Tag: Trump Lies

Atlantic: The FBI Desperately Wants to Let Trump Off the Hook (He Just Won’t Allow It)

Pensito Editors

Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: “A simple but obvious fact has been lost over the past few years, amid Trump’s direct attacks on the FBI, and liberal defenses of the FBI against those attacks: FBI agents are cops. Law-enforcement officers, including the FBI, have long been disproportionately conservative, but in the past few decades, like the rest of the nation, they have also become far more polarized by party, a reality reflected in the rhetoric and positioning of advocacy groups such as the Fraternal Order of Police. There are liberal and moderate cops, but they are not close to comprising a majority. Simply put, the FBI is full of people who would prefer not to investigate Donald Trump. He remains under federal investigation only because of his own inability to stop criming.”

MAGA Lies About Pelosi Attack Are Cynical Assertions of Power

Pensito Editors

Art by imgflip

Republicans’ and MAGA right-wingers’ lies about and mockery of the attack on Paul Pelosi in the face of contradictory facts are an assertion of power and the first step toward autocracy. So argues Greg Sargent in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post.

It’s a compelling argument:

In 2020, Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud provided a fake pretext to overturn his presidential election loss. Now that has metastasized: Many Republicans in the MAGA vein are employing “big lies” on numerous fronts, but their purpose has taken a dark new turn: It’s as if all the lying is becoming an assertion of power in its own right, a kind of end in itself.

The embrace of political lying as a declaration of power — of the power to say what reality is — has long been studied by academics. Some see it as a harbinger of autocratic political tendencies.

Read the rest in this gift article here.

The Ad Trump Doesn’t Want You to See

Jon Ponder

In this hard-hitting ad released earlier this month by Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC, a graph showing the rise in confirmed Covid-19 cases is superimposed over video clips of Trump repeatedly downplaying the spread of the pandemic.

In an apparent effort to help publicize the ad, a pro-Trump group is suing Priorities USA, claiming that the ad is “patently false, misleading and deceptive.”

Their quibble is a clip of Trump at a rally in South Carolina on Feb. 28 in which he says, “The coronavirus … this is their new hoax.”

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