Meet the Press: You can do better....

Liz Cheney and her father, Darth Vader... spreading the darkness and blowing up planets....


to Mr. Charles David (Chuck) Todd
Meet the Press

RE: December 29, 2019 show on lies and disinformation

Dear Mr. Todd,

Although I enjoyed and appreciated your special Meet the Press program on lies and disinformation and journalism's responsibility, I have a few bones to pick.

First and foremost: you had the Executive Editor of the New York Times on your program, yet you failed to raise the most serious and tragic lie of the last 50 years- probably the worst since the Gulf of Tonkin "attack" back in 1964, that led to a Congressional authorization, the vast expansion of the War in Vietnam, 58,220 American dead, untold Vietnamese casualties, and a war that transformed this country. That lie was the infamous "weapons of mass destruction" canard that the Bush Administration used to get us into a war in 2003 that has transformed America and the Middle East. It was not "faulty intelligence" that got us into that war. That war was ginned up by the Bush Administration- you only have to read the stories on The Project for a New American Century which had been promoting an invasion of Iraq since the Clinton years, and whose members ended up in the highest positions in the Bush Administration, including the Department of Defense and the Vice President's office.

https://buildabettermousetrap.blogspot.com/search?q=pnac

"The fundamental essence of PNAC's ideology can be found in a White Paper produced in September of 2000 entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century." In it, PNAC outlines what is required of America to create the global empire they envision. According to PNAC, America must:

* Reposition permanently based forces to Southern Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East;

Vice President Dick Cheney is a founding member of PNAC, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is the ideological father of the group. Bruce Jackson, a PNAC director, served as a Pentagon official for Ronald Reagan before leaving government service to take a leading position with the weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin.

PNAC has recently given birth to a new group, The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which met with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in order to formulate a plan to "educate" the American populace about the need for war in Iraq.

The PNAC plan calls for the US to take control of the Gulf region with overwhelming and deadly military force. "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification," the PNAC document explains, "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." In other words, Saddam is little more than an excuse for "maintaining global US pre-eminence... and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests." After the PNAC document was leaked to the Sunday Herald, Tam Dalyell, the British Labor MP, hit the nail right on the head when he declared, "This is garbage from right-wing think-tanks stuffed with chicken-hawks -- men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war. Men like Cheney, who were draft-dodgers in the Vietnam war.""

The lies told by the Bush Administration were swallowed whole by The New York Times, and there was a spectacular fail on the part of their "WMD" coverage reporter, Judith Miller.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-reporters-defense-of-her-flawed-reporting/2015/04/09/5bf93f14-de15-11e4-a500-1c5bb1d8ff6a_story.html

And you had the Washington Post's Executive Editor, whose paper wrote the above story in 2015, debunking Judith Miller and her credulous WMD reporting in The Times. That same story contained the following mea culpa:

" (Full disclosure: The Washington Post editorial board admitted that it had been “insufficiently skeptical of intelligence reports” in its pro-war editorials.)"

So the upshot is that you committed the same sin of insufficient journalism with both editors that you have been committing for years with the lying liars (mostly Republican politicians, others, like Hugh Hewitt and other Republican "operatives" masquerading as the "press" on your panels): you failed to take them to task for their lies or their failure to discern lies in their reporting.

The difference? When Trump lies, it's to feed or protect his ego. When Bush lied, it led to the deaths of 4,571 American servicemen and women, the wounding, some permanent, of tens of thousands more, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the rise of ISIS, and the permanent destabilization of the Middle East.

The second bone? You had Congresswoman Lynn Cheney on your program in March of 2019, and you let go by unremarked the following bald statement she made to your face: "The Democrats have been in charge for about 2 1/2 months in the House. In that time, they’ve been the party of anti-Semitism, the party of infanticide, the party of socialism."

https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr2=piv-web&p=lynn+cheney+on+meet+the+press+democratic+platform+of+infanticide&hspart=att&hsimp=yhs-att_001#id=1&vid=bf521e412abdef5454a4e8bbbe82f604&action=view

Just because she said it quickly, in the middle of a paragraph, near the end of her segment, was no excuse to let those breathtaking lies go unchallenged. Take it apart: she is claiming that Democrats murder live babies. I haven't heard that slander since the Cossacks slaughtered Jews for allegedly killing Christian children on Passover. You should have stopped her cold and told her:

"Unless you have proof that Democrats are killing babies or that their "platform" urges the killing of live babies, you will have to admit that this is a gross and disgusting slander. And although I'm sure that proof will not be forthcoming, but I'll reserve a slot on next week's show for you. If you don't have it, then we'll rerun your comment and allow experts in Nazi propaganda to appear and explain your "Big Lie" tactic. Same goes for claiming that the Democratic platform is anti-Semitic. Given that the leading lights in the Democratic Party- including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders are Jewish, and given that polls consistently show that a majority of Jews self identify (and vote for) as Democrats, that was also a bald faced lie. But I'll give you a chance to come back and prove that the official Democratic platform- not a few quotes taken out of context from Congresswomen from Minnesota or Detroit- has as its official policy "anti-Semitism." And if you can't do that, we'll rerun your quote and have some top Jewish lawmakers- including Senators Sanders and Schumer, and Congressmen Nadler and Raskin- appear and debunk your lie."

https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/half-of-american-jews-identified-as-democrat-in-2018

The "socialism" comment has been thrown around on your show as well by every Republican politician and most of their "press" commentators, and you have never bothered to press them to define the term. The term "socialism" means the government owning the means of production (i.e., steel mills, cell phone plants, car manufacturers). It doesn't mean allowing more persons to buy into Medicare, although that is a "social program." Here's Merriam Webster's definition of "socialism":

"1. any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods

2a: a system of society or group living in which there is no private property
b: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state

3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done"

There is no Democratic candidate for president who advocates any of those things- not Bernie Sanders, not Elizabeth Warren, not Andrew Yang. There is no Democratic "platform" that advocates it. So how about correcting your panelists and your politicians, or at the very least, ask them to crack open a dictionary (you can provide it) and have them read the definition to the audience. Tell them that if they want to make up their own definition, they will have to publish a dictionary that is generally accepted by the public and by English teachers. Then tell them that the term is banned from your air until they use it properly.

That's about it. I'm available if you ever need any advice on how to cross examine a witness. I'm a trial lawyer with 43 years of experience and more jury trials- civil and criminal- than I can remember. My reputation is sterling (better than I deserve, actually).

Lying Liars and their attempts to change reality... on our TV's

So...... Chuck Todd did a special show on Meet the Press this morning about "truth" and "facts" and "disinformation." He led off with the clip of KellyAnne Conway and her infamous "alternative facts" explanation for Sean Spicer- and Trump- lying about Trump's crowd size at his inauguration. He had on the two executive editors of the New York Times (Dean Baquet) and the Washington Post (Martin Baron).

It was a decent show, and explored the sources of disinformation and a brief history of the lying we have endured from political leaders.

But..... But, it's hard to imagine being a producer of that show and leaving out two huge omissions: (1) "Weapons of Mass Destruction." and (2) the role of the late night comedy hosts in fighting the war against bad journalism and the lying liars in politics.

First: the fact is that the New York Times played a role in the 2002-2003 dissemination of an easily dismantled lie that helped get our nation to swallow the Bush Administration's claims that Iraq posed an imminent military threat (it didn't- far from it) and that it was assembling "weapons of mass destruction" (it wasn't). Prominently among the Times reporters was one Judith Miller, but it was the overall failure of the media- led by the Times- to expose the fabrications of the Bush Administration BEFORE the invasion was launched.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/5bf93f14-de15-11e4-a500-1c…

It was also the failure of prominent Democrats in the Senate with presidential aspirations- Hillary Clinton, who to this day has never admitted why she, along with John Kerry (the 2004 nominee) and John Edwards (also appearing in the primaries) voted to authorize Bush to use force against Saddam Hussein in 2002. The real reason Clinton voted that way was because of her presidential aspirations- not "faulty intelligence." My buddy Glenn and I, sitting in my living room in December of 2002, knew that the claims were lies and that it would be a disaster to invade Iraq. But the senators- including Clinton- who voted to authorize the use of force did so just before the 2002 mid-term elections (it didn't save Georgia's Max Cleland when he made that vote). Clinton knew that if she voted against the use of force, that vote would be thrown in her face later when she ran for president as evidence of her unfitness- her unwillingness to use our military to confront a brutal dictator, as a sign of "weakness" that no woman running for high office could afford to display. She wanted to show that she was just as much a "man" as the other guys willing to use our military to show off how macho they were. And the "faulty intelligence" was a joke, easily unmasked (by anybody who used the most basic logic and had even a smattering of knowledge of Iraq and its ruler). But Clinton still refuses to admit that it was a lie, and she knew it was a lie, that Iraq posed any kind of imminent threat to anybody. Our military had the country surrounded (troops in Kuwait to the south and Turkey to the north). That had an implacable foe- Iran- on its eastern border. And our air force ruled the skies over Iraq.

The other thing Chuck Todd missed was how often his program has been a platform for repeated lying liars: how can he explain the numerous appearances of Lindsey Graham, Ron Johnson (Wisconsin senator) and John Kennedy (Louisiana), and their repeated, conscious lies- and Todd's unwillingness or inability to confront them with their lies while they are on his air.

Meanwhile, late night "comedians" like Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert (I don't watch Kimmell or Conan O'Brien, but I assume they are just as good) do the heavy lifting that the so called "news" shows fail to do: putting up the video of the same lying politicians saying the exact opposite of what they said that day- or, showing numerous liars repeating the same lies with the same words, on Fox News and elsewhere. And mocking them mercilessly for it. Over and over.

Well, at least it's a start. But Todd and the other Sunday morning news shows and their nightly news shows should realize that they are in a war. A war agaainst facts and truth. And they need to fight back. With immediate Pinocchio awards and the unmasking of the lies.

So the next time a Lynn Cheney (Congresswoman from Wyoming, head of the RNC's campaign for Republicans for Congress and daughter of Darth Vader) shows up and says that Democrats' platform is "socialism, infanticide, and anti-Semitism" in the middle of a paragraph, Chuck Todd needs to stop everything else he is doing and call out the lying liar. He just had a member of Congress claim that the Democratic platform is to murder living babies after they are born. That Democrats hate Jews (the large majority of Jews, myself included, ARE Democrats- including Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg- a recent "convert" to the Democratic Party). And Chuck needs to patiently explain what "socialism" is, and if he doesn't understand it, pull out an expert (like Woody Allen with Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wWUc8BZgWE

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/…/liz_cheney_democrats_ha…

A Bridge to the Third Decade of the 21st Century

Here's a serious question: Trump is going to be gone, one way (impeachment) or another (election, hamberder, resignation). After he's gone, then what? We had toxic politics long before he arrived. You can go back to Nixon (his infamous "Southern strategy " followed by a series of crimes for which he was about to be impeached when he resigned), or Reagan (kicking off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi for a call for "States' Rights" near the murder site of Goodwin, Cheney, and Schwerner by the Klan), or George H. W. Bush ("Willie Horton," the "Pledge of Allegiance" "card carrying member of the ACLU.") George W. Bush (Karl Rove, the push-poll in South Carolina that asked voters how it affected their vote that John McCain had a black child (he and his wife had adopted a baby from Bangladesh, but voters weren't told that). The godawful 2000 election and the "riot" of Brooks Brothers suited Republican operatives in Miama to shut down the counting. 5-4 Bush v. Gore.

The 1994 New Gingrich GoPAC memo to Republican candidates to call their opponents "traitors," among other things.

The Ken Starr investigation (Monica Lewinski hadn't even been hired as an intern at the White House when that investigation launched).

And then there was Sarah Palin. In 2008. A celebration of know nothingism who called the question by Katie Couric "what do you read to get your news" a "gotcha question (!!!)" A poor man's Joe McCarthy: "I'm glad to be here in "Real America." Talking about Obama "palling around with terrorists." Cause the rest of us aren't "real Americans" in the Republicans' playbook.

So Donald Trump wasn't an aberration. He wasn't a bug. He was a feature. And the party fell into lock step, even those he grossly insulted and who denounced him (Ted Cruz- Trump claimed Cruz's wife was ugly and his father had helped assassinate Kennedy (!); Lindsey Graham). He was a culmination of decades of the Republican Party cultivating ignorance, stupidity, hate, tribalism, spreading lies, confusing truth when the profit margin might suffer (cigarette companies and the killing effects of tobacco carcinogens; energy companies and pollution and global warming, and so on).

So what do we do when Trump is gone? Here's one observation: Donald John Trump has done America a huge service. He's personified every awful thing about modern Republican politics and exaggerated it to the nth degree. And that has energized the good people. The real "silent majority," which isn't so silent anymore. He's energized the participation of women, as voters and candidates and as elected officials, like no one ever had before.

