Trump Versus Biden

[SGOS]

WASHINGTON (AP) â€" Refusing to concede a presidential election he lost, President Donald Trump sought falsely to take full credit for drugmaker Pfizer Inc.’s announcement that its COVID-19 vaccine may be 90% effective, wrongly asserted the vaccine news was delayed until after Election Day to undermine him and repeated baseless claims of voter fraud.

I'm thinking this must have been posted already, but I can't remember seeing it.

https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-ap-fact-check-donald-trump-business-virus-outbreak-108077c4b716db604ee49b42c6d64af0

[Unbeliever]

Fact-checking Trump is a full-time job!

[Unbeliever]

You are the only person posting here who isn't a hypocrite.

I seriously doubt that. I've seen little hypocracy from the regular posters, but the drive-bys are often full of it.

[SGOS]

It seems like for the last week or so, I've become aware of main stream media qualifying Trump statements as false.  So much of the time, these incidents are reported as "Trump falsely stated that bla bla bla."  Unless I haven't been paying close attention, this is new to the news.  In the past, one of pet peeves about the news outlets, both TV and news print is that they would happily report whatever a politician said, and then just let it go.  OK, I get that.  They simply report and strictly speaking that is the news.

But isn't that the same thing as reporting fake news?  Sure, people can take it or leave it, but a lot of people will believe it because it's on the news.  It struck me as the media was shirking responsibility and adopting a position of, "Hey we didn't say it.  We just reported it."  My suspicion was that they were afraid of politicians, and I understand politicians in response, may clam up, resulting in less news to report.

But I remember some old saw that freedom and democracy were closely tied to a free press, and I never actually accepted that my perception was entirely accurate, but where does freedom of the press end?  Twitter and Facebook are finally exercising some responsibility with the stuff they allow on their sites.  I agree with the idea of a freedom of the press, but I think that over the years we may have neglected the idea of responsibility of the press.  And I'm hoping that we continue to see more responsible press in the future.  That goes for both parties.  Trump just happens to be the worst so he's taking the brunt of the fact checking right now.  But for Godsakes, if you are going to print political rubbish, at least identify it as such.

[Hydra009]

It seems like for the last week or so, I've become aware of main stream media qualifying Trump statements as false.

Yeah, they finally grew a backbone now that they know he's done for.  Previously, it would just be a "controversy" and he-said-she-said between Trump and whoever was more or less forced to defend reality that week.

[Hydra009]

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/republican-dean-browning-gay/

As a gay goth Methodist archbishop for Jeb, I'm shocked and appalled that people would lie on the internet in a sad bid to manipulate key identity groups among one's political rivals.

[SGOS]

Dean Browning is black?

[Hydra009]

Dean Browning is black?

Not any more than I'm a gay goth archbishop.

[Hydra009]

PA postal worker admits his allegations of ballot tampering were trumped up, got $136,000 from GOP for fake news

Paying these people a dollar is like buying gasoline for the getaway van.

[SGOS]

Trump saying "every vote should be counted," sounds like Democrats weren't saying this long before Trump wanted to stop the vote count.  Maybe if he says it louder, people will think this was his idea.  Maybe like no one ever had such an idea before.  Count every vote!  Yeah, that seems like a good idea, why didn't I think of that?

I saw Chris Wallace on Fox news saying, "When you go to the court to present a case, it's up to the plaintiff to present evidence that the court can consider, but Trump doesn't have any evidence.  It's kind of like Trump is asking the court to find the evidence for him."  Then Trump can stop the count our throw out ballots.

Watching Trump's personality decomposition in the last few months is a case study for psychiatry.  It's hard to think straight under extreme duress, and that's what seems to be happening to Trump.  It almost seems like this is the first time in his life that Trump has been forced to face reality.  It's unfamiliar ground, and if you're not used to it, it's frustrating as Hell as your thinking becomes more and more disconnected.  In the past, he was able to invent his own reality and he could live in it just fine, while others thought they were just watching  a grown up version of "Alice in Wonderland."

I'll go out on a limb and say that Trump entered the presidency with the fantasy dream of finally being able to do anything he wanted.  Everyone knows only dictators get to do that, and even Trump's cries of, "But I wanna.  I wanna," just weren't enough to make his dream come true.  Maybe, just maybe, there's enough inertia behind our democracy to keep it going for another four years.  That would be really nice.

[SGOS]

If you have a bad day at work, come home and kick the dog.  If you're the president who can't get reelected, fire the Secretary of Defense or take away millions of people's health insurance, but don't bottle that anger up.  Alternatively, you might consider growing up.

[Baruch]

I seriously doubt that. I've seen little hypocracy from the regular posters, but the drive-bys are often full of it.

I would characterize the drive-bys as ignorant.  People here see politics and religion as different, but the psychological coping (see new string in medical section) mechanisms are the same.  G-d as Father or Trump/Biden as Father.

[Hydra009]

Nearly 80% of Americans accept that Biden won, 72% say the loser must concede defeat

About 6 in 10 Republicans and almost every Democrat said Biden won.  If you think Republicans are unusually slow to accept reality on this, just check out how they view climate change.

[SGOS]

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-packages/fact-check-video-shows-police-collecting-discarded-amazon-packages-not-thousands-of-trump-ballots-idUSKBN27Q2JC

Social media users have claimed a video shows police finding thousands of ballots for U.S. President Donald Trump dumped in a field. This is not true; local police report that the footage actually shows discarded Amazon packages.

[Hydra009]

Remember when they used to take pictures of buses and use that as evidence that "illegals" were bused in to vote for Democrats?  (clearly, there's no other explanation)

That's exactly the sort of standards of evidence one might expect for people who thought 2011 was the End Times.