FRENZY: Nets Devote 7 Hours to Trump-Ukraine, Only 46 Minutes to Hunter Biden Sweetheart Deal

all fake news. all of the three major networks are run by liberal owners. doesn’t the very anti-Semetic disney company own abc?

@Greg: When has Trump had a favorable affect on the liberal propaganda arm of the Democrat party, AKA the MSM? That would be… never. The media lies, the Democrats lie. Same sewer.

Biden himself bragged he got the prosecutor fired in exchange for the $1.9 billion in aid. Coincidence? Let’s find out. But there is plenty of legitimate suspicion and it is RIGHT to investigate. Unless, of course, you are afraid of the findings. You are afraid of the findings.

@Greg:

Honest reporting does not work in Donald Trump’s favor.

Honest reporting from what sources, Comrade Goebbels? Perhaps your now disgraced CNN (being that you are a Rachal Maddow fan) or maybe the NYSlimes? You are so desperate you are now giving links to The Guardian and Pravda.

October 2, 2019 – Impeachment is driving right-wingers crazy. Literally.

The impeachment fight is driving a lot of right-wingers crazy. Literally.

Granted, some right-wingers (just like some left-wingers) have always been nuts. The John Birch Society used to posit, in the 1950s to 1960s, that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist agent and fluoridation a communist plot. Such kooky views were pushed to the fringes by more mainstream conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr., only to reemerge, in a different form, decades later. The modern right-wing media-industrial complex — Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Breitbart, Infowars, 4chan and all the rest — has provided a home for wacky conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Hillary Clinton’s involvement with Uranium One — and now the scandals that are putting the Trump Train on the fast track to impeachment.

A prime example occurred last week when a fringe website called the Federalist reported that, just before a whistleblower filed a complaint about President Trump’s actions with Ukraine, the intelligence community inspector general had conveniently lowered his standards to allow hearsay. This claim was immediately echoed by all the usual suspects, including Trump himself. He tweeted: “WHO CHANGED THE LONG STANDING WHISTLEBLOWER RULES JUST BEFORE SUBMITTAL OF THE FAKE WHISTLEBLOWER REPORT?”

Trump’s own inspector general had to clarify that, while the wording of a submission form had changed, the standards had remained the same — and that, in any case, the whistleblower had firsthand information. This will not, of course, stop this phantasmagoric claim from becoming an article of faith among the true believers. The Federalist’s editors, who took credit for forcing the New York Times to clarify a misleading article about Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, issued no apology or correction for their own bungling.

Trump has an obvious motive to spread lies as a distraction from the 10 words (“I would like you to do us a favor though”) that have made his impeachment inevitable. What is truly terrifying is that the man with his finger on the nuclear button might actually believe this aliens-are-talking-through-my-fillings drivel.

Trump, after all, tried to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky not only to dig up dirt on Joe Biden but also to “get to the bottom of” reports that the Democratic National Committee’s server had wound up in Ukraine. Zelensky must have wondered what the hell Trump was talking about. Turns out that some inventive wing-nuts posit that CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that identified the Russian hacking of the DNC, has a connection to Ukraine. Because, you see, its Russian-born co-founder is affiliated with a think tank whose donors include a Ukrainian billionaire’s foundation. Got that?

If a friend came to me babbling about CrowdStrike and Ukraine, I’d recommend that he get professional care pronto. Yet Trump is not just yakking. He is enlisting the full resources of the U.S. government to validate this crackpot hypothesis in hopes of showing that the Russians didn’t really hack the DNC and that, therefore, he wasn’t really elected with Russian help.

The president is assisted in this disreputable endeavor not only by his own lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, but also by the attorney general of the United States, William P. Barr. Barr has embroiled Italy, Australia, Britain and other U.S. allies in a wildly improper effort to demonstrate that the investigation of Trump’s campaign — conducted by his own department! — really was a “political witch hunt.” Somehow Trump and his lackeys are able to believe that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was a political hit man and also cite him as their source for their (false) claim that the president was exonerated of collusion and obstruction of justice.

