From: Cecilia Tanaka <[email protected]>
>Jim, I respect you, but I don't agree with 80% of your opinions, sorry. Maybe >Sweden government, the whole 'Internets', all the media and I have >misunderstood your >President, but I sincerely believe he should study more >and watch less TV. It would be much better for him and the rest of the world. > I hope you are using that "your President" term in the most generic sense, as in 'Jim Bell is American, so Trump is his president". I voted for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate. So arguably, he is just as much "not my President" as the various people (Obviously, supporters of Hillary Clinton) who, even yesterday, were LOUDLY protesting that Trump is "not my President!!!". In the large majority of cases, when there is a controversy based on what Trump is supposed to have said or did, and I trace it down by Google searches, I find that the MSM is misrepresenting what he said or did. Or, they are otherwise engaging in dishonesty. Two examples: Recall in about July 2016, Trump and Hillary were invited by the Mexican president to Mexico; only Trump went, for reasons which were never made clear. Initially, the media speculated on whether Trump attempted to negotiate payment for the construction of the wall; Trump denied it. At THAT point, the MSM 'piled on' Trump, saying, more or less, 'He failed to negotiate the cost of the wall!!! How awful!!!'. Problem was, the Logan Act arguably prohibited a private citizen engaging in diplomacy with a foreign government. So, again arguably, if Trump had indeed attempted to negotiate that payment, he would have been declared A CRIMINAL (!!!), for doing exactly that. But since Trump didn't, the MSM went to 'Plan B', They accused him of FAILING to do those negotiations, the ones that would have arguably made him a criminal. "Damned if you do, damned if you don't". I raised this issue many months ago, on CP. I have no doubt at all that this didn't just happen by accident; it was clearly a trap intended by the news media, and probably Hillary Clinton's campaign as well. Example 2: Within less than the last week, I saw an anchor of one of the three major evening news programs (CBS, NBC, ABC) actually repeat the longstanding LIE that Trump had called for the Russians to 'hack' Hillary's email server for those missing (deleted on Hillary's own orders, BTW) emails. Problems: Trump actually had said, calling on Russia in what I saw was a humorous statement, to try to FIND those emails, NOT hack them. Another problem: Hillary's server, on which those emails once existed, had probably been shut down a year earlier, so their is no possible way (other than time-travel) for anybody to have actually acted on Trump's request. But, at the time, it was a very common theme by the (lying) MSM that Trump had somehow called on Russia to 'hack' SOMETHING. It was never made clear by the MSM what Trump was asking Russia to 'hack'. As an example of this continued lying, I present this article: http://www.salon.com/2016/12/12/donald-trumps-russia-hacking-denials-ignore-that-he-asked-russia-to-hack-hillary-clinton/ That article claimed: "In July when news of the hacking first broke, Trump openly encouraged Russia to continue spying on his opponent.“I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said at a news conference then. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”"[end of very revealing quote from the article, itself seeming to quote what Trump said] How Salon gets from that statement, presumably an exact quote by Trump, to saying "Trump openly encouraged Russia to continue spying on his opponent", it is very hard to see. I wouldn't have been surprised if one over-enthusiastic lying MSM person had made that claim, ONCE, but the push-back on that must have been fierce. Obviously, and precisely as Trump stated, he wanted Russia (or anyone else, presumably) to FIND FIND FIND those missing emails. That request, if it had a hope of being successful, presumes that prior to Hillary's ordered deletion of those emails, SOMEBODY obtained them, perhaps an outside person, or possibly an inside person. (For the life of me, I can't figure out what kind of specific arrangement they must have had with Platte River Systems, the ISP that handled that system. The highest priority to such an organization, I imagine for ANY customer