This is a very careful way of calling something a pack of lies:
"With regard to the House Intelligence Committee's memorandum, the FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it," the FBI said in a statement. "As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy."
But it's a nice way of getting around to this:
Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech. 45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history. @FoxNews beat every other Network, for the first time ever, with 11.7 million people tuning in. Delivered from the heart!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 1, 2018
Which even FoxNews, by the standards set by Director Wray, said was a lie:
For the younger members of the audience (you know who you are!), 1993 was Bill Clinton's first address to a joint session of Congress (by tradition not considered a SOTU in the new president's first year in office), 2003 was W's third SOTU, 2009 Obama's first address to a joint session, 2010 his first official SOTU, 2017 his last; and then there's Trump's. Note Trump barely clears the bar set by W. in his seventh SOTU.#SOTU TV Viewers:— Fox News Research (@FoxNewsResearch) February 1, 2018
2018: 45.6M
2017: 47.7M*
2016: 31.3M
2015: 31.7M
2014: 33.3M
2013: 33.5M
2012: 37.8M
2011: 42.8M
2010: 48.0M
2009: 52.4M*
2008: 37.5M
2007: 45.5M
2006: 41.7M
2005: 38.4M
2004: 43.4M
2003: 62.1M
1993: 66.9M* (largest TV audience)
*Not an official SOTU pic.twitter.com/OZlUHmGQp4
That more people watched it on FoxNews than any other network (I'll take that as read, though it comes from Fox&Friends) only underlines where most of the audience for this was located.
You can say Trump was simply "incorrect" in his assertion, but let's be honest: he's lying. I know everyone thinks this is being "normalized" because the President hasn't been zapped by lightning or dragged out of the White House by an angry mob and tarred and feathered yet, but I see the glass as half-full:
It's getting more and more likely that even the media is willing to call a lie a lie, even when the President says it. The fear that this kind of assertion will run rampant, and everyone will call everything a politician says a lie, is wildly overblown. That horse has left the barn, and the barn has burned down. All that needs to change is for the media to catch up to reality, and when reality is lying to them on a daily basis, maybe they will finally see what is right in front of their nose. Or maybe we just all need to learn to call it a "material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the [statement]'s accuracy."
It kind of feels like that's what's going to be normalized out of this Presidency.
I think everything he learned about historical method he learned from watching TV commercials. Though he probably could have learned as much from watching the shows.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure there are lots of college graduates, even those from the U. of Penn and the other Ivys who believe history as seen in movies, the Pony Express, the Alamo, not to mention the Charlton Heston Moses, where it was all about sexual jealousy because Pharoah's girlfriend (was she his sister, I wonder) had the hots for hunky Moses. If they went with him being 80 at the time of the Exodus from Egypt it would have spoilt the story line.