Trump lickspittle Lou Dobbs opened his Fox Business show complaining about other peoples’ “shameful politicization” of the Puerto Rican death toll from Hurricane Maria last year – then proceeded to do exactly that by attacking an independent assessment that was greatly higher than Dear Leader’s propaganda.
With his limitless ability to make any and everything about himself, Trump reacted to a George Washington University study estimating “excess deaths” as a result of Maria at nearly 3,000 – not with any sympathy for such a tragedy befalling American citizens, but with a Twitter tirade declaring the statistic false and “done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible.”
A white guy's conspiracy theory about people of color? Count Dobbs in! Even before he joined Trump’s birther bandwagon, Dobbs had made a name for himself as an anti-immigrant bigot and conspiracy theorist. And discounting the deaths of Puerto Ricans had the added Dobbs-bonus of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his beloved bestie, Trump.
In the opening of his show Thursday, Media Matters caught Dobbs gaslighting viewers by claiming the fact-based, scientific study of the Hurricane Maria toll had engaged in the very politicization he was promoting.
LOU DOBBS (HOST): Also tonight, the shameful politicization of Puerto Rico’s Hurricane death toll, and only President Trump has had the guts to call out the Dems and national left wing media types, who have blindly accepted an amazing tortured inflation of the death toll, almost 50 times higher than the original count, and with scant evidence to support any of it. How does that count go from dozens in the days after the storm to almost 3,000 nearly a year later? Well, it involves as many academicians as humanly possible in the effort, and then you watch the entire exercise become a farce.
The Washington Post awarded Trump’s attack on the death toll four Pinocchios. Yet Fox Business allowed Dobbs to present Trump as the truthteller.
Not surprisingly, Fan in Chief Trump amplified the gaslighting with a retweet.
Watch it above, from Fox Business Network’s September 13, 2018 Lou Dobbs Tonight.
(News Hound Ellen also contributed to this post.)
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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Editor's note: Here's more with Dobbs and Dan Bongino in the segment Dobbs was promoting in the opening of his show:
