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…