Standards of Truth?! What has Happaned?

 Standards of Truth?! What Has Happened?

[This is not an astrological report but personal opinion based on a lot of serious study. I try hard to be 'in the middle' of politics because I know there are good, well-meaning people on both ends of the spectrum. This piece may surprise you because I am trying to be fair, and that seems a rarity!]

In 2016 I was appalled at Donald Trump's stretching of the truth, or outright lying. For example, his claim that Barack Obama was not an American citizen, was born in (I don't even remember where, Kenya?). It was a blatant lie which Trump maintained even after birth records were produced. Absurd and horrid. Then there was Trump University, and although I tried to believe that there might have been some redeeming features in it (many of its students in fact gave pro-Trump testimony claiming it had helped them), the facts seemed to verify that it was phony and exploitative.

I did not vote for Trump.

I have also read Michael Cohen's book on Trump which reveals how he maintained untruths deliberately, through clever 'legal' but unjustifiable manipulations. To be charitable, one could say he was a devotee of Machiavelli, who thought that lies were just fine if they secured power for the liar (or something like that).

However, during the four years of Trump's presidency, a funny thing happened. His opponents started lying just as much as he did. They fought Machiavelli with Machiavelli. This was evident in many of the claims they brought forward about "Russian collusion" which seemed to be as full of hoaxes as the supposed collusion was supposed to be. It was evident in the ridiculous claims that Trump had done something totally evil in a letter to a Ukrainian leader which on further investigation seemed as harmless as it could be. I don't say that lightly; I studied the information available at the time.

Now in this second round of impeachment, or would-be impeachment, we have the same thing. I watched the whole hour-and-a-half video of Trump's rally speech on January 6, live, and there was not the slightest indication of incitement to riot or violence or insurrection. Now, when I read in the standard media that Trump incited insurrection, stated blandly as if an accepted fact, I know that either they are grossly misinformed or they are deliberately lying! There is no third alternative.

Likewise when they say there is "no evidence" of election impropriety, illegality, or fraud, or that it is 'baseless,' it is obvious to me---who have studied much of that evidence carefully---that they are either horribly misinformed, or are repeating what someone haw told them blindly, or are deliberately lying. There is no fourth possibility.

Am I claiming that every single claim about election illegality or fraud is true? No. Have you or I had time to investigate every one of those claims, hundreds of which are in sworn affidavits? No, you have not done that and neither have it, and neither has the New York Times! What it has done is to investigate a few selected claims which were clearly weak ones, debunk those, and then assume, and cajole their readers into assuming, that all the other claims were equally questionable. That is a deliberately deceptive tactic. There are hundreds of claims about hundreds of thousands of ballots in eight states. Each one of them deserves to be investigated and the standard media are not doing that. They have not been investigated by courts. Yet the media people will say "The courts have turned down all these claims." The truth is that no court has considered them but has rejected the suits on the basis of technicalities without even looking at the evidence! (An exception is the Wisconsin Supreme Court which voted 3 out of 7 in favor of Trump's lawyers in one case and 4 out of 7 in another.) Every lawyer who has looked at these cases knows that and anyone who says otherwise is being deceptive.

One conclusion I make: Trump's opponents, by imitating some of his tendencies to play loose and fast with the truth, have made themselves worse liars than he has been. Another conclusion: Not everything Trump says is a lie and in fact over the four years of his presidency he seemed to come closer toward honesty about many factors, probably because (a) he knew he couldn't get away with too-gross deception and (b) he does have some conscience and is not the total demon his enemies make him out to be.

All this seems self-evident to me and I am astonished that I am expected to blindly accept the anti-Trump propaganda routinely spouted by CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and many other media outlets.

I hope to continue with this tomorrow, considering to some degree the claims of Mike Lindell in his Absolute Proof documentary designed to prove election fraud. Why does that seem a daunting or impossible task? Because so far I have noted that people either (a) discount Lindell totally as a fool or self-deceived deceiver or propagandistic liar,, or (b) accept all his claims, as loyal Trump supporters who will believe most anything in his favor. Obviously neither of these approaches is the right one.

I watched the video in its entirety and did not think that every single statement in it was totally correct, but many seem either totally or partially verifiable. Others are questionable or susceptible to adjudication through further investigation.

The most astounding claims in the Absolute Proof video are the final ones in the last half hour, propounded by Mary Fanning (who apparently works with Alan Jones). Who is Mary Fanning? I have not been able to find out! Type her name in Wikipedia and you get Elle Fanning! That is weird. Wikipedia is pretending that there is no Mary Fanning, or that she does not exist? Are they afraid of her? Of course I do not accept her astounding claims that computers in China, Germany and elsewhere around the world targeted the voting machines in thousands of U. S. counties and flipped votes from Biden to Trump just because she says so! Obviously this needs thorough investigation. But she seems to have, in the video, hundreds or (thousands?!) of pages of such data and the bits of it she shows are, again, astounding. Why have not the standard media, or even Wikipedia, written about this?

Of course more is needed. Lindell does not sufficiently present that evidence, not clearly enough, not fully enough, but that does not mean it is unreal. It just needs to be investigated. Why hasn't that been done yet? I think Liindell may be working on a new version or a sequel.

I have read the "debunking" of the Absolute Proof video presented by Facebook. It is not good! It is not convincing at all! It is in fact very flimsy. It provides no links or footnotes to its supposed counter-evidence in most cases. Written by someone named Dana Ford (who is she?) it complains that in Fanning's list of supposed hacks of county voting machines by foreign computers, they are arranged in the order of the lowest number of votes flipped to the largest number of votes flipped in a specific county. Ms. Ford presents this as if it were evidence that the data is faked but why would that be? In most digital lists one can arrange them either alphabetically or by quantity or any criterion one chooses. It appears that Fanning chose a "quantity of votes flipped" criterion for the top-to-bottom sequence, and that is as valid as any other. If her data is in fact real, she could easily have it arranged instead alphabetically by county name, or whatnot.

I may be accurate in claiming that what you have just read is the fairest, most balanced exposition of some of these questions available anywhere! I did not have to work very hard to meet that criterion! Do we care about verifying truth any more?

H H H / C P