Lies, deception, and gaslighting

 

Joe Biden's closing argument seems to be that Trump called military personnel "suckers and loser," a thoroughly debunked fabrication of The Atlantic based on four anonymous sources, whereas 19 on-the-record witnesses say he never said it. It would also be totally out of character for Trump to say such a thing, since he has always been a big admirer of the military. The fact that Biden has continually repeated this lie at every opportunity for the past two month demonstrates the bankruptcy of his candidacy. He's against fracking except when he's in Pennsylvania...then he's for it. He knows nothing about Hunter's business arrangements with the Chinese, yet emails and witnesses say he did. Trump failed to protect us from the virus, yet he never says what he would have done differently and everything he plans to do is already being done. His whole campaign is founded on lies, deception, and gaslighting.

19 Obama Lies in Florida Speech

  

1.       “He doesn’t have a plan” for coronavirus. Obama cited the presidential debate on Thursday. However, the president did, in fact, specifically mention Operation Warp Speed, his plan to develop and distribute a coronavirus vaccine quickly. 

2.     Trump couldn’t answer Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes when she asked, “What’s your priority in your second term?” In fact, Trump answered her: “The priority now is to get back to normal, get back to where we were, to have the economy rage and be great with jobs and everybody be happy. And that’s where we’re going and that’s where we’re heading.”

3.     “He doesn’t even acknowledge that there’s a problem” (i.e. coronavirus).  This is obviously not true, and provably so. Trump even talked about coronavirus in his State of the Union address, which Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) ripped in two.

4.     Trump said “if you put some bleach in you, that might clean things up.” Trump never said that. He mentioned new, experimental technologies in UV light, and also specifically said he was not talking about putting bleach inside anyone.

5.     “America created 1.5 million more jobs in the last year of the Obama-Biden administration than in the first three years of the Trump-Pence administration.” Obama seems to be saying that more jobs were created in 2016 than in 2017, 2018, and 2019 combined, which is demonstrably untrue. New revisions earlier this year indicated that slightly more jobs were created in 2016 than in any particular subsequent year. However, seasonally adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that more people were employed in each of the first three years of Trump’s presidency than in Obama’s last. In addition, Trump faced a different task. It is arguably easier to add jobs in the early stages of a recovery than it is to add jobs during a recovery already eight years old. The Obama-Biden recovery was the slowest since the Second World War.

6.     Black unemployment went down, but “not because Donald Trump did anything.” It is possible to credit several Trump policies with lowering black unemployment, especially immigration enforcement. A 2007 paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research noted: “immigration has more far-reaching consequences than merely depressing wages and lowering employment rates of low-skilled African-American males: its effects also appear to push some would-be workers into crime and, later, into prison.” Trump’s focus on domestic manufacturing capacity also arguably played a role.

7.     “The only people truly better off than they were four years ago are the billionaires who got Trump tax cuts.” A Gallup poll recently found that 56% of registered voters said they were better off than they were four years ago, which is a record high. (That’s a lot of billionaires.) In fact, a majority of Americans received a tax cut from Trump’s 2017 tax law.

8.     “He barely pays income taxes.” In fact, Trump pays tens of millions of dollars in taxes, despite losses in some years.

9.     Trump has “secret Chinese bank accounts.” The Trump hotel chain used a legal bank account to pay taxes in China when it made licensing deals. It is not a personal account and the account has reportedly been inactive for five years.

10.  “His first year in the White House he only paid $750 in federal income tax.” Trump paid over seven million dollars in taxes in 2017, but used a tax credit from an earlier year to pay it. Also, he donated his entire salary to the government.

11.   Trump has no plan “when it comes to preexisting conditions.” The president has constantly promised to provide health insurance for people with pre-existing conditions; he issued an executive order laying out his plan in September.

12.  Trump “drove up costs” under Obamacare. Actually, Obamacare premiums have been falling under Trump.

13.  Trump said: “We hope the Supreme Court takes your health insurance away.” Trump never said that. He said he hoped the Supreme Court would end Obamacare (“I hope that they end it”), noting his desire to replace it with a better plan.

14.  Trump is “MIA” when “Russia puts bounties on the heads of our brave soldiers in Afghanistan.” The Pentagon said that there was never “corroborating evidence” of a supposed Russian program to pay bounties for killing U.S. soldiers.

15.  “Joe Biden would never call the men and women of our military suckers and losers.” Neither would Trump, because it never happened. Biden did call U.S. troops “stupid bastards,” however. (He claimed that he had been joking.)

