John Adams, the second U.S. president, famously wrote following the Boston Massacre of 1770: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” Today, there are epic gladiator games occurring in the toxic political arena where every partisan soul is out for blood, vengeance, and power. As histrionic talking heads ring the doomsday alarm daily, declaring that anything coming out of the White House is worse than Watergate, a chief figure in the age of enlightenment has been conquered and victimized: Truth. The truth, unfortunately, has been bastardized. Facts have been used when they suit the occasion and then vanquished to desolate lands like a leper.
Unreliable Sources
David Remnick, the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources with Brian Stelter to discuss the impeachment of President Donald Trump. He expressed his displeasure with various polling data that reveal not everybody is believing the “facts” about the case. Remnick conceded that the population is divided along ideological lines, but he pointed out that he and his leftist bubble inhabitants cannot understand why “the evidence of things don’t penetrate so many of our brothers and sisters.”
And, according to Remnick, this threatens democracy – at home and abroad – and the entire planet.
Remnick told Stelter:
“The stakes here are immense, it’s not just about the political future of one man – Donald Trump, it’s about the future of democracy and democratic process, and this is a trend throughout the world. It’s about the future of the Earth.”
His feigned outrage was quickly called out. After his interview was aired, people started going through his treasure trove of content and came across a series of pro-war stories in the months leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He promoted the links between then-President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda and parroted the White House’s claims about Baghdad possessing weapons of mass destruction.
Yet, Remnick wants the public to take his media friends’ word on impeaching President Trump. Liberty Nation’s Graham Noble recently and brilliantly reported on how the mainstream press published misleading headlines to incriminate President Trump over Ukraine aid. Noble explained:
“The media breathlessly reported that the aid was frozen immediately after Trump’s now-famous July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president. That all sounds terribly incriminating – if only it were true.
Misleading headlines appear to have been deliberately written to imply a sequence of events that might incriminate the president but, in fact, the articles beneath those headlines concede that a hold was placed on the aid well before the Trump-Zelensky phone call. In each case, that one, vital fact is buried several paragraphs into the respective reports.”
How can the public blindly believe these folks?
In the Swamp, the globalists either get the facts wrong or they employ unscrupulous methods to manipulate the public to generate support. They justify their odious actions by adopting the logic of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY): It is better to be morally right than to be factually correct. In this case, the left believes its crusade of mendacity is warranted because professional activists are trying to oust a supposed racist, transphobe, homophobe, Islamophobe, and xenophobe.
The War in Iraq and on Truth
All the figures who have proclaimed that President Trump and the right have launched a war on truth need to look in the mirror. Or, at the very least, read a history book of the last 10 or 20 years.
In 2018, Hillary Clinton excoriated the president for attacking truth, facts, and reason. Considering her blatant lies, flip flops, and policy reversals for political expediency, her statement was rich in irony. Like Remnick, Clinton sold the public a bill of goods on Iraq, voting for the biggest boondoggle in modern U.S. history. As Secretary of State, she claimed that the Benghazi attack was the result of an anti-Muslim YouTube video, which later turned out to be false. Indeed, you could author a library of books on Clinton half-truths, misleading comments, and downright lies that would put a crime noir criminal to shame.
Joe Biden
Former Vice President Joe Biden, who remains the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, has initiated a blitzkrieg on President Trump’s “flat-out lies.” While it is best not to delve too much into his catalog of gaffes on the 2020 campaign trail (regurgitating the Fine People Hoax, for example), it is important to remember Biden voting to invade Iraq. Some of his proposals to solve the quagmire in Baghdad, including a plan to split the country into three different parts to satisfy the Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis, have also been questionable. Biden now claims that he opposed the war as soon as it started, but his past remarks offer a different tale. “I don’t know a single informed person who is suggesting you can take down Saddam and not be prepared to stay for two, four, five years to give the country a chance to be held together,” Biden stated, recounting a conversation he had with former President George W. Bush in 2002.
It is not only the left that has embarked upon a crusade to lament on President Trump for going on the offensive against facts. The neoconservative anti-Trumpers have been big on this, too.
William Kristol, the founder of the now-defunct Weekly Standard, has repeatedly called out the accuracy of Trump’s comments. Max Boot tweeted in June 2019: “Trump's lies may seem small, but they are telling.” Ralph Peters posited that the president “lies like a little boy.” It is well-known that Trump embellishes his record, over-emphasizes his success, and exaggerates a lot of the time. However, Trump’s festooning basic facts has not led to the deaths of more than 600,000 people like these men’s propaganda and cheerleading for the Iraq War did.
The Truth Will Out
The Iraq War was based on mendacity, misinformation, and mongering. The military blunder will serve as a noose around the necks of politicians and pundits who declared support for it because their credibility and judgment have been jeopardized and tarnished forever. Thankfully, the public record will eternally expose Biden, Clinton, and any individual who tries to gaslight the public into thinking that he or she was skeptical from the beginning. As William Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, “The truth will out.” The people thinking they possess a monopoly on the truth should look to their past sins and realize that nobody believes them because they continually get it wrong – and their mistakes produce deadly consequences.
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