Trump's Lies Preferable to Progressives' "Conceptual Falsities" ? A Farrago Of Lance Morrow's BS Shows He's No Better Than Trump TV

"Doh! I  duz know this op-ed gonna be da best I ever dun' while on MJ an' Ripple!' 


Once again we see the WSJ's   'gig a week'  misfit, Lance Morrow, pulling every conceivable strawman out of his hack's hat to try to assert voters' choice in 2020 is between Trump's lies and Progressive fantasies.  But oh, what fantasies, making Dotard's lies look like a mythic truth by comparison.  (Eliciting the question: How much of a mixture of weed and Ripple is needed to get an over- the -hill, former TIME essayist,  to write such  drivel?)    

In fact, 2020 general election voters have a choice between Donnie Dotard's reckless deformation and destruction of civic and political reality and a leader who will be the opposite and beckon citizens to renew their national pride based on respect for our Constitution and reality.

Recall Morrow is now writing such trash  -  cherry picking the most extreme examples of progressive  politics (what we call using the "strawman" fallacy)  -  after already desecrating his bona fides last year. In a piece of yellow journalism back in October  (WSJ, Oct. 19,  'We've Grown Accustomed To Trump', p,  A19)  Morrow  actually invoked a modified Stockholm syndrome to explain why the Democrats  might not take back the House. He scribbled:

""Familiarity and the passage of time may breed a certain kind of acquiescence, even grudging acceptance.  We see a touch of the Stockholm syndrome.

My guess is that the variations on Stockholm syndrome will play a role in the minds of independent voters in the 2018 midterms, producing a slightly friendlier inclination toward Mr. Trump and anyway, toward Republicans."

Of course, Morrow's midterm projections didn't happen. Most independents saw the insanity and disruption of the Dotard and sided with millions of Dem voters to generate what we now recognize as a true blue wave, and finally, a counterweight to Trump's excesses.

Morrow's recent piece - to try to disarm the unwary into believing he's remotely balanced -  begins by comparing Trump's "falsehoods"  to car sales tactics, e.g.:

"Trump works with huckster falsehoods - the flashy superlatives of a car salesman."

Hmmmm....I was thinking more of the proverbial carny barker or better, snake oil salesman.  Never mind. Morrow  quickly drops all pretense of fairness and invokes the usual false equivalence ploy:

"The progressive left works with conceptual falsities.  Voters in 2020 will decide which style of lies is better."

Here is where this twit needs to be slapped down. Trump's 8,000 lies so far, are baldfaced, straight up, in your face LIES. Like claiming his inauguration crowd surpassed Obama's, that Obama had electronic bugs planted in Trump Tower,  and also that he would "build a wall and make Mexico pay" when he knew damned well that was never going to happen.   

What he calls "conceptual falsities" is Morrow's own brand of conceptual rubbish, much like the invocation of "Stockholm syndrome" for independent voters in his earlier piece.   There is in fact nothing conceptually false about arguing for a nation that works for all citizens not just billionaires and corporations (like Amazon -which I will have more to say in a coming post).

Then, after spewing that indiscriminate bollocks Morrow really loses it, much like an earlier nitwit nabob (Crispin Sartwell of Dickinson College) who insisted Trump's tweets were a form of "literature" as opposed to toddler-level garbage. 

"Mr. Trump composes his reality after the manner of Renaissance painter's penitmento, except that he works at the speed of Twitter."

How about instead, Trump composes his reality in the manner of a drunken monkey handed two cans of paint and induced to splash the contents all over a wall?  But Morrow isn't quite done, at least revealing for us the degree to which his brain has been scuttled by Trumpist balderdash and FOX ("Trump TV")  propaganda,  e.g.

"Trump's abuses, he and his followers believe, somehow become right by coalescing into a larger truth - the mythic America that radiated from my father's old Saturday Evening Post and came to the apotheosis of the Neverland in Dwight Eisenhower's 1950s"

Ah, yes, I recall that era well too. Traveling through the deep South in the late 50s - my Dad driving his '57 Chevy - to get us all to Milwaukee for a family reunion (we had left Milwaukee  for Miami in 1956). . Passing through Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky - and seeing all the stark signs labeled "Whites Only"  and  "Colored"  at water fountains, ditto with restrooms. 

