Repeated Lying About Lying
Repeated Lying About Lying
Of course, Donald Trump has been using this Big Lie method of simply endlessly repeating a Big Lie and successfully so with his claim that last year’s presidential election was “rigged” or “stolen,” according to the latest poll I just saw on the order of 70% of Republicans accepting this Big Lie.
But this practice seems to be spreading for yet more degeneration happening as figures who have not done this like Trump now seem to be imitating him also. The latest is Hugh Hewitt, a conservative who is a columnist for WaPo and usually avoids this sort of flagrant lying. But he seems to have caught the bug.
I rarely listen to his radio show, but yesterday (Nov. 15) I inadvertently heard it when it was turned on for a while and got quite an earful. I thought it was one of his guests but it was him. He was repeating over and over and over way more times than I could count, “Everyone knows Adam Schiff is lying. Everyone knows Adam Schiff is lying…” It was weird, so many times without a break or explanation, and even after a break, he did it again and again. It was obviously an effort to convince his listeners of something he knew they did not necessarily believe. Heck, near as I can tell, at least among most Dems and non-GOPs, Schiff has a very high level of credibility. I have always found him one of the most credible people in the entire Congress with a substantial grasp of a lot of fairly complicated information and never have seen him appear to knowingly lie.
So what had Hewitt on this binge of repeated lying? It was Schiff’s response to the indictment of Ivan Danchenko by John Durham, the Special Prosecutor appointed to the DOJ during the Trump era that Merrick Garland has left in place to do his thing. Danchenko has been indicted for lying to the FBI about who his sources of information were when he provided information to Steele of the famous Steele dossier. This is all part of a long-running campaign by Trump allies to somehow discredit the Steele dossier, which Hewitt, following the likes of Sean Hannity and others on Fox News, described as “totally discredited” and “shown not to contain a shred of truth.”
Well, first of all, Danchenko was not indicted for actually saying anything false to Steele, only lying about who his sources were to the FBI, a point Hewitt did not mention. Indeed, and I have checked on this numerous times after hearing some of the more perfervid claims against the Steele dossier, over 70% of it has been confirmed, with some of those confirmations actually in the Mueller Report. Most of it was/is true. Only about two items in it have been shown to be false, a claim that Cohen visited Prague and that Carter Page was going to get some huge sum of money from Gazprom. Otherwise, most of it has been found to be true, with some items still in the undetermined category. That latter includes its most notorious item, the infamous “golden shower” story about Trump, which seems increasingly likely to in fact also be true, given all the stuff that just seems to keep coming out about Trump, and which may be why so many of Trump’s followers are so keen on just totally discrediting the whole dossier.
As for Schiff supposedly being disbelieved by “everyone,” supposedly even including people like Nancy Pelosi according to Hewitt, the only evidence he seemed to supply for this is that Schiff’s recent book has not been a bestseller, #357 on some list or other. That it is not a big seller is obviously not at all evidence one way or the other about whether what is in the book is accurate or not. It is evident that people are not all that interested, and in fact at this point, most people are not much interested in this leftover 2016 election stuff, which the Steele dossier is. But the Trumpistas are still desperate to somehow discredit that dossier, even as it has largely been verified. So Hewitt and his ilk are the ones making a big fuss about his latest indictment and trying to dump on Schiff for his showing the dossier is largely accurate, in an effort to stir their own base up. But not that many care any more. They are too busy believing Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election to be all that worked up about leftover stuff from the 2016 one.
Barkley Rosser
I recommend reading IG Horowitz’s report on FISA warrant applications concerning Carter Page, and then the “competing” memos covering the subject from early 2018 by Schiff and Nunes. Keep in mind that both reps had access to the same material. Let me know if one feels at odds with the others.
Barkley
I know nothing about Schiff or the Steele Dossier. I watched Schiff a couple of times and he did not seem to be lying to me. but, for what it’s worth, I have a friend who is a “progressive” who calls him “shifty Schiff” which I assume is “progressive” doctrine..as no one has an original thought anymore.
As for Steele…everything anymore is a lie or said to be a lie by people I know to be liars, so I don’t put much stock in it one way or the other. On the other hand, what they do and say right in front of me tells me a lot..basically, you can’t trust anyone, but some are much more dangerous than others.
Coberly
Read Robert Waldman’s early post on Democrat infighting. A Noah Opinion 1/N – Angry Bear (angrybearblog.com)
It is a good read on the topic of progressive versus other Democrats
run
done. it’s a little confusing to me but i think i get the point. the tragedy of course is that the dems can’t do anything about it. the R’s will call them socialists and hippies and n…lovers and traitors no matter what they do or say.
up until recently both paties could be relied upon to generally support the status quo (the business of America is business). FDR, and Johnson for that matter, were not really exceptions to this. FDR saved “business” from its own stupidity. and Johnson saved business from the stupidity of legal racism.