16.   Trump asked if we could “nuke hurricanes.” Even Snopes.com regards this claim as “unproven.” Obama also claimed that Trump had suggested selling Puerto Rico, which even the source for that claim says was never seriously considered.

17.  Trump “cannot call out or even criticize white supremacists.” This divisive, false claim is also easily disproven.

18.  Trump “threatens people with jail for just criticizing him.” This does not appear to have ever happened. Trump did threaten a reporter with prison time — after he defied instructions not to photograph a classified letter from Jim Kong-un. It was the Obama administration, that tried to prosecute journalist James Risen of the New York Times, and which jailed an obscure filmmaker after it blamed an obscure anti-Islamic YouTube video for the Benghazi terror attack in September 2012.

19.  The EPA is “giving polluters free reign to dump unlimited poison into our air and water.” Demonstrably untrue. Obama delivered several other attacks on members of Trump’s Cabinet in the same vein (“declared war on workers” etc.).

What???

Because we all misspeak from time to time, I have been tolerant of Joe Biden's frequent verbal gaffes. But this was no gaffe. He made this assertion deliberately the other day in Kenosha: "We've got to, for example, why in God's name don't we teach history in history classes? A Black man invented the light bulb, not a White guy named Edison." My first response was, "Whaaaat? What is he talking about?" Undoubtedly Joe was referring to Lewis Latimer, who patented an improved version of the light bulb in 1881. But Edison patented his in 1879. So we should certainly give Latimer his due, but to teach that he invented the light bulb would be a revision of history. Long before Edison's bulb, others had succeeded in producing light by sending electricity through some kind of filament. But without question, Thomas Edison was the first to invent a "commercially viable" bulb. Joe was not correcting the historical record; he was pandering.

Examples on newspeak

Rioters are protesters. Smoke canisters are tear gas. Supporting Trump is racism. But the most serious and egregious of all comes from leftists such as Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), who this past Wednesday introduced a measure dubbed the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act of 2020. According to Schakowsky, “Safe, legal, and accessible abortion” IS “comprehensive reproductive health care.” Furthermore, “safe, legal, and accessible abortion” IS “a human right.”

This newspeak is echoed by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), chair of the Abortion Rights and Access Taskforce of the Pro-Choice Caucus, who stated that “abortion care is health care and health care is a fundamental human right.” She went on to maintain that the failure to pay for abortions around the world with the hard-earned money of American taxpayers is the failure to “dismantle racist policies that perpetuate inequities and exacerbate health disparities for Black and brown people here in the United States and around the globe.”

To sum up, the newspeak of these contemporary leftists tells us that if we oppose using tax money to pay for abortions in Burkina Faso, we are racists who are bent on depriving people of their human right to health care. I wonder how many people actually believe that!

Gaslighting America

In simple terms, gaslighting is manipulating a person into questioning his or her sanity by asserting that something is true when it is patently untrue. It comes from a movie called Gaslight where Charles Boyer drives his wife, Ingrid Bergman, crazy by continually telling her what is untrue is true. It's right out of the Joseph Goebbels school of communication arts. The prophet Isaiah described it as calling evil good and good evil. It is usually perpetrated by insecure husbands who are trying to keep their wives in a state of dependency. It is a cruel, sick, perverse thing to do to a fellow human being.

Today I feel as though our entire nation has been gaslighted by the Left for the past 50 years, and we have reached the tipping point where well over half of our citizens are certifiably insane, including six members of the United States Supreme Court.

Meaningless words

As we know, the terms "man" and "woman" no longer have anything to do with genetics or physiology. They are now "social constructs" and can be applied to any human being or all human beings. We are all both men and women, and on any given day we can select whichever one we wish to use to identify us. The result is that these terms have lost all meaning, so they may as well be jettisoned. But they won't be, because they continue to serve a political purpose.

It occurred to me this morning that a new variant of this phenomenon is now fully emerging from the dark shadowy crevices of the Leftist mind. Perhaps it began with Rachel Dolezal, the white women (excuse me, the white person) who self-identified as a black person. But I credit Joe Biden with bringing it into full expression when he asserted that any black person who does not support him "ain't black!" What this means is, not everyone with "black skin" is black, just as not everyone with "white skin" is white. For example, Ben Carson, who certainly does not support Biden, is not black. And Tim Scott, who also does not support Biden, is not black. So taking this to the next logical step, can we say that being black has nothing to do with genetics or physiology but is purely a social construct? This effectively renders the terms "black" and "white," as applied to human racial groups, meaningless. But they won't disappear as they should, because they serve a political purpose.