I also recall my younger brother Jerry being read the riot act by an inebriated elderly cracker in Georgia when he mistakenly drank from the "colored" fountain.   And we won't even get into the fact that the cafes and such we frequented for our breakfasts were barred to the "colored".  Yeah, Morrow, real nice era-  but glad you connected it to Trumpism and its "larger truth".

Then Morrow - likely overdosing on MJ candy and Ripple - vents his spleen on modern day progressives - as if anywhere in the same remote league of atrocity as Trump and MAGA -land:

"Progressive are busy reinventing the Kingdom of God on Earth. Trying to make their version as different as possible from his.  They contrive elaborate new genders, for example - ones the deity didn't think of. They invent bristling and ecstatic vocabulary terms like 'intersectionality', 'cistendered'  and 'heteronormality'  -designed to bully reality into compliance."

Hold strain there, "MJ Morrow".  The terms, examples you're citing are valid for perhaps 1/2  percent of progressives, if that.  Like so many on the Right who love false equivalence, we also see Lance loves to commit the fallacy of  hasty generalization. Given he probably doesn't know what that means - like most Trump boot lickers- we need to explain that it refers to an unwarranted inference made in a statement about a sample (or minor subset of a population) but generalized to the whole population from which it is drawn.

The same fallacy commission is evident later as when he blabbers:

"The progressive notion of gender as a social construct rather than sex as a fact of nature contradicts ages worth of human experience about the biological roles of men and women in the drama of procreation and survival."

By now realizing he's perhaps committed  too many generalization fallacies as well as consumed too much of his column space on gender issues ( which characterize only a tiny minority of progressives) we read:

 "The role of law is cast aside for a 13th century dream of open borders and sanctuary"  

 Actually, as I recall my 13th century World history,   walls were ubiquitous, as were the beliefs that populations could easily be sequestered  (and protected) by them.  That illusion  definitely was shattered with the siege of Caffa (Kaffa) in 1346 when Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes hurled plague-ridden rats over the walls. The scene was captured in assorted etchings  and other art, e.g.



Morrow's next to last paragraph is just as loopy and crazed, as befitting a hack and senile doper on his last gasp of meaningful gig legs.  Now finding temporary succor by wallowing in Trump glorification in the WSJ's dubious op -ed pages.  So no surprise - while blinded to the "catastrophic awfulness" of  Trump (Michelle Goldberg's description)-  we next read this codswallop:

"The left disparages masculinity as evil and Western civilization as monstrous, hoping to extinguish the intellectual and moral legacy that created the U.S. in the first place. If we are not careful the strategy that might work."

No, idiot. The left does not "disparage masculinity as evil".   Alert and aware progressives, in the wake of #MeToo, are instead trying to communicate the dangers inherent in toxic masculinity. This is of the same type Trump exemplifies, for example in his serial misogyny, multiple assaults of women through the years - even bragging on it in the Access Hollywood tape. 

Nor does the left imagine or claim "Western civilization is monstrous".  We instead point to how that civilization has evolved from the Enlightenment to become a cooperative, global trade entity - minimizing the wars and fractures that had gone before- and which nearly tore Europe apart.  However, since Trump's ascent he has militated against that trans-Atlantic compact while finding more solace and succor with Putin, than say Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron!

Morrow is right about being "careful" about an incipient and ongoing "strategy". He's just wrong about the real culprit.  Which would be Trump's slow dismantling of all constitutional norms and trans-Atlantic alliances to pave the way for his brand of unitary, narcissistic authoritarianism- in league with Putin's Russia.  And what's to stop that  descent into chaos and fascism with deranged fools like Morrow enabling him as he scribbles such utterly reckless prose?  Prose in the form of op-eds devoid of historical fact and context as well as being replete with every logical fallacy I'd noted in some previous posts, e.g.

Brane Space: A Primer on Logical Fallacies: Part One

brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/08/primer-on-logical-fallacies-part-one.html

Beyond all this,  former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal gives perhaps the best summary of why the voters' choice next year is really a no -brainer- all Morrow's balderdash aside:

"All the accounts together show that Trump is engaged in a serial murder of the Constitution and rule of law. He fires anyone investigating him who wants to seek the truth,  whether it's McCabe or whether it's Comey or even Jeffrey Sessions. He puts in place constitutional jokes like Matthew Whitaker.  He tries to discredit and destroy investigations.  He dangles pardons at people who could help him out in any trials. He declares national emergencies without warrant. He discredits judges. All together  this is someone who is unfit to discharge his duties as our chief executive officer."


See also:

Trumpworld’s outreach to Russia since the Mueller investigation began

And:

Corporate America | Government | Politics | Pop Culture

Deep Shit: Plumbing the Depths

by Jaime O'Neill | February 19, 2019 - 7:28am | 

The Corporate Media Needs Its Ass Kicked Over Its False Equivalence Shutdown Narrative

"The Tea Party is acting like lemmings, just going over a cliff. You shouldn't be taking your toys and just throwing a fit and threaten government shutdown, and that's what this strategy is."

Devin Nunes (California Republican) on CBS Early Show today

"the 'they're all bums' reaction is off-base. This shutdown, the first in 17 years, isn't the result of two parties acting equally irresponsibly. It is the product of an increasingly radicalized Republican Party, controlled by a disaffected base that demands legislative hostage-taking in an effort to get what it has not been able to attain by the usual means: winning elections.Call it the Tea Party shutdown. The group will wear the badge proudly. (USA Today, editorial, 'The SHutdown Party')

Right now, unbeknownst to most Americans, we are in the middle of a new Civil War. No, there are no bullets, not yet anyway , but the consequences in terms of pillaging the nation's treasure are just as real. The last time a shutdown happened, in 1996, it cost $2.1 billion in today’s dollars. Breaching the debt limit would be far, far worse, likely destroying this country's credit and ruining the savings of millions of Americans. But don't blame "congress"   What we have is one (mainly former Confederate ) faction of one extreme Right party -Repukes-  comprising maybe 50 in number, holding all three branches of gov't hostage to a terrorist demand: defunding an already passed and legit LAW.

As Chris Hayes aptly put it two night ago, on his 'All In' program,

"We have one thirtieth of the government holding the whole nation hostage".

And yes, I use the term "terrorist" responsibly, because that is what the fuck they are. Anyone who doesn't believe so is either brain dead, or a Tea Bagger. Let's get it clear here: These Tee Pee -driven Republicans are demanding that Democrats unwind their signature achievement – a piece of legislation that took 18 months to pass, survived a Supreme Court challenge and a presidential election – in exchange for a stopgap budget resolution. On Saturday, they tacked on a provision that would limit access to contraceptives. Are you kidding me? Every REAL American with real blood in his veins ought to be up in arms and bombarding the Tee Pee fruitcakes to tell them to stop this barbarism.

Idiots and fools like Condi Rice (this morning)  - but more often the whole blow-dried corporo-punditry axis of bimbos and himbos keep saying they "hope both sides can sit in the same room and settle this."

Both sides? Let's get it fucking clear here once and for all that there is no "settling" anything when one side (a minority contingent of extremists) has a loaded gun to the other side's head. The gun in this case is effective repeal (they call it "defunding") of an already passed law.

Apart from the fact that this is ALL on one side, so silly talk of "congress" being responsible misses the point (it's a core of assholes within congress) think of the god-awful precedent being set. Imagine if after a repuke administration got a defense funding law passed, a majority liberal caucus in the House held the nation hostage via a shutdown unless they got their way - having it repealed or "defunded".

The whole country would erupt in outrage.

But the corporate media, the wimps who looked the other way while the NSA went hog shit wild in mass spying, are trying to portray it as a "pox on both houses" - equally blaming Repukes and Democrats. This is pure unadulterated codswallop.

Blogger Joshua Holland has exactly the correct take on BillMoyers.com:

"Beltway reporters who see their professed neutrality as a higher ground bear an enormous amount of responsibility for encouraging this perversion of democratic governance. With a few notable exceptions, the media have framed what Jonathan Chait called “a kind of quasi-impeachment” in typical he said-she said fashion, obscuring the fact that the basic norms that govern Congress have been thrown out the window by a small cabal of tea party-endorsed legislators from overwhelmingly Republican districts."


