I Hate Being Put In This Position

I hate being put in this position. Donald Trump's critics have proven themselves to be pathological liars time and time again. Whenever he actually manages to accidentally be right about something, the media twists what he says to demonize him even more than usual. Maybe this is why trust in legacy media is at an all-time low?

Case in point: Trump was campaigning in Arizona and made one of his rambley comments in an interview with Tucker Carlson.

The CNN version:

While campaigning in Arizona, former President Donald Trump told Tucker Carlson that former Rep. Liz Cheney is a "war hawk" and said she should be fired upon.

According to the context from Politifact, it's at the very least a lot more nuanced, and means something completely different.

She wanted to stay in Iraq. I took them [the troops] out. I mean, if were up to her, we'd, we'd be in 50 different countries. And you know, number one, it's very dangerous. Number two, a lot of people get killed. And number three, I mean, it's very, very expensive.

And later on,

She is a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face."

In other words, she's a bloodthirsty bitch eager to send other people to kill and die, but she knows damn well she's safe and sound stateside. If she faced death herself, she would probably change her tune.

Of course every mainstream media channel seems to be in lockstep yet again, abandoning the principles of sound journalism to parrot a talking point. Harris immediately sought to exploit this widespread misinformation as a new wedge issue. Remember who keeps saying we need government to crack down on "misinformation?" Harris and Walz. But who deliberately uses falsehoods at every opportunity? Oh, right, these are the people who want to have the power to decide what is truth.

Governments have been selling war on lies since the dawn of history. 20 years ago, there were Democrats pushing back against the neocon warmongers, and I didn't get it then. Not yet. But now I see how many lies we were told, how many Americans died, how many veterans suffer physical or mental wounds, how people in orders of magnitude greater numbers suffer from the devastation American soldiers inflicted on their homes and families.

Dick Cheney was part of that war machine. Liz Cheney cheered it on. Barack Obama was elected as the "peace candidate," and then escalated all of George W. Bush's wars while adding new fronts to the fight. Trump in 2016 was an anomaly. He wasn't a dove, but he wasn't a rabid bloodthirsty warmonger in the vein of his recent predecessors either. He oversaw more than his share of war crimes, and he failed to end wars, but he wasn't playing the neocon game. Then we got Biden, Obama's second fiddle. He (or his handlers) managed to get the US mostly out of its quagmires, but eagerly intervened in Ukraine and Israel to promote more bloodshed and death, drawing out the conflicts so more would suffer and die. Now Harris openly campaigns on war abroad and a police state at home.

We were lied into war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Dissidents were accused of everything from lacking patriotism to collusion with terrorists.

We were lied into COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Dissidents were accused of everything from science denial to wanting people to die en masse.

These lies and accompanying accusations against anyone who questions them will continue as longa s it keeps working. Republicans and Democrats alike want to wield such power more than they want to prevent their opponents from having such power.

I won't be voting for Trump, but I understand why people in swing states would use him as means to vote against Harris. Meanwhile, use this as yet another example of media duplicity. The media has lied about Russian collusion, "very fine people," and now this instead of actually exploring his real failings. The mainstream media is absolutely bankrupt and without credibility, and they did it to themselves. They embody misinformation and disinformation. We deserve better in news, and we deserve better in leadership than either of these liars offer, but at least one of them isn't openly lying us into more wars.