What then can we say about Black Lives Matter? I think we can say that not all black lives really matter. For example, as BLM marched in protest of the murder of George Floyd, a couple of young black thugs murdered David Dorn in cold blood. But did BLM march in protest of his murder? Clearly, either some black lives don't matter as much as others, or maybe David Dorn wasn't really black; therefore, his life didn't really matter.

The fact is: David Dorn was a 77-year-old retired policeman who was killed trying to protect a friend's business, while George Floyd was a drug-filled felon who was killed after, to some degree, resisting arrest. To me, the contrast between the public responses to the deaths of these two men tells us everything we need to know about Black Lives Matter.

My demand for consistency

One of the things I admire about Leftists is their ability to hold two contradictory ideas in equilibrium without feeling any particular need to resolve them. For example, they can simultaneously oppose the legalized killing of murderers and support the legalized killing on innocent pre-born children. In the midst of the latest goings-on, we again see this amazing talent being displayed. Apparently Leftists see no contradiction between tearing down a statue of Robert E. Lee because he was a "traitor" and establishing their own independent nation within the borders of the United States (i.e. CHAZ). As I contemplate this, I begin to see that life would be so much easier if I wasn't so preoccupied with demanding consistency within my own thoughts and values.     

Context of Schumer's remarks

Chuck Schumer's threats against Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were right in line with the fundamental purpose of the event at which he was speaking, which was to promote violence against the innocent. 

Bernie's deception

Joseph Betz, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University, explains Bernie Sander's view of socialism: “Socialists like Bernie believe that every human has, by nature, the right to food, clothing, shelter, a job with a living wage, vacations, medical care, security in sickness and retirement and education. And each and every human has the justified claim to that amount of each of these which allows the full development of that person’s potentialities.” And who exactly does “every human” make that claim upon? The greater society in which they live? But what if everyone is claiming their right to a vacation or retirement, leaving the greater society without the means to provide such largess? Where does the money come from to cover the costs of these rights? Neither Bernie nor Professor Betz explain this side of the equation. Neither do they explain why “every human” does not include those who have not yet exited the womb?

The professor goes on to say, “A communist is also a socialist but is an autocratic socialist rather than a democratic one.” He then explains that we do not need to be concerned that Bernie’s brand of socialism would give us an autocrat like Stalin, explaining, “Yes, the USSR guaranteed everyone a job, an apartment, free medical care and good education. But the guarantor was a dictator like Josef Stalin, who ran roughshod over the democratic freedoms of religion, speech, the press, assembly, dissent and protections from arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and death.”

Returning to Bernie, Professor Betz asserts that it’s good that Bernie is a socialist, but the fact that he’s a “democratic socialist makes him even better.” This, he explains, is because “he would provide for disadvantaged people’s wants by working with them and their opposites, giving all of them the freedom to dissent, modify, even reject his means to his ends for them. A communist, in contrast, like Fidel Castro in Cuba, might provide jobs and education and medical care to an admirable degree. But the citizens who enjoy these benefits do so at the cost of losing their freedom to dissent or organize or seek an alternative government.”

These statements raise some serious questions. First, the professor says that Bernie would “give” the people the freedom to dissent, modify, or even reject his means to his ends for them. But what a man gives he can also take away. The professor seems to naively believe that an avowed socialist leader would complacently stand aside while the people he rules tear down his socialist utopia and replace it with a capitalist, free-market society. When in history have we ever seen such a compliant socialist leader?

Or in a more limited sense, what if the people decided merely to strip their society of the right to a job with a living wage and a justifiable amount of vacation time? Would any socialist leader be ok with that? Or what if his treasury simply did not have the funds to pay for medical care or retirement living for every human being under his rule? What if the funds were depleted due to a military necessity? Let’s face it, if Venezuela had to go to war today, the already impoverished population would face mass starvation. At any given moment there are only so many dollars.

What Professor Betz seems to be unaware of is that only an autocratic government can give everyone the bare necessities, and only a constitutional republic can protect everyone’s self-evident God-given rights. You can’t have it both ways. If we are free, we must take responsibility for providing for ourselves and pursuing our happiness as we are able. If we want to be provided for and have our happiness served up to us on a silver platter, we cannot be free, notwithstanding the hollow promises of Senator Bernie Sanders.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/joseph-betz-bernie-sanders-and-his-democratic-socialist-vision-for-america-have-my-support