Sarah Palin Weighing In…

Alaska’s former republican 1/2 term governor and failed 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has surfaced again. This time to sound off on FBI Director Comey’s testimony that President Obama did indeed not order Trump’s phones to be wiretapped. Trump’s allegations of wiretapping and surveillance are false. Trump,  the nation’s chief purveyor of alternative facts has lied again.

The former beauty queen and publicity hound is suggesting  Comey is tainted because of ties with the Clinton Foundation. On her Facebook page she said the swamp runs deep while questioning why there has been no congressional investigation on what she sees as a conflict of interest issue.

Palin is not the only one on board with the Clinton connection meme. Breitbart “News”, one of America’s premier conspiracy theory publications,  published an article in September of 2016 claiming Comey  is deeply entrenched in the big-money cronyism culture of Washington, D.C. Like most things Breitbart it went nowhere. Groundless sensationalism generally does.

Our guess is Palin, sensing an opportunity to find her way back into the political limelight, and ingratiate herself with the present POTUS at the same time , believes it will somehow make her relevant again.

THE HILL has more.

FEAR AND VICTIMHOOD IN A BOGUS POTUS AGE

In the opinion pages of a local newspaper, another letter writer fabricates this claim of victimhood:

“My fear is that if I wear my Make America Great Again hat in public I may be assaulted.  That is what I call ‘real’ fear.  True Trump supporters are generally a quiet, hard-working, taxpaying, respectful group of people.  We need a little more conversation and a little less confrontation,” she writes. Continue reading FEAR AND VICTIMHOOD IN A BOGUS POTUS AGE

The Surreal State Of American Politics & Government In The Era Of Trump…

A lie by any other name or explanation remains a lie. Unless you are a Trump surrogate who willingly and without question accepts alternative facts as truth.

We know Trump is attempting to build an army of supporters and surrogates who will blindly accept his alternative facts simply because HE states them. No evidence or proof is necessary. Because he is The Donald anything he claims to be true must be true.

All hail The Donald who is making Make America Great “Again”. 

Perhaps it is just me, but I’ll ask anyway. Does anyone else sniff the oder of an American dystopia in the making?

The Washington Post – It was a rough night for Jeffrey Lord, CNN’s preeminent surrogate for President Trump.

During a panel discussion on “Anderson Cooper 360” Monday evening, Lord and seven other commentators discussed the president’s baseless claims that President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign. When the conversation turned to Trump’s credibility, Lord appeared to be the lone guest unwilling to call the president a liar.

On an average day, that might have been par for the course for Lord, who has established himself as a reliable Trump booster since joining CNN as a paid analyst in the summer of 2015.

But Lord’s interlocutors weren’t having it. Hours earlier, FBI Director James B. Comey had snuffed out Trump’s wiretapping allegations, testifying under oath that there was “no information” indicating Obama had spied on his campaign. Even Comey was calling Trump a liar, they argued.

Lord saw it differently, repeating the claim by some Trump backers that he didn’t mean what he said about wiretapping and therefore couldn’t be lying.

Trump, he said, was speaking “Americanese” when he tweeted that Obama had orchestrated a “Nixon/Watergate” plot against him. The president’s supporters knew what he meant, but Washington insiders didn’t and blew it out of proportion.

Cooper and other guests seemed baffled.“What you’re arguing then is the FBI and the Justice Department are mistaken for taking the president literally because they don’t speak Americanese?” Cooper asked.

Other guests continued to press the issue.

“The whole world had a chance to watch this unfold, and it was a direct test of his credibility. And the whole world now knows he lied about it,” former White House aide David Gergen said of Trump.

“We’ve seen it again and again,” Gergen continued. “When we have a president who is a congenital liar, it really matters.”

Lord tried to jump back in with an attack on Obama, but Cooper cut him off.

More BENEATH THE FOLD.

