ZeroHedge.com<\/p>\n
Submitted by Scott McConnell via The Strategic Culture Foundation,<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n Even amidst a cacophony of nearly nonstop media fusillades against President Trump, the\u00a0New York Times\u2019 charge has stood out.<\/strong> After months of stories presenting Donald Trump as a sexual predator, business fraudster, puppet of Vladimir Putin, tax dodger, walking emolument disaster and whatever else it can dream up, the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0called Trump a liar in a prominent headline\u2014proclaiming \u201cMeeting with Top Lawmakers, Trump Repeats an Election Lie.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Speaking in a closed door meeting with congressional leaders, Trump had apparently claimed that he would have won the popular vote were it not for the votes of millions of noncitizens. After escalating this bit of semi-private braggadocio into \u201ca lie,\u201d the\u00a0Times\u00a0justified itself three days later, explaining somberly that it had not made the charge lightly, but that it \u201cultimately chose more muscular terminology\u201d instead of terms as \u201cbaseless\u201d or \u201cbogus\u201d because, as\u00a0editor Dean Baquet stated<\/a>, Trump had made a similar assertion months ago in a tweet. \u201cWe should be letting people know in no uncertain terms that it\u2019s untrue.\u201d\u00a0Times\u00a0opinion columnists, who\u2014with the notable exception of Ross Douthat\u2014have for a year seemed to write about little else than how despicable Trump is, followed up, rolling around passionately with the L word. \u201cOur president is a pathological liar. Say it. Write it. Never become inured to it,\u201d<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0wrote Charles Blow<\/a>, in one instance among many.<\/p>\n Of course President Trump doesn\u2019t know how many people voted illegally, but, in a country where millions of undocumented immigrants are commonly accorded driver\u2019s licenses, access to public benefits and other accoutrements of civic normalcy, and after President Obama gave a\u00a0pre-election interview<\/a>\u00a0to Hispanic media in which he seemed, in lawyerly fashion, to minimize the legal consequences of voting illegally, all while urging higher turnout, it\u2019s difficult to believe the number is nugatory.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n It clearly galls the new president that he lost the popular vote. So he repeats random speculations about voter fraud (though Rep. Steve King\u2019s\u00a0assessment of the extent<\/a>\u00a0of illegal voting strikes me as meriting serious examination) and inflates them. He does much the same thing in the even less essential question of the size of Trump\u2019s inaugural crowd (plainly smaller than Obama\u2019s in 2008). He does it in extolling the excellence of his very good golf courses. If one speculated about why Trump bothers, one might surmise that he thinks his supporters expect\u2014and deserve\u2014some pushback against a media determined, from the outset, to paint, as far as possible, his presidency as partially or wholly illegitimate.<\/p>\n In other words, Trump did what politicians do routinely: take more credit than they deserve, make an unsubstantiated claim, stretch the truth.<\/strong> Trump probably does it a little more. And\u00a0New York Times\u00a0editors conclude that instead of being a so-what issue, or fodder for a\u00a0Saturday Night Live\u00a0skit, it should be elevated into a \u201clie\u201d to serve as the \u201cnot my president\u201d talking point of the week, until it is replaced by a new one. (It was replaced by Trump\u2019s doubling down on a previous Obama order pausing admissions of refugees from certain Muslim-majority countries, a policy that went virtually unnoticed when Obama did it in 2011.) The increasingly interlocking alliance between the establishment media and the protest left is a new phenomenon, one that hasn\u2019t been seen in America since the radical 1960s.