CSotD: Truth, or a reasonable facsimile thereof
Skip to comments
I’ve been having a debate with myself over when you say a person is misinformed and when you call them a deliberate liar. It’s a debate the entire nation has been sucked into.
The third possible category is “raving looney,” however, and if you’d like a fairly detailed justification for that one, I strongly recommend listening to this On the Media interview with Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and a physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia about the incredible cast of science-deniers RFK Jr has assembled for his newly-revised vaccine advisory panel.
It will scare the bejeezus out of you, but it’s crucial information, and Davies’ cartoon is kinder to the panel than it deserves.
On a related topic, Heller is correct that masked secret police are on the verge of ending Justice, and the Secretary of Justice has revealed herself to be either a deliberate liar or a complete incompetent, denying at a Congressional hearing that she has any knowledge of ICE agents wearing masks.
You can’t not know this, and she was presumably testifying under oath. Perhaps she, too, is a raving looney, but I’m betting she is a deliberate liar.
And the person who hired them is similarly disengaged from facts and truth. I’ve said several times that my coverage of commercial real estate developers made me familiar with this particular example of the breed.
Residential real estate is governed by rules that assume an imbalance of expertise: The Realtor has training and experience in making deals, while the homebuyer may only purchase one or two homes in a lifetime. Accordingly, the Realtor assumes an obligation based on the advantage they have.
By contrast, the law assumes that commercial real estate deals are made with experience on both sides, and as a result, it’s a full-contact sport with only a few basic regulations based on contract law.
And a heaping helping of balloon juice from people eager to make an advantageous deal, and who see the other party as an opponent in the game.
Kal captures the balloon-juice factor in his cartoon, and I particularly appreciate the military man calling the dance “premature,” because the issue is the contrast between Trump’s triumphant bragging about the raid and the less enthusiastic initial intelligence reports.
Matson captures the result of Trump’s overconfident claim of obliteration, which is of a piece with his usual practice of enthusiastic bragging that goes beyond truth into a level of snake-oil claims that would be considered fraud in a residential real estate transaction but are expected in the free-for-all melee of a commercial deal.
We have checks and balances in our government so that Congress and the courts can act as a sort of sea-anchor when the executive branch drifts off-course, but our legislative branch is proving to be, to use a crude but applicable term, tits on a bull while, as Bramhall indicates, the Supreme Court is actively removing the judicial branch from the fray, leaving the executive free to peddle his nostrums. .
Allardyce Merriwhether bore the scars of several failures, while other snake-oil salesmen have filed repeated bankruptcies. Yet they always return to their trade, bold and confident as ever.
Now Dear Leader expects not only to be believed, but to be rewarded.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Anybody can nominate anybody else for the Nobel Peace Prize, and the fact that Trump has been nominated means absolutely nothing, though, as Bennett suggests, it might lighten up the next meeting.
Though probably not to the extent Banx depicts. Which is a damn shame.
If you take Trump seriously but not literally, his incredible string of lies is entertaining and fully expected. Nobody believes in the big fish that they didn’t actually see, or the sexual adventures recounted on an Access Hollywood bus.
And Dear Leader scored $1.3 million in profits from selling “God Bless the USA Bibles”, despite Karoline Leavitt’s insistence that being president has cost him money. (I’m got her listed under the “deliberate liar” category.)
Davies, I think, is a bit unfair in how he categorizes the intelligence reports, the coverage of which made Pete Hegseth go completely unhinged at a press conference. The reports were preliminary and were not only categorized that way by the intelligence sources but reported that way by the bulk of media outlets.
But Davies is correct in noting the White House’s ability to strike back at those who reported what they had learned. And while it’s true that those reports are likely to be refined and corrected as more information is gathered, that’s also true of enthusiastic claims that the sites had been “obliterated.”
Granlund brings up another issue, which is the open speculation and preliminary hunches that Iran anticipated attacks on the facilities and moved their existing stock of enriched uranium.
That, too, is all very preliminary and unverified, but if it turns out to be correct, it would mean that, even if the three development sites were “obliterated” or even severely damaged, Iran would have preserved some vital material that could be more readily developed.
Or shipped off as a series of dirty bombs, and neither outcome would live up to Dear Leader’s confident-but-unverified claims.
In any case, as Markstein suggests, the attacks simply strengthen a sense that nations without nuclear capability are at a growing, decided disadvantage, and this doesn’t just apply to Iran nor is it a lesson taught only by this particular set of attacks.
After all, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for a series of promises, and it seems unlikely Putin would have launched an invasion of a nation that could turn Moscow into a sheet of glowing glass.
We got through the Cold War on the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction, which is why Khruschev withdrew his missiles from Cuba. But today, there are enough countries with nuclear weapons that the others see a threat of “Assured Destruction” unless they, too, can make it “Mutual.”
But, as Anderson Cooper points out, the destruction and obliteration already under way is that of Truth, and if we allow that, anything may follow:
Comments 10
Comments are closed.