http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/19/trump-first-foreign-trip-europe-215163
Attorney General Jeff Sessions will be testifying before a Senate Commitee shortly. He has lied before, and gave a B.S. explanation for the 'discrepancy'. I guess his excuse is "I was too dumb to understand the question." Hey, Sessions is entitled to his own 'alternative facts." In unfortunately, he is also the federal government's law enforcement officer. The consequences for the rule of law could be tragic.
Trump is a chronic liar. Check out a reputable fact check website (see below), think about what is said and analyze it. Trump won the factcheck.org
King of Whoppers award for 2015 and 2016. He beat out Hillary Clinton by a big margin.
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/12/the-whoppers-of-2016/
A year ago, we broke with past practice and named Donald Trump our first ever “King of Whoppers.” This year, the reigning champ defended his title well – once again dominating our annual review of political whoppers.
At his campaign rallies, Trump regularly disparaged the media as “dishonest,” referring at one point to fact-checkers as “dishonest scum.” Yet, he peddled conspiracy theories from a supermarket tabloid and a website that serves as a platform for the alt-right.
The Republican president-elect used a thinly sourced story from the National Enquirer to make the baseless claim that Sen. Ted Cruz’s father “was with Lee Harvey Oswald” prior to John F. Kennedy’s assassination — a claim he doubled down on after Cruz already had dropped out of the presidential primary. Trump also cited Breitbart as evidence that he was “right” when he suggested that President Obama supported terrorists. No, Trump wasn’t right.
During the campaign, Trump also made the wild accusation that Obama “is the founder of ISIS,” the terrorist group based in Syria and Iraq, and retweeted a fake image of Fox News host Megyn Kelly that purported to show her posing with Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal.
Of course, we wrote about plenty of others who distorted the facts and made false claims in 2016. After all, it was the year when the facts caught up with Hillary Clinton’s numerous false and distorted claims regarding her use of a private email server while secretary of state. Contrary to what she said, Clinton did have classified material on her server and did not have government approval to use a private server because she never requested it.
Even so, Trump is in a league of his own." Note that they called Hillary on the carpet.
Check out he website for a complete analysis.
He will probably win again this year.
Sean Spicer said Hitler never used poison gas as a weapon. The list of Trump and Trump administration B.S. is endless.
"House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says Attorney General Jeff Sessions “lied under oath” when he said he “did not have communications with the Russians” during the presidential campaign. She has called on him to resign.
Sessions says that, in context, his responses as part of the Senate confirmation process were “honest and correct as I understood it at the time.” He acknowledged that he should have told the Senate that he “did meet one Russian official a couple of times,” but he said any claims that he gave a false answer are “not correct.”
Please don't respond by saying that he's a better AG than Hillary would have appointed. Every time I try to talk to a Trump supporter about issues that make Trump look bad, they respond, that "he's better than Hillary." Obviously, a lot of people don't want to address issues and come up with B.S. responses that do not address the issues. Brain damage, thick skull or ideological blinders? These folks need to start addressing and facing facts. Get out of the delusional world. Get over the bromance, hero worship, or whatever it is and get real.
Time to abandon post truth, alternative facts. etc.
Please consider the following:
POST TRUTH AND CRITICAL THINKING
“I’m sorry, Jeannie, your answer was correct, but Kevin shouted his incorrect answer over yours, so he gets the points,” says the quiz master to a group of participants, in a cartoon with the caption “Facts don’t matter.” The cartoon gives a clear picture of the post-truth and surreal world. Oxford Dictionaries (OD) announced post-truth as its 2016 International Word of the Year. Post-truth “relates to or denotes circumstances in which objective facts [truth] are less influential in shaping public opinion than
[1]appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
[2] the intense admiration or affection (or the opposites)for the speaker can also overrule the truth] Post-truth also applies to making sweeping claims about objective reality without any, or any substantial .evidence.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics
In the post-truth and surreal era, we are constantly bombarded with messages that can be labeled as “half-truth” or “no-truth.” Propagandists speak in such a way that the targeted people believe and accept disinformation as information. They are successful in their mission as they are convinced that the audiences can be persuaded, manipulated and deceived. Lies that are told in a convincing way are treated as truth and result in shaping public opinion. Lies coupled with emotional appeals win the hearts of the weak who do not know how to differentiate between falsehood and truth, information and disinformation, honesty and dishonesty. We live in a world where deceit, disinformation, distortion, falsehood and fiction try to have victory over information and truth. In the post-truth era, certain lies are considered too benign to be treated as lies.” See book mentioned here (optional) Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era https://www.amazon.com/Weaponized-Lies-Think-Critically-Post-Truth/dp/1101983825
FAKE NEWS, AN ELEMENT OF POST-TRUTH THINKING
This term has two meanings. 1. Present something as ‘news’ that has no factual basis, and