He goes on to observe (again, spot-on) that the "corporate media treat unprecedented legislative extortion as typical partisan negotiations, and in doing so they normalize it."

Indeed, by normalizing it the "fifth estate" betrays its responsibility to inform and educate the American public. Yet only ONE person, interviewed last night in an ABC News segment, correctly pinpointed the Tea Bagger faction as the ones responsible - all the others employed generic mush references to "they" and "congress". Can't these people THINK? Well, it's hard when: a) one isn't already a political junkie and b) one can't depend on the press to clarify issues.

But why be surprised at this media obfuscation and irresponsibility? It's been going on for years, hell decades! Look at the media's inability to properly  discuss the JFK assassination in context without employing their usual dopey "tin foil hat" narrative BS. Michael Parenti in his book, The Dirty Truth, as well as his essay The Gangster State, has well documented how the media has become committed to the "one lone nut" myth almost since the Warren Commission received its specious benediction from LBJ. It didn't help that CIA disinformation hirelings were ensconced at both The New York Times, and Washington Post, so controlled any anti-Warren narratives. This was documented by Kathryn Olmstead in her book, Challenging the Secret Government (University of North Carolina Press, 1996)

In the same sense, to use an analogy, what is happening now in the U.S. shutdown coverage would be like German media equally blaming holocaust deniers and holocaust survivors,  offspring for any new civic turmoil over the trial of  Nazi Beate Zschäpe,   see e.g.  http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/06/what-are-new-german-nazis-really-up-to.html


But make no mistake that sober publications, like The Financial Times, put the onus foursquare where it belongs on the Tea Bagger- controlled House Republicans.  There are also responsible bloggers and media people in the U.S. that do the same - but one must make an effort to find them, But if you believe the shutdown crazies are wreaking havoc, wait until the debt ceiling fight begins and these terrorists take it to another level!  As reported by Ezra Klein:

In return for a one-year suspension of the debt ceiling, House Republicans are demanding a yearlong delay of Obamacare, adoption of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s tax-reform plan, construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, more offshore oil drilling, more drilling on federally protected lands, looser regulations around ash coal, a suspension of the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of carbon emissions, more power over the regulatory process in general, reform of the federal employee retirement program, changes to the Dodd-Frank Act, more power over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s budget, repeal of the Social Services block grant, expanded means-testing for Medicare benefits, repeal of the public health trust fund and more.

Are we going to stand for this? Isn't there some punishment for treason? Isn't it hanging or putting before a firing squad?  All of the above to me indicate blatant nativist, domestic extortion and terrorism (hence treason)  no different from what American "enemy combatants" are using, as in Yemen and Somalia. If those fuckers can be taken down by a drone.....well.....don't get me started!

Here We Go Again....FALSE Equivalence!

Well, we knew it wouldn't be long before the Reich Wing and its sock puppets came out again with the only pseudo -defense that they can muster (after the outrage that erupted over El Rushbo's vile attacks on Sandra Fluke): "Na, na, na.....them nasty lefties did it too ....to Sarah, and Michelle, and and all kind of conservative women and the media gave 'em a pass!"

BULLSHIT!

And isn't this game getting old by now? I mean we already saw it played out nearly two years ago as hundreds of tea bagger outrages reached fever pitch, including cutting gas lines, and tossing bricks through Dem legislators’ windows. The corporate media - spurred on by the Reich blogosphere (including the late Andy Breitbart) then switched into false equivalence or “the incivility is on both sides” mode, as it dredged up incidents of past leftist abuse and attempted to place both right extremists and its concocted left extremists on the same spectrum of misbehavior.

It wasn't until salon.com punctured this crap in a lead story, for March 26, 2010 (‘Eric Cantor’s Phony Victim Story’), that the truth emerged and scales fell off the public's eyes as they beheld it was all a ruse designed to distract from the ongoing right wing violence and portray conservatives and the GOP as much victims as the Democrats. Meanwhile, the Richmond, Va. Police confirmed the bullet was a stray. Salon also noted the building was totally nondescript so there was no indication that Cantor or anyone else lived there. Cantor invoking his Jewish heritage made his spurious charges even more reprehensible, painting the putative “angry leftist” as also anti-Semitic.

