CSotD: Finding Reasons to Disbelieve
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Pat Byrnes criticizes the press with an imaginary Page One, accusing them of seeking to find faults with the Harris/Walz ticket while giving Trump a free ride.
It’s a troubling accusation, because he seems to run afoul of Hanlon’s Razor, which states “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
That, in turn, is also troubling, because “stupidity” is a specific charge, while the problem may be more properly some sort of subset of incompetence in which otherwise intelligent people repeatedly make bad decisions.
The nice thing about Fox News is that they don’t make any effort to cover malice with their “We report, you decide” motto.
They even attempted to defend their lies by saying the bulk of their prime time hosts are commentators rather than reporters, which didn’t save them from having to pay $787.5 million for libeling Dominion Voting Systems. Similar lawsuits against Fox and others remain active.
It’s much harder to prove malice in other cases. People have complained for months about the NYTimes apparently doing much as Byrnes’ cartoon suggests, highlighting minor Democratic issues while burying major Republican shortcomings.
It’s natural, of course, that people object when the things they care about are not the things major media cares about. That’s a universal, perennial issue.
But it’s also possible that editors don’t see Trump’s firehose of exaggeration and lies as newsworthy. The old bromide is that “Dog bites man” is not news, but “Man bites dog” is, and Trump has been such a free-flowing font of nonsense for so long that his lies are no longer news.
As Mark Jacobs noted, however, we get hurricanes every year, yet we still cover them and provide warnings about their potential damage.
Besides, it’s not as if the media ignores Hurricane Donald: Yesterday, he tricked several networks into broadcasting a live press conference that turned out to be a half hour campaign speech. CNN finally gave up and cut away, Fox continued to cover it.
And the Harris/Walz campaign had the satisfaction of having told them so in advance:
Stuffed shirts will protest that this sort of thing lacks class, but class has long since left for parts unknown, and if a campaign can’t get attention by behaving itself, maybe a sly elbow in the ribs is called for.
Meanwhile, Chip Bok (Creators) appears to be completely serious in charging the Biden/Harris administration with living up to the treaties and agreements set up by the Trump/Pence administration.
The actual departure on the established date could certainly have gone better, but Trump had not just set the date but had done so without consulting the Afghan government, while his negotiations included freeing 5,000 Taliban prisoners, including some who helped lead the debacle at the airport.
But that is no longer news, and so now it’s Kamala Harris’s fault that the Taliban are in power and have access to equipment left behind.
While, as Joel Pett (Tribune) points out, the MAGAts are testing tampons as an anti-Harris/Walz weapon.
It seems that Governor Walz wanted to make sure young women had access to menstrual supplies in Minnesota schools, a move that has drawn support from women who are willing to share their own horror stories of being caught unprepared.
Sometimes that has included making them available in locker rooms normally assigned to boys but which are used by visiting girls’ teams on game days. Walz didn’t direct that tampons be regularly placed in boys’ bathrooms, but, well, when did facts ever get in the way of a good argument about lady parts?
OTOH, if “Tampon Tim” catches on as an insult, only progressives who never laughed over the fake story of Vance and the sofa will have a right to object. Funny lies about opposition candidates are part of the game, right?
Pat Bagley offers an interesting challenge: If someone accuses Harris and Walz of communism, ask them to define the term. Ditto with socialism.
If MAGAts knew what those terms meant, they might not be so eager to endorse plutocrats and oligarchs, or to condemn those who are, as Bagley suggests, in favor of letting majority opinions shape public policy.
Or maybe they would, since we live in Lotto Nation where people genuinely expect that, at some magical point in the future, they will find themselves among the oligarchs.
And that was more than a decade ago. I wish I could believe people had become more realistic, but I can’t.
Nor have the arguments become any more substantive or realistic. Which brings us to this
Juxtaposition of a Partisan Story Arc
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday (Today)
I almost get the feeling that Prickly City (AMS) creator Scott Stantis doesn’t plan to vote for the Harris/Walz ticket in November. Just a hunch.
And perhaps it’s an issue of his lead time that he hasn’t, in this week-long bashing, said anything more than that people who like Kamala Harris are naive and deluded and unrealistic. Still, he hasn’t offered any reason for his dislike of her, and of them.
Stantis did, however, post this political cartoon last week and he’s right: Harris faces opposition over her connection to the Biden administration’s support of Israel and its ineffective pleas for a ceasefire.
It’s a serious matter, though more in the sense of young leftwingers staying home than of them voting for Trump, whose Gaza policy seems harsher than the Biden/Harris stance.
The threat of abstention also assumes protesters won’t recognize that letting Trump win could lead to concentration camps, environmental degradation and a national abortion ban.
Since her campaign began, Harris has started separating from the administration in calling more forcefully for a ceasefire. Will the firebreathers care?
Ella Baron notes that it’s not just the US, that her own UK government also supplies weapons despite the change there in government, which raises the question of whether a change here — either to Trump or to Harris — would make any difference?
Trump has said it won’t. Harris suggests it might.
And, however much you trust in words, the current administration has just signed on to a multi-national call to resume the peace talks:
This isn’t an answer. But it adds substance to the question, which, in this frothy campaign of vague and bogus charges, makes it stand out.
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