Most, but not all, media seems to be having a problem calling Donald Trump a liar. I'm sure that it's against their editorial standards to call anyone a liar, but that's what he is. A dirty, nasty, bigoted, fascist liar.
Rachel Maddow came the closest anyone has gotten to calling his latest claims a lie on her show Monday.
And this, from Benjy Sarlin, would be perfect if only he had used the word "LIE" instead of "falsehood."
The last few days have been dizzying. On Saturday, Trump told a crowd in Alabama that “thousands and thousands of people were cheering” on 9/11 in Arab neighborhoods in Jersey City as the World Trade Center came down. There is no evidence this ever happened; the mayor, the police, locals, researchers who have investigated the claims, and officials in nearby cities like Paterson, with large Arab and Muslim communities, say it’s a phony rumor that’s hung around for years.
The closest approximation The Washington Post could dig up was one academic researcher who found unconfirmed reports of a handful of teens shouting in front of a South Paterson library. Presented with evidence on ABC News contradicting his claim, Trump responded that he had personally seen it happen on television. “People over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down,” he said.
On the other hand, CNN twisted itself into a pretzel to avoid calling Trump the lying fascist that he is.
Donald Trump twice repeated over the weekend that he saw people cheering in New Jersey after the September 11 attacks -- but his claims are being widely disputed as false.
Come on, CNN. Grow a pair and call it what it is -- A LIE. A dirty, disgusting, racist lie intended to light a fire in the souls of Trump's brownshirt brigade.
After all, when you lose Laura Ingraham, you've lost this round. Just hold his feet to the fire and make him admit he made it up to feed the trolls in his audience.
Even Fox News won't back him up on this one, though they also demurred from calling him a liar. No surprise there. Commentator Stephen Hayes said this:
I think people are looking for moral clarity and they're looking for somebody who is not sort of living their life or having these arguments in the nuances. And if that describes anybody, it describes Donald Trump. Unfortunately I think in situations like this, you know, he's fact checked for a reason. He's fact checked because he got the facts wrong. There were not, in fact, thousands and thousands of people in Jersey City cheering. And the The Washington Post article that he tweeted out doesn't actually support that contention. It's a different thing altogether. Now that doesn't mean that there weren't maybe these tailgate parties, although the author of the The Washington Post story at the time has started to walk that back a little bit. But, the reason Donald Trump is fact checked as often as he is, is because he says things that are factually not true. That's part of the problem.
On Chris Hayes' show Monday night, former RNC head Michael Steele observed that the Republican base is angry and restless because they're tired of being lied to. Perhaps it would have been appropriate for someone to suggest that if the base doesn't like being lied to, Republicans should quit lying to them?
Seems like that would solve the problem of building up their expectations just to dash them over and over. Also, it might cut down on the number of lies they tell. A girl can dream, can't she?
