The president’s fake Dorian claims matter
It may seem like a small thing, after all, because the president has either lied or misled the American public 12,019 times since taking office so we’re used to it, but people cannot let him off the hook for his recent whopper about the path of Hurricane Dorian.
It could very well have cost lives.
Look, when a hurricane sets its sites on land, those in its projected path are sent into a frenzy of activity.
People pack up and flee to safer environs.
People hit the stores for food, water, and the necessities of life.
People gather in groups to ride it out together.
Everybody is set into motion.
Money, energy, and, sometimes, lives are expended in the effort to dodge killer storms.
When staring a hurricane in the eye, you don’t waste a lot of time. You react as if your life depended on it, which it often does.
And, in those times of emergency, we look for the best possible advice.
Under normal conditions, you could look to the White House for that advice.
Of course, there is a new normal in play these days.
That’s why after the president tweeted that Alabama and several other states “will most likely be hit much harder than anticipated,” the fear set in, even though the National Hurricane Center had already announced that Dorian’s trajectory had veered far from Alabama.
But, these were words from the president and, well, if you can’t trust the president, who can you trust?
I mean even Alabamians realize that a hurricane is something not even Bear Bryant could have staved off.
Thankfully, the Birmingham, Ala. branch of the National Weather Service saw the president’s message and issued one of its own 20 minutes after the president’s Twitter post. In its post, NWS Birmingham told residents “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from Dorian,” and assured them that the system would remain too far east.
When the media, including Fox News, the president’s personal propaganda machine, called him on it he dug in his heels and started another of his Twitter bombasts.
He showed up later with a federal hurricane forecast map that had a segment of Alabama circled with a Sharpie supposedly indicating where the storm would strike.
Now, to be honest, I don’t know if the president could point out Alabama on a United States map, but I do know that when a federal agency makes a change to a document as important as the projected path of a hurricane, it is computer generated by professional graphic artists and does not look like something reworked by a student in Mrs. McGillicuddy’s third grade class.
Why are the president’s lies still newsworthy?
Because they matter, because the public needs to understand that this guy is as legit as the guy running a Three-Card Monty game in the alley; because we deserve better than to have a two-bit hustler in the Oval Office.
The lies have ranged from the ridiculous to the petty, whether he is proclaiming that the noise from windmills causes cancer (it doesn’t); that under his administration the troops received “one of the biggest pay raises ever” (untrue) and that it was their first pay raise in “more than 10 years” (not true); that former Sen. Harry Reid was “thrown out” of office (he retired.)
His petty lies have included reprehensible attacks on President Barack Obama, from questioning his place of birth (state records prove he was born in Hawaii) to claims the Obama administration never submitted documents requested by Congress (evidence shows he turned over hundreds of thousands of documents.)
But, his base remains loyal and I want to know why.
It would be easy to write it off as the results of racism. Although I’m sure there is some of that I hope it is minimal.
It would be easy to write it off as pure laziness. I mean, we see how many people are too lazy to fact-check the malarkey they pass on through social media.
The truth, I think, is that Americans tend to wallow in ignorance.
“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby,” the esteemed social critic and newspaperman H.L. Mencken once wrote.
It is an excruciating reality, but it is our reality.
He also gets away with it because we are now populated by a generation that lives in the moment, moves from soundbite to soundbite.
The president is adept at tossing out soundbites, little bundles of words designed to keep his name in the marquee regardless of how outrageous they may be because he is of the old-school opinion that there is no such thing as bad publicity. He’s the carnie barker who directs you to the geeks who bite the heads off of chickens, the snake oil salesman who sells you a pint of moonshine claiming it is some magical elixir that will cure all that ails you, the hustler who takes your paycheck in the pool hall.
When he was Citizen Don, it was OK.
People accepted his weirdness, his arrogance, his lies as part of the bigger schtick of a bamboozling street hustler who we didn’t worry about because we were sure to never encounter him. So what if he muddied the waters as long as he was the only one swimming in them.
But, now, it is different.
We encounter him on a daily basis and his quirky, uncomfortable countenance has the power to touch our personal lives and we all swim in those waters.
His election is the result of a perfect storm.
We were disengaging from our first African-American president, whose election was a constant source of anger among the White Nationalists who have so deeply attached itself to the hard right.
We had a most unlikeable woman heading up the Democratic Party ticket, a humorless candidate with little charm but an intelligence that far surpassed that of the voters.
We had the usual suspects with deep wallets – Big Pharma, Big Oil, the NRA and Corporate ‘Murica – feeding the muppets on the right who would sell their own mothers for a handsome campaign donation.
Go ahead, take your best shot, tell me how there is evidence that there are Democrats who prevaricate. Sure they do. Libs don’t hold the patent on truth and you should always question what they say as well.
But, I would be willing to bet hard money that you could take the most radical of the Democrats in Congress, count up the lies over the last few years, and they still would not total the 12,019 spun by the president.
And, I guarantee that not a one of them has told a lie of the proportions that would have set people into needless panic like the president’s statement about the path of Dorian.
Does the truth matter?
Damn right it matters.
Peace.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
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