds will ever again be able to buy houses is optimistic. The median age of a first-time homebuyer is now 40.
The immediate factor is that you wouldn’t be able to move for decades, because you’d be paying interest and never making the slightest dent in your principal. This New Orleans station has an interactive feature where you can figure it out for yourself.
Here’s what I know: When I was covering real estate in Colorado in the mid-80s, interest rates were high, so Realtors began offering 3-2-1 buydowns, in which for the first year, you’d pay three percent less interest, then two, then one and then you’d pay full interest. Later, as rates continued to climb, it became a 5-3-1 buydown.
Colorado Springs being a military town, a lot of servicemembers took these discounted loans, planning to sell before their rates climbed, only to find that, when their hitch was up, they were upside-down in their loans and had to make a profit on the sale in order to avoid a catastrophic loss. (This was made far worse by a building boom that meant they were competing with builders as well as other homeowners.)
The HUD Repo book that came out each month went from magazine- to phone-book size, as people walked away from their loans, declaring bankruptcy and leaving behind a shell-shocked marketplace.
One major development went belly-up with streets, sidewalks and sewage installed but only a handful of homes sold. Those homeowners became responsible for five-figure property taxes on infrastructure divided among too few people, a disaster that made 60 Minutes.
Anyway, JD says our problem with housing prices was caused by illegal aliens buying houses that should have gone to white folks. Apparently, these motel maids and lettuce pickers saved enough to buy those houses for cash, considering they wouldn’t get mortgages without valid Social Security numbers.
JD says The Thing That Is Not, and nobody’s diagnosing him with dementia. Alas, the days of dueling are long over.
But everything is fine. Skies are rosy and our future is bright. Big Brother would never say The Thing That Is Not.
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