So every day, it seems, someone else at some prestigious news organization publishes some “fact-checking” piece on this or that bit of blustery blatant untruth from President-Elect Blowhole. To which I have reached the point of asking: Are you fucking serious? Because do you think this, in any way, helps? Trump don’t care, baby, and the choir for this claptrap already knows he’s lying, while the folks out in the pews actually seem to dig the fact that he does, speaking “truth to power,” as it were.
Trump clearly holds the truth out as one more thing that should never stand in the way of an objective, whatever that objective is. Lies, truth, y’know, whatever.
So, now we are all fact-checking, are we, journalists? We who gave this monstrous goon damn near a clear path to election, simply reporting his lies as easy entertainment fodder, each time he spoke, each new time, as if that was actually, y’know, reporting? Then claiming real reporting by … yes, doing a little postmortem fact-checking.
Seriously, just print a fucking recipe for brownies or something instead. Be useful.
A little late to the party, weren’t we? And aren’t we?
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I for one, would relish finding a new brownie recipe in place of yet another Trumpline…
I’m thinking of following Zonker Harris’s motto: “A life spent in search of the perfect hash brownie is a life well spent.”
Orwell really showed us something with ‘Newspeak,’ did he not? Words like ‘ethnic cleansing’ have taken the place of ‘genocide,’ ‘collateral damage’ now stands in for ‘civilian casualties,’ and now ‘fake news’ seems somehow less alarming, and, I’d argue, cuter, than ‘propaganda.’ Alas, simple fact checking isn’t the only thing to be done. These mountebanks must be howled down loudly and with enthusiasm. How opinion trumps (yeah, I went there) expertise stumps me, and I have to deal with it all the time in my line of work. I am close to people who don’t ‘believe’ in vaccinations, and do believe things that my eleven-year-old would laugh at. Hell, Dr. Strangelove was about making fun of crazy beliefs. Now the son of one of the most powerful politicians of that era is running around telling us that vaccines cause autism, and everybody’s favorite Orange Creamcicle is about to let him head up a commission on vaccines.