So here we are. On the cusp of the third decade of the 21st century. We don't have jet packs, flying cars, or a colony on the moon. We do have devices in our homes we can talk to that control the environment and our electronics (that's a cool thing).

And as for our politics? First and foremost: we need comprehensive campaign finance reform, getting all private money out of policians pockets and defanging the PAC money used to influence elections without compromising the First Amendment. (I've already written how that can be accomplished. https://buildabettermousetrap.blogspot.com/search?q=toxic

Once we do that, everything else is possible... If we can do two things: eliminate the electoral college (no Constitutional amendment is necessary, just enough States to pass legislation joining the popular vote compact to require their electors to vote for the winner of the popular vote) and get all private money- contributors, lobbbyists, et al.- out of the pockets of elected officials, the modern Republican Party will be dead. A new party will have to arise- one party politics is bad for the country. Competition is good, and you don't have to go back very far (1993-1994) to see what happens when a "do good" party controls all three branches of government yet somehow can't manage to pass any meaningful legislation, including an expansion of Medicare. We can call it the "New Republican Party." Hopefully, they will get the lying liars out of it.

Impeach the Motherfucker....

(Kristin Anderson told The Washington Post that Trump put his hand up her skirt to her underwear in the early 1990s. In other words, he did exactly what he bragged he did in the Access Hollywood video a few years later).

This is for cousin Larry, who asked how I managed to write such a brief letter (in today's New York Times). The answer is: I didn't. I got an e-mail from the NYT letters editor, who seems like a very nice lady (she had also called my office, but I was in court all day past 6:00 p.m.), who asked me a series of questions, including whether or not I was ok with the editing she had done. I think she did a pretty good job- when I wrote, the House Judiciary Committee had not yet submitted articles of impeachment, and there was some question as to whether they would add the obstruction charges from the Mueller report regarding the Russia investigation.

Anyway, for Larry, below was the original. I only wish the Democrats would pay attention to the forest, as they seem to be only aware of the tree in front of them. The big picture is getting him out of office, while at the same time letting the country know that his behavior is unacceptable and that he will forever bear the stain of being only the third president impeached-- and the third to survive a trial in the Senate, absent some amazingly stupid and catastrophic move by Trump himself that will put the Republicans in the Senate in an impossible situation. You know, like raping someone on the White House lawn or shooting somebody dead on Fifth Avenue. Of course, he'd still have Jim Jordan and Louie Gomert's votes in the House (!)

"Dear Editor:

The House Democrats are, as usual, about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by wrapping up a narrow impeachment inquiry, impeaching the President on only a scintilla of the crimes he has committed- omitting emoluments violations, campaign finance felonies, ties to the Russian Mafia and money laundering, fraud felonies by Trump University and the Trump Foundation charity, and sex crimes including felonies up to and including rape. Sadly, they will send the Senate impeachment articles based solely on the Ukraine scandal, but possibly including obstruction of justice from the Mueller investigation, where the trial will end quickly and be long forgotten by next November, just as the month long government shut down, the children in cages at the border, and the mass murders committed in the name of anti-immigration hate inspired by Trump, are all distant memories.

Instead, Democrats in the House should take advantage of the spotlight, hold evidentiary hearings lasting months, understanding full well- as Trump did when he sought an announcement of a corruption investigation of Biden, not an actual investigation (which would have revealed no criminal activity or corruption)- that it will be the allegations, not the conviction, that will do in Trump. If there was a month long hearing of just the emoluments violations, followed by another month of woman after woman who was sexually assaulted by Trump- also including those who were illegally paid off with hush money in violation of federal campaign finance laws, Trump will continue to lose his grip, and his re-election campaign will be stymied by his inability to focus on anything other than the impeachment hearings.

Instead of wrapping hearings up quickly before the New Year, Democrats should patiently build a case for impeachment that will include every crime committed by Trump, both before he took office and after, and continue building that case all the way to the Republican convention next August.

Then, send it to a trial in the Senate after the Republicans have made him their nominee. And instead of campaigning for President, as the Democratic nominee will be doing, he'll be defending himself in a trial that will last months, as every single item of evidence is presented to the Senate. Because there is not a chance in hell of getting a conviction in the Senate. But that doesn't mean that Democrats can't get every one of his crimes in the public spotlight during the election campaign."