I think FDR was a genius and I wish he was here to outsmart the R’s who are stupid. I don’t know if Johnson was bloodthirsty. I think he was too weak to go against his advisors…he was willing to lose elections over racism, but not over the “fight against communism.”
oh, up until recently” today’s R’s may still be doing “business’s” dirty work, but it sounds to me like they have become swallowed by their own strategy of playing to the idiots and haters. “business” will not survive if they win.
Coberly,
Business already has all that it can realistically want. Offshoring alone solved most their regulatory compliance problems. The partisan competition on wedge issues is just a matter of reaping the rewards of success as professional politicians. The infrastructure bill was good for business though, the kind of things old time Republicans would have pushed for. In any case, the Southern Strategy was a natural line of demarcation for political triangulation that Nixon could not resist and now the Republican Party cannot escape. It would only be bad for business if the republican dollar democracy itself were at stake and I do not believe anyone with any kind of power wants that. In America we can buy all the guns that we want with dollars, but we will never be able to buy all the dollars that we want with guns.
Ron
“Business,” as opposed to “honest businessmen” is an insane predator. It wants every nickel and every power to get every nickle it can get by fair means or foul. Long past what “it ccan realistically want.” It is destroying it’s “resource base” including the workers and customers it needs. It can’t help itself. Only countervailing power can keep it from eating itself (bad for business).
Trouble is..”countervailing power” is subject to the same law of the jungle, not to mention the well known stupidity of people (“a person,” as Agent K said, “is smart; people are dumb, and you know it!” [MIB I]).
Note, I am not disagreeing with any thing you said, just offering another way of seeing, saying, the same thing.
Cob,
Understood.
note on “The Big Lie” can be found by google
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
This is an excellent definition of the “Big lie,” however, there seems to be no evidence that it was used by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, though it is often attributed to him.
The original description of the big lie appeared in Mein Kampf. Adolf Hitler applied it to the behavior of Jews rather than as a tactic he advocated. Specifically, he accused Viennese Jews of trying to discredit the Germans’ activities during World War I. Hitler wrote of the Jews’ “unqualified capacity for falsehood” and “that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation…. From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited.”
The OSS psychological profile of Hitler described his use of the big lie:
His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
Goebbels did describe the big lie in different language in an article he wrote in 1941, “Churchill’s Lie Factory,” but he was accusing the British of the ploy:
The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.
Randall Bytwerk argues that neither Hitler nor Goebbels would admit to lying. Goebbels, “always maintained that propaganda had to be truthful. That doesn’t mean he didn’t lie, but it would be a pretty poor propagandist who publicly proclaimed that he was going to lie.”
I’m not surprised some still believe the Steele dossier and Russia collusion [100% lies].
But, this is funny. Credentialed, laptop classes and lying media [redundant] are constantly whining about millions of Americans doubting last year’s [legally-stolen] election, feigning shock that anyone would call into question the results. How? When in fact, they’ve done precisely that for all of this century, beginning with the 2000 presidential election. The sacs of excrement spent years insisting that Al Gore really won that one.
Curiously, Al Gore did win.
Eric,
Please note that I pointed out that there are two items in the Steele dossier that have been clearly disproven, only two. One of them is indeed about Carter Page, the claim that supposedly Gazprom was going to pay him large sums of money, actually supposedly given him some huge chunk of their stock, like 20%, something which was obviously just incredible and off-the-wall unbelievable from the start. Most of the rest of the stuff about Page has either been verified or is in the intermediate category. But it should be remembered, although Fox News and others never mention it, that the Steele dossier was never more than a secondary supporting document for those FISA warrants on Page. But we know that those were flawed, and one of the people involved in them was the only person indicted for any of this until Durham started doing so for more recently, with none of these recent indictments actually claiming anything in the Steele dossier is false.
The other verified false claim was that Cohen supposedly visited Prague in August, 2016. Cohen himself denied it, and there is no evidence he did so.
For T. Shaw, your claim that 100% of things in the Steele dossier are false and shown to be so is completely false itself, as out of it as claiming the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, although perhaps you are one of those pathetically delsuded people who believes that. I suggest you read the Wikipedia entry on the Steele Dossier, or check out other sources one can easily find by googling that are no just straight out of some Fox News source. Also read the Mueller Report (I know, it is long). Again, there seems to be widespread evidence of agreement about a lot of it, with over 70% of it verified, those two items proven to be false (rather a lot less than your 100%), with other items remaining up in the air, including indeed the notorious “golden shower” tale.
You really look astoundingly foolish here, T. Shaw.
@Barkley,
Good take-down. I thought to post something like that, albeit less detailed, but I recognized T. Shaw as being one of the resident AB trolls. I am trying to avoid feed trolls. It only causes them to leave more droppings.