But the kibosh was delivered on this "mutual incivility -rage" idiocy long before the tea bagger displays of intermittent explosive disorder appeared. Thus, in a special issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report ('Rage on the Right’, Spring 2010 (Issue137), page 43) the extent of right wing hate groups throughout the country was firmly documented including their locations by code (for Patriot Groups, White Nationalist, Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederate-Secessionist, Racist-Skinhead, Neo-Nazi and Christian Identity. A total of 932 hate groups – all on the Right, documented by the SPLC staff (this number is now well over 1,300).

My point is that just as the faux outrage of the Right back then was exposed for what it was ('Blame the Lefties! They did it too!') so also is their response now after El Rushbo exposed himself as the bombastic, reckless jerkwad he is which his favorite party worships then asks permisison of before they even take a dump. Yet we have commentators who ought to know better, like Denver Post op-ed columnist Vince Carroll in yesterday's Section B, opining that the media have allowed "Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann, Jimmy Fallon, Ed Schulz" and other left -leaning males to get away with murder in putting down Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, Michelle Malkin, S.E. Cupp, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter and other Rightist female poppets, puppets and imps.

Now, let's set the record straight and indicate why this false equivalence is also false analogy. First, there is the issue that all the conservo females verbally taken down were powerful public figures, who either were running for high office (as Palin was in 2008) and had access to the media or who themselves operated within a powerful media realm where they had open access and hence could blast anyone any time they wished. Some (e.g. S.E. Cupp) even were granted access by virtue of false positioning, e.g. pretending to be an "atheist"(but spieling for religious liberty etc.) and thus open to more objective presentation of cultural issues than a normal person. Thus, I already dismissed the likes of Cupp and her fake "I'm a real atheist" road show in a prior blog:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/05/se-cupp-and-case-for-pseudo-atheists.html

As for Palin, let's recall Maher's most aggressive attack on her (which was only incepted and prompted by The National Review's Rich Lowry bloviating how "hot" she was - along with other conservo males) was right after she'd appeared at a fall 2008 campaign rally somewhere in GA and a number of her hangers-on, groupies and applauders had strung up an effigy of then candidate Obama and ....hung it! What did Palin say? Nothing to deter or stop them! Instead she fed the frenzied mob with her own rhetoric on "terrorists" and dragging in "William Ayers" to link to Obama. She merited no quarter, and she got none.. (Though I will admit in retrospect that SNL's Tina Fey did a much more thorough number on her with longer lasting effects - see also the upcoming HBO movie, 'Game Change')

As for Michelle Malkin, I've ripped that little floozy a number of times over her despicable columns and in any case, Keith Olbermann was a lot more generous than I was ...because as Keith noted on his Current TV two nights ago, his references to Malkin (e.g. as a "sack of meat") were actually from an old HBO series and the reference was not gender specific, but specifically emphasizing a lack of humanity! As Keith noted, the same phrase would have been apt for male or female.

As for Sandra Fluke, unlike the Reepo female power brokers and players who've been rightly attacked, she is a young private citizen who has NO radio or TV show, and no syndicated column (read by millions) by which she can rip others to smithereens. Nor does Sandra have any pretensions to any public power or public office - or have major political parties or Super-PAC money funding her!

She is merely one lone, private individual speaking out from her heart from the seat of what is putatively a democracy....and for a right she believes all women should have. But the beastly Right has projected their own fell ambitions and motives onto her, the latest is that she's doing all this for "attention" and "self-promotion". Puh-leeze, give me a fuckin' break already! Would anyone in their right mind, other than a foursquare truth teller, put themselves out there for this much public abuse based on the flimsy basis of ego aggrandisement? Only a moron would believe so but evidently plenty on the Right do!

This compares with Limbaugh's rant, which as one Denver Post letter writer pointed out in today's paper, was rendered:

"while hiding out alone, in a tiny radio room somewhere ...spewing his faceless bile to a like-minded audience".

Will people be intelligent enough to understand the differences here? We don't know, but to put it Keith's words: "I'm not holding my breath!"