Adapted from the Twitter feed, Sunday, July 21, 2019. Posted Tuesday night, July 23.
Boldly striding away from the truth: Trump on his way to board Marine One in Morristown, New Jersey, leaving another pile of lies behind him as a parting gift. Friday, July 19, 2019. Photo by Al Drago, courtesy of the New York Times.
You know, New York Times, there’s such a thing as being too reasonable:
The president wants to portray his opponents as steering the country in a dangerous direction. But what does it mean to be a socialist — and to what degree do Democrats fit the definition?
…
"How much truth is there to Mr. Trump’s characterization of the Democratic Party?”
None. None at all. You’re asking the wrong question.
Truth doesn't figure in anything he says. He doesn't care if any one thing he says is true. He only cares that it keeps his base too angry to think
It's not just _what_ he says but how he phrases it and under what circumstances.
Taking anything he says as worth serious interrogation is missing the point and falling for his tricks.
“You have some of these socialist wackos, they want to double and triple your taxes, and that won’t come close to paying for it.”
Pure demagoguery. Truth has no bearing. The emphasis isn’t on socialist. It’s on wackos. The “truth” he’s pushing is “they want to double and triple your taxes”. The insult and the hyperbole are the point. He’s not exaggerating for rhetorical effect. He’s exaggerating to deceive and mislead.
Trump:
“There’s a rumor the Democrats are going to change the name of the party from the ‘Democrat Party’ to the ‘Socialist Party.’”
The Times:
“Putting aside the fact that it is called the Democratic Party and stipulating that it is impossible to disprove a rumor that Mr. Trump may or may not have heard, no, the Democrats are not changing their name to the Socialist Party.”
Cute, the way you’ve phrased it. But he didn’t hear it. There’s no rumor to disprove. There’s no may or may not about it. Unattributed assertions of his like this are attributable to him. It’s a given that whenever he phrases a statement this way, as something somebody else said and with that somebody else going unnamed, he’s made it up himself. You may---or may not---have intended a wink in the may or may not, but the effect, wink or no wink, is that you keep open the possibility that Trump may actually have heard it and from someone who would know, and he may have been trying to make what he thought was a legitimate point instead of deliberately perpetuating another one of his lies.
Your article is chock-full of succinct, balanced examinations of Republicans’ hypocrisy on spending and deficits, their penchant for corporate welfare, and their fondness for socialistic policies and programs when they’re good for buying Republican votes----socialism for me but not for thee---as well as how Trump’s own economic policy blunders have caused him to try buying his way out of trouble with his voters. There are also succinct, balanced explanations on how the Democrats as a party aren’t socialists even though many Democrats favor certain socialistic policies, big government programs that will cost a lot of money and can only be paid for with tax increases, redistribute wealth, and “entail substantial changes in the way the economy operates now”----as if those changes aren’t needed to mitigate the substantial changes in the way the economy operates the Republicans have been making since the Reagan era. Moving the country left means, pragmatically, pulling it back from the rightward edge.
But that “balance” is the problem.
Whenever you balance a lie against the truth without flat out calling the lie a lie, and with the intention of disproving it reasonably and not forthrightly condemning it, you do half the liar’s work for him: you make the lie sound reasonable and the truth sound questionable.
I know your upshot is that that the Democrats aren't a socialist party but by the way you’ve framed things and your “reasonable” approach you’ve created the impression that that Trump is just being wrong.
He’s not being "wrong." He’s lying!
Everything he says is a lie, because everything he says in service of the Big Con: selling himself as the President of the Forgotten Man and Woman and has their interests at heart and everything he does he does for them, when he’s really a front for the rich greedy Right Wing corporatists who own and run most of the country and plan to own and run the rest of it. The question isn’t whether Democrats are socialists, but how does calling them socialists serve the interests of the rich greedy bastards?
Last thing.
Times:
The slew of programs many Democratic candidates have supported — universal health care, affordable child care, and higher education and a higher minimum wage — are more accurately labeled proposals of social democrats rather than socialists said Peter Dreier, a professor at Occidental College and scholar of the left.
No, again. Drier is wrong or, rather, he’s right in the way intellectuals too smart for their own good are right----that is accurate but off base. This is an academic reading from a textbook. Those things are more accurately described as Democratic. They've been on our jobs list for at least 86 years.
By the way, how do you write an article like this without mentioning FDR?
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No harm in reading the whole article. Follow the link to "Fact-Checking Trump’s Claims That Democrats Are Radical Socialists" by Reid J. Epstein and Linda Qiu at the New York Times.
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