 

Comey Confirms Trump’s Allegations Obama Had His Phones Wiretapped Are False…

So, Trump was wrong. And, for folks like me we suspect he knew he was wrong all the while. He willfully spouted lies to mislead the American people and he should be held to account for it.

Most likely Trump will pass it off that he was given misinformation, pick a scapegoat, and fire him or her. Then, all will be forgone and forgiven.

I suppose there is an outside chance he’ll double down, turn on Comey, and,… you get the picture. He’s that much of a “narcissist”, and, he is crazy. Right?

The Washington Post – On the 60th day of his presidency came the hardest truth for Donald Trump.

He was wrong.

James B. Comey — the FBI director whom Trump celebrated on the campaign trail as a gutsy and honorable “Crooked Hillary” truth-teller — testified under oath Monday what many Americans had already assumed: Trump had falsely accused his predecessor of wiretapping his headquarters during last year’s campaign.

Trump did not merely allege that former president Barack Obama ordered surveillance on Trump Tower, of course. He asserted it as fact, and then reasserted it, and then insisted that forthcoming evidence would prove him right.

But in Monday’s remarkable, marathon hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Comey said there was no such evidence. Trump’s claim, first made in a series of tweets on March 4 at a moment when associates said he was feeling under siege and stewing over the struggles of his young presidency, remains unfounded

Comey did not stop there. He confirmed publicly that the FBI was investigating possible collusion between Trump campaign officials and associates with Russia, part of an extraordinary effort by an adversary to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. election in Trump’s favor.

Questions about Russia have hung over Trump for months, but the president always has dismissed them as “fake news.” That became much harder Monday after the FBI director proclaimed the Russia probe to be anything but fake.

“There’s a smell of treason in the air,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said. “Imagine if J. Edgar Hoover or any other FBI director would have testified against a sitting president? It would have been a mind-boggling event.”

More BENEATH THE FOLD.

THE ART OF WILLFUL SELF-DELUSION

Motivated reasoning and cognitive bias are terms used by psychosocial researchers to describe a tendency among people to filter information, turn off eyes and ears, and consider only the evidence they want to hear.

Everyday in our local newspaper, I read letters to the editor. Letters from hotheads. Letters from bigots who rationalize hatred even as they deny their bigotry.  Most remarkable is the inventiveness of people who go to extraordinary lengths to rationalize the irrational and engage in willful self-deception.

Fake news, bogus conspiracies, straw man arguments, exaggerated and embellished claims, errors of attribution, errors of reasoning, denial, projection … all are examples of cognitive bias.

Each week, I see examples of willful self-delusion in opinion letters and online discussions. One reader says: “You make me sick to think that you walk the streets and could be near me. You are probably one of the animals …”; a cognitively biased abreaction.

“The left absolutely hates Donald Trump. They hate him with every fiber of their being, every cell in their bodies, but they don’t precisely know why.”  But we do know why!  Do you see what we see?  Do you see Trump’s defects of character?  Do you see the bullying of a disabled man, a travel ban that handcuffs children, a deportation order that sends a hospitalized girl with a brain tumor to a detention center?  Partisan bias is cognitive bias when you fail to see the insanity and inhumanity.

Conservative commentator Kathleen Parker condemns his reckless rhetoric. Hothead Trump loyalists denounce Parker as a traitor.

President #45 bashes the press as “an enemy of the people.” Senator John McCain defends a free press as a constitutionally protected right.  Hothead Trump loyalists denounce McCain.

There will always be an angry rabble who cast a blind eye on gross misuses of power. Never dismiss a mob whose hunger for red meat is insatiable. If you fail to feed them, they will assail you as assuredly as flies drawn to carrion.

Galloping hissy fits, boorish misuses of words, ad hominem character assassinations, misquotes, harping, carping, nitpicking, accusations, fabrications, deceptions, insults, and angry outbursts — hardly a week goes by without uncouth examples of cognitive bias leaping off page.