2. Labelling news that we don’t like as ‘fake news’ without checking it, so we don’t’have to consider it.
Below is an example of the effects of the first type of ‘fake news.
For 45 minutes, police said, Edgar Maddison
Welch, cradling an AR-15 assault-style rifle, roamed the Comet Ping Pong pizza
restaurant looking to prove an Internet conspiracy theory that the popular D.C.
restaurant harbored juvenile sex slaves.
The few patrons had fled before Welch shot off
the lock to an inside door, sending a bullet into a computer tower. The North
Carolina man then turned the gun on an employee who emerged from the back
holding pizza dough. The worker ran out, unharmed.
With D.C. police amassing outside on Sunday
afternoon, Welch finally walked out with his hands up — but not before he
finished his search.
He had come to rescue the children, court
papers say he later told police, and now was convinced that none was being
harmed there.”
“Family and friends said they are struggling to understand how Welch apparently became so fixated on a fake news story that he drove from North Carolina with a Colt long rifle, a .38-caliber revolver and a shotgun, determined to take action. The viral Internet tale, which emerged shortly before the presidential election, falsely linked Hillary Clinton, her campaign chairman and the owner of Comet to the alleged sex-slave conspiracy.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/alleged-gunman-tells-police-he-wanted-to-rescue-children-at-dc-pizza-shop-after-hearing-fictional-internet-accounts/2016/12/05/cb5ebabc-bae8-11e6-ac85-094a21c44abc_story.html?utm_term=.eab34e5cbe5d
Some insight is given by this answer to a question put to Pres. Trump:Mr. Trump wanted his inauguration crowd to be the biggest ever, so in his mind it was, no matter what was plainly obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes.”
Most press accounts and much of the debate have understandably focused on
the president’s false and often childishly fantastic “alternative facts.” But
the greater hazard to his presidency, and the country, is the other dynamic in
his hostile relationship with the truth: his refusal to take contrary facts in
— to compare the ego-stroking view from the Capitol steps to the more revealing
aerial photos.
Consider his response to ABC’s David Muir, who challenged him to back up his repeated, and repeatedly debunked, claim that millions of people voted illegally — which he insists is the reason he lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes. Rather than admitting he had no evidence, Mr. Trump said: “You know what’s important? Millions of people agree with me when I say that.” In other words, facts aren’t important; blind trust in a leader is.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/28/opinion/sunday/can-donald-trump-handle-the-truth.html?_r=0
ANOTHER ELEMENT OF THE POST-TRUTH SYNDROME IS THE IDEA OF ‘ALTERNATIVE FACTS.
"Alternative facts" is a phrase used by U.S. Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway during a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017, in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statement about the attendance at Donald Trump's inauguration as President of the United States. When pressed during the interview with Chuck Todd to explain why Spicer "utter[ed] a provable falsehood", Conway stated that Spicer was giving "alternative facts." Todd responded, "
Conway's use of the phrase "alternative facts" to describe what are demonstrably falsehoods was widely mocked on social media and sharply criticized by journalists and media organizations, such as Dan Rather, Jill Abramson, and the Public Relations Society of America
Alternative facts are not facts. They're falsehoods. Choosing to desregard ‘facts’ (or substantial, credible evidence to the contrary, or the lack thereof instead of a rational conclusion based on evidence) are examples. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts
ONE SOLUTION
Critical think is even more crucial in the post-fact age. What to do? Use fact check websites. Open and print this link for 6 of the best.
http://www.technorms.com/454/get-your-facts-right-6-fact-checking-websites-that-help-you-know-the-truth
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