"The Madness of King Donald"
By Andrew Sullivan
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/andrew-sullivan-the-madness-of-king-donald.html
All "norms" aside, it is time to call out Tweety Twump and only a couple weeks into his Presidency.
Fox News cannot explain Tweety Twump falsehoods, but call media hysterical.
Be the frog in boiling water and wait longer for Tweety to make a really big mistake?
The Emperor is naked:
"Used to express when many people believe something that is not true. Used also to express something as untrue. See also the expression "the Emperor's new clothes".
Based on Sufi wisdom, Hans Christian Andersen tells the tale in his "The Emperor's New Clothes", the story this expression derives from. In it. there existed an emperor who loved wearing fine clothes and spent all of his people's money on them. He had a different set for each hour and was, without doubt, the finest dressed man in the land."
Link to story:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=the%20emporer%20has%20no%20clothes
"Trump’s Lies vs. Your BrainUnfortunately, it’s no contest. Here’s what psychology tells us about life under a leader totally indifferent to the truth."
By Maria Konnikova
January/February 2017
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/donald-trump-lies-liar-effect-brain-214658
"All presidents lie. Richard Nixon said he was not a crook, yet he orchestrated the most shamelessly crooked act in the modern presidency. Ronald Reagan said he wasn’t aware of the Iran-Contra deal; there’s evidence he was. Bill Clinton said he did not have sex with that woman; he did, or close enough. Lying in politics transcends political party and era. It is, in some ways, an inherent part of the profession of politicking.
But Donald Trump is in a different category. The sheer frequency, spontaneity and seeming irrelevance of his lies have no precedent. Nixon, Reagan and Clinton were protecting their reputations; Trump seems to lie for the pure joy of it. A whopping 70 percent of Trump’s statements that PolitiFact checked during the campaign were false, while only 4 percent were completely true, and 11 percent mostly true. (Compare that to the politician Trump dubbed “crooked,” Hillary Clinton: Just 26 percent of her statements were deemed false.)"
Here is more:
"What happens when a lie hits your brain? The now-standard model was first proposed by Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert more than 20 years ago. Gilbert argues that people see the world in two steps. First, even just briefly, we hold the lie as true: We must accept something in order to understand it. For instance, if someone were to tell us—hypothetically, of course—that there had been serious voter fraud in Virginia during the presidential election, we must for a fraction of a second accept that fraud did, in fact, take place. Only then do we take the second step, either completing the mental certification process (yes, fraud!) or rejecting it (what? no way). Unfortunately, while the first step is a natural part of thinking—it happens automatically and effortlessly—the second step can be easily disrupted. It takes work: We must actively choose to accept or reject each statement we hear. In certain circumstances, that verification simply fails to take place. As Gilbert writes, human minds, “when faced with shortages of time, energy, or conclusive evidence, may fail to unaccept the ideas that they involuntarily accept during comprehension.”"
And more:
"Our brains are particularly ill-equipped to deal with lies when they come not singly but in a constant stream, and Trump, we know, lies constantly, about matters as serious as the election results and as trivial as the tiles at Mar-a-Lago. (According to his butler, Anthony Senecal, Trump once said the tiles in a nursery at the West Palm Beach club had been made by Walt Disney himself; when Senecal protested, Trump had a single response: “Who cares?”) When we are overwhelmed with false, or potentially false, statements, our brains pretty quickly become so overworked that we stop trying to sift through everything. It’s called cognitive load—our limited cognitive resources are overburdened. It doesn’t matter how implausible the statements are; throw out enough of them, and people will inevitably absorb some. Eventually, without quite realizing it, our brains just give up trying to figure out what is true.But Trump goes a step further. If he has a particular untruth he wants to propagate—not just an undifferentiated barrage—he simply states it, over and over. As it turns out, sheer repetition of the same lie can eventually mark it as true in our heads. It’s an effect known as illusory truth, first discovered in the ’70s and most recently demonstrated with the rise of fake news. In its original demonstration, a group of psychologists had people rate statements as true or false on three different occasions over a two-week period. Some of the statements appeared only once, while others were repeated. The repeated statements were far more likely to be judged as true the second and third time they appeared—regardless of their actual validity. Keep repeating that there was serious voter fraud, and the idea begins to seep into people’s heads. Repeat enough times that you were against the war in Iraq, and your actual record on it somehow disappears."
Sad. We may be defeated by our own minds.
"Scarier still for those who have never supported Trump is that he just might colonize their brains, too. When we are in an environment headed by someone who lies, so often, something frightening happens: We stop reacting to the liar as a liar. His lying becomes normalized. We might even become more likely to lie ourselves. Trump is creating a highly politicized landscape where everyone is on the defensive: You’re either for me, or against me; if you win, I lose, and vice versa. Fiery Cushman, a moral psychologist at Harvard University, put it this way when I asked him about Trump: “Our moral intuitions are warped by the games we play.” Place us in an environment where it’s zero-sum, dog-eat-dog, party-eats-party, and we become, in game theory terms, “intuitive defectors,” meaning our first instinct is not to cooperate with others but to act in our own self-interest—which could mean disseminating lies ourselves."
By the way, where are all these TV ads for Tweety Twump "initiatives" coming from? Who is paying for this propaganda? How can they be legal, promoting Government policies?
How do True Believers defend Tweety's statements about:
- highest murder rate in 45 years (not 2014 spike or 2015 spike, 45 YEARS)
- 5 million fraudulent votes all for Hillary
- omits Jews from holocaust remembrance
- Feb. 9, 2017: Lied about Chris Cuomo not asking Sen. Blumenthal about him falsifying his service in Vietnam
- Feb. 7, 2017: Claimed he was facing a historic delay to get all of his cabinet nominees confirmed
- Feb. 6, 2017: Claimed that terrorist attacks across Europe are “not even being reported”
- Feb. 2, 2017: Lied that Kuwait had issued a visa ban on several Muslim-majority countries after his immigration order
- Jan. 30, 2017: Lied that Delta, protesters, and Sen. Chuck Schumer’s tears were to be blamed for the problems over his travel ban
- Jan. 25, 2017: Lied about voter fraud on ABC News (and many times since . .)
= Jan. 23, 2017: Lied about voter fraud at a reception with congressional leaders
- Jan. 25, 2017: Lied about size of the inauguration crowd on ABC News
"Dear team Trump,'alternative facts' are lies"
By Dean Obeidallah, Updated 10:52 AM ET, Mon January 23, 2017
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/22/opinions/alternative-facts-lies-obeidallah-opinion/
etc. etc. etc. etc.
This is YOUR GUY, True Believers, and he is lying his ass off.
We knew lies were coming EVEN BEFORE HE WAS ELECTED!
"A Week of Whoppers From Donald Trump"
By MAGGIE HABERMAN and ALEXANDER BURNS SEPT. 24, 2016
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/24/us/elections/donald-trump-statements.html?_r=0
Tweety does not differentiate his selling techniques from outright lies so get used to the President of the United States lying to America constantly.