<\/strong><\/p>\n When does a politician\u2019s unsubstantiated statement merit being labeled a \u201clie\u201d? <\/strong><\/em><\/u>The line between political misrepresentation and lying is not always a bright one. When, in 1988, Bob Dole accused George H. W. Bush of \u201clying about his record\u201d (after taking a pounding from Bush\u2019s attack ads in New Hampshire), the remark was taken as evidence of Dole\u2019s hot temper, not Bush\u2019s lack of veracity. When an official gives deliberately false or misleading testimony under oath before Congress, it is commonly deemed more serious, and if discovered has serious legal consequences. If the question is generally murky, one thing is clear: a casual and unsubstantiated political boast gets turned from a \u201cso what\u201d into a \u201clie\u201d when the paper publishing it has fully internalized its role as part of the opposition.<\/em><\/p>\n Yet one might have thought that, given its recent history, the\u00a0Times\u00a0would be more careful about making such claims. <\/strong>Twice in recent memory, the\u00a0Times\u00a0has felt the need to publicly acknowledge its failings to readers about matters regarding its journalistic mission, that is, about presenting a true picture of the world. The most recent (and more benign) came five days after the election, when in a\u00a0letter to subscribers<\/a>, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and executive editor Dean Baquet, vowed to \u201crededicate ourselves\u201d to honest reporting, \u201cstriving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories we bring to you.\u201d It was a tacit admission that the\u00a0Times\u00a0had failed in its horserace reporting, which up until Election Day had emphasized stories like the frazzled and unprofessional nature of the Trump effort, in contrast to the finely honed Hillary ground game and the surging anti-Trump Latino vote. On election eve,\u00a0Times\u00a0\u201cdata-driven\u201d estimates had placed Hillary\u2019s chances of victory at 84 percent, but a\u00a0Times\u00a0reader would have been hard put to explain how there could be any doubt about the outcome at all, so missing were respectable arguments for Trump from the paper\u2019s pages. <\/strong>The final pileup came on the morning after, when the headline acknowledging Trump\u2019s victory seemed to parody the solipsism of the paper\u2019s editors. \u201cDemocrats, Students, and Foreign Allies Face the Reality of the Trump Presidency<\/a>.\u201d The editors could not bring themselves to acknowledge that the nation\u2019s voters had opted for fundamental change and upended an election scenario long assumed inevitable by bicoastal elites.<\/p>\n In the interceding two months, some flashes of the\u00a0Times\u2019 pledges to cover the Trump phenomenon with more objectivity were apparent<\/strong>: one report on\u00a0women who voted for Trump<\/a>\u00a0allowed them to speak in their own words, as did a\u00a0recent story on voters<\/a>\u00a0who backed Trump\u2019s immigration restrictions. But emphasis on \u201cthe lie\u201d illustrates that in its present incarnation the\u00a0Times\u00a0is not going to reform itself.<\/strong> The paper\u2019s reporters, editors and columnists\u2014with a handful of exceptions\u2014harbor a visceral hatred for Donald Trump and feel it their higher calling to act on their hate in everything they put in the paper. When it comes to Trump\u2019s ties to Russia, the paper has acted upon the thinnest of evidence to lodge the most sweeping of claims against Trump. Is it lying, or just engaging in reckless hyperbole?<\/p>\n However biased the\u00a0Times\u2019 Trump coverage, the consequences were mild compared to the paper\u2019s record in the run-up to the Iraq War.<\/strong><\/u> In the year prior to the invasion of Iraq, the\u00a0Times\u00a0published numerous front-page \u201cscoops\u201d based primarily on fake facts leaked to its reporters from Iraqi defectors whose goal was to spur an invasion of Iraq. Judith Miller wrote several stories promoting disinformation from the notorious fabricator Ahmed Chalabi and others in his network; so, too, did the\u00a0Times\u00a0give credulous play to the most alarming (and incorrect) administration interpretations of Saddam\u2019s effort to procure aluminum tubes. As some media analysts\u00a0have pointed out<\/a>, numerous voices in the intelligence and nonproliferation world doubted the claims reported in the\u00a0Times\u00a0scoops, and tried to warn the paper. The\u00a0Times\u00a0customarily ignored them, or buried skeptical voices in small paragraphs deep inside the paper.<\/p>\n