To see how pervasive illogic has become on the right, check out this Wall Street Journal op-ed by Michael B. Mukasey, a former federal judge and President George W. Bush’s attorney general. He wrongly writes that “the FBI took [CrowdStrike’s] word, instead of conducting its own examination, for the conclusion that the Russians had hacked the DNC.” He seems to believe it was really the Ukrainians, not the Russians, who interfered in the 2016 election because a Ukrainian journalist broke the story about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s corrupt dealings in his country. For good measure, Mukasey maligns the whistleblower’s complaint, already validated by the inspector general (and by the rough transcript), as consisting of “whoppers” and “secondhand reports.” Mukasey is the one spreading “whoppers” when he denies that Trump asked Zelensky to investigate Biden as a “favor.”

This is not a contributing editor to Breitbart talking. Mukasey is a pillar of the Republican legal establishment — just like Barr and Giuliani. All three men once enjoyed bipartisan respect. But, like much of the right, they have succumbed to a collective madness that leads them to embrace nonsensical conspiracy theories just like the president that they inexplicably venerate.

The rise of irrationality on the right is a deeply disturbing development that goes hand in hand with the right’s embrace of Trump’s authoritarianism. The willingness of so many Republicans to take leave of their senses rather than face the unpleasant facts about the president augurs poorly for our future. Will they become any saner once Trump is gone? I fear not.

@kitt: The whistle blower even said he got all his information from other people or media, but it’s never too late for a liberal to completely change their story.

Hypnotized sheep?

October 2, 2019 – This poll number proves how powerful Trump’s misinformation machine really is

In a July 25 phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump asked his counterpart to look into debunked allegations of corruption by Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

This is a fact. The Truth. How do we know? Because the White House released a rough transcript of the conversation last week in which Trump said this:
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.”

See, it’s right there. In the transcript the White House released itself.

All of which makes this next fact absolutely mystifying and terrifying: In a new national Monmouth University poll just four in 10 self-identified Republicans believe that Trump mentioned Biden in his call with Zelensky.

Are. You. Kidding. Me.

It is right there in the transcript that the WHITE HOUSE released of the call!
Remember that we aren’t talking here about whether Trump pressured Zelensky to look into the Bidens. He did, but there is a little bit of wiggle room there in that Trump didn’t say “Unless you do this, I will withhold military aid from you.” This poll question deals only with whether Trump actually mentioned Biden’s name in the call. Which he 100% did!

How can so many Republicans say he didn’t? Because Trump has conditioned them to not believe things that are, quite literally, right in front of their faces.

“Stick with us,” Trump told a group of veterans last July. “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. … What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

When you consider that the American President actually told people that “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” this poll finding doesn’t seem so unbelievable. The primary work of Trump’s candidacy — and his presidency — has been to erode the idea that objective truth exists. This is an administration that said the words “alternative facts” with a straight face. And a President who has misled or lied more than 12,000 times in his tenure in the White House.

Virtually every day, Trump takes to Twitter to push ideas that are simply and provably false. No independent fact checker gives credence to the idea that Joe Biden called for the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor to avoid an investigation into his son. There is zero evidence that the whistleblower in this Ukraine story is either a) a partisan or b) already proven wrong in his or her claims. (If anything, the whistleblower’s credibility has gone up of late — as his/her recounting of the Ukraine call was very, very close to the rough transcript released by the White House.)

But he has so conditioned his supporters to believe what he says — and, as importantly, to reject out-of-hand anything the media reports on — that actual facts are worthless to them. Even when — as is the case with the Ukraine call — the White House is the one providing the facts. The rough transcript came from the White House! The media didn’t make it up. All we did is read it!

Down this road nothing good, well, lies. Because we are now not just in an age in which the media is distrusted, we are in a moment in which facts are distrusted and in which the very idea of truth is under direct assault.

This will be Trump’s most lasting legacy — whether he loses in 2020 or serves through 2024. Truth and facts are a lot like an elastic band. Once you stretch it beyond normal bound, it either breaks or never returns to its normal elasticity. That’s what Trump’s presidency is doing.

Please, don’t waste your time on Comrade Goebbels’ click bait that generates traffic for the disgraceful Washington Compost. The article is written by the reprehensible Max Boot who is nothing more than a partisan hack. Boot has a nasty habit of going after other journalists (he fails the test of a journalist) and other competitive publications.