Lying and more lying

Q: Will it ever end? A: Not with these two.

Today, I saw this, reported by, among others, Fox News:

Former President Trump said President Biden and Vice President Harris’ "rhetoric" is what is causing him to be "shot at," following the second assassination attempt against him since July, while telling Fox News Digital that the suspected gunman "acted" on "highly inflammatory language" of Democrats….

The suspected gunman, Ryan Wesley Routh, had an AK-47 style rifle pointing through the chain-link fence out toward the green; a go-pro camera…He ran from the scene but was pulled over and arrested on I-95. 

"He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it," Trump said of the gunman in an interview with Fox News Digital. "Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out." 

Trump pointed to Biden and Harris’ past comments casting Trump as a "threat to democracy," while telling Americans they are "unity" leaders. 

This is vintage Trump, embellishing without apparent conscience and giving his opponents easy talking points when, with just a trace of discipline, he could make solid and important arguments that would win him votes and, maybe, the election.

First off, there is not an iota of actual evidence that either the present would-be assassin or the first one “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and…acted on it.” Nor, from what is known about either man, does it seem even likely that politics had much if anything to do with it (from what is known at present, each was a serious headcase). Indeed, this stands on about the same footing as Trump’s now infamous debate claim that illegal immigrants, specifically Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, are eating cats and dogs, a claim that seems to be drawing boatloads of ridicule, including from conservatives. I won’t go into more of it here because it’s just too depressing.

The main problem with this stuff is that responsible people, and still less major party presidential candidates, don’t just say whatever pops into their heads. Most people learn this by middle school at the latest. Even if one accepts the notion that politicians by nature are going to lie, this is pushing it way over the line.

The second problem, at least as far as Trump is concerned, is that this bizarre attitude toward truthfulness obscures what could and should be telling points: In fact there has been hateful and vicious rhetoric aimed at Trump for years (the sort of rhetoric the Left, ever suffering from the vapors, denounces, when convenient, as wahoo “incivility”); he was the target of a politically-rigged Special Counsel investigation for almost the entirety of his first term; his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot has been routinely exaggerated as an almost-got-there overthrow of the government; and illegal immigration is in fact a major and frightfully expensive problem, apart from its intrinsic harm of disrespecting our borders and, hence — let’s say it out loud — our sovereignty. You lose the effectiveness of fully warranted attacks on the other side’s corrosive deceit when you package it in your own, guaranteeing that any merit in what you say will be buried by your opponents’ gleefully, and gratefully, seizing on your own blunderbuss excess.

It’s just astonishing that Trump either doesn’t know this or — worse if it’s true — does know it but lacks the character or rudimentary discipline to act on it.

Still, as I trust readers know, I like to be balanced. What I actually started to write about were a few of Cacklin’ Kamala’s whoopers, whoopers she gets away with in the MSM because, ya know, it’s only Donald Trump who needs fact-checking.

The very smart Prof. Jonathan Turley has a good take on the story. Specifically, Turley notes three legal “facts” that are being slavishly repeated in the MSM despite being clearly untrue.

“Crime is down under the Biden-Harris administration.“

One of the most notable slap downs by ABC followed Trump commenting that crime rates have drastically risen during the Biden-Harris administration. Muir immediately balked and declared: “As you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

Harris and her allies have been repeating the claim by ABC. But the actual statistics show that Trump was right. The Justice Department’s released survey found that, under the Biden administration, there has been a significant increase in crime. Violent crime was up 37 percent from 2020 to 2023, rape is up 42 percent, robbery is up 63 percent and stranger violence is up 61 percent. Other reports had shown startling increases such as a doubling of carjackings in D.C. in 2023.

Crime is an issue that hits home, and with even modestly honest reporting, Republicans should run away with it. We had skyrocketing crime for three full decades, from the early Sixties to the early Nineties, when the get-tough approach that became popular in significant part because of the work of Ronald Reagan and Attorney General Ed Meese then began to bear fruit; and crime rates fell by nearly half over the next generation, see this chart. Trump mostly has those same ideas.

Dear Donald: Quit with the dogs and cats for dinner and stay with what works. It’s not that hard.

“Harris has not supported transgender operations for undocumented migrants.”

Some of the greatest mocking in the media concerned Trump’s statement that Harris has supported transgender conversion treatment for undocumented persons. New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser immediately wrote “What the hell was he talking about? No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’s point.”

On CNN, Wolf Blitzer declared how “outlandish” it was for Trump to make such a claim.

But it’s true.

In 2019, Harris told the ACLU that she not only supported such operations but actively worked for at least one such procedure to take place. When it was reported by Andrew Kaczynski on CNN, host Erin Burnett was gobsmacked by the notion of taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained migrants. “She actually supported that?” Burnett exclaimed.

Even the New York Times later admitted that the “wildest sounding attack line” from Trump was “basically true.”

Ms. Harris is a sitting duck on this and other issues that will ring the Amerika Stinks and Decaying Culture bell — see, e.g., reparations and their bastard cousin, anti-white racial preferences. It’s partly Trump’s fault because of his carelessness and disregard for the truth (see above), but it’s also the press’s fault for simply refusing to admit it when Trump is right.

“Harris does not support the right to abortion in the final three months of a pregnancy.”

As Prof. Turley notes, Trump also hit Harris on her no-limits position on abortion rights, allowing women the right to abort a baby up to the moment of birth. Trump said Harris supports laws allowing abortions in “the seventh month, the eighth month, [and] the ninth month,” to which Harris retorted: “C’mon,” “no,” and “that’s not true.”

The hosts again said that Trump was making up his criticism of late-term abortions, including the risk of babies being born but allowed to die.

But in fact, many states, including Minnesota under Gov. Tim Walz (D), protect the right of a woman to abort a baby into the ninth month. While it is often said that this is left to the mother and her doctor, the law gives the decision to the mother.

Late-term abortions are relatively rare, but they do occur. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report estimated in 2019 that about 4,882 abortions were performed that year at least 21 weeks or later into pregnancy.

More than a dozen states, in fact, allow on-demand abortions after a baby is viable and can even survive outside of the womb. Nine of those states permit abortions throughout the entirety of pregnancy. Harris has supported these state laws and certainly did not answer the question on what limits she would support, other than saying that she supports Roe v. Wade.

Clearly, many late-term abortions occur to protect the life of the mother. However, you can have (as both Trump and Harris support) exceptions to protect the life of the mother without allowing abortions up to the moment of birth.

The substance of Ms. Harris’s claims and Trump’s correct rebuttals to them, and the moderators’ treatment of it, is by itself a scandal. Moreover, it could be critical in an election likely to be very close. But bad as all that is, I found Turley’s closing observation even more troubling, in part because it suggests how far our cultural rot has gone, and in part because, worse, it suggests that we no longer care.

What is most striking about this election is that none of this seems to matter….With the help of the media, we have reduced our election to a political Slurpee. It’s all sugar rush and no nutritional value. We now have pundits supporting the idea of no further debates and even arguing that Harris shouldn’t give any interviews because it’s too risky….If you do not say anything, there are no facts to check. The election then becomes a vote over whether you are for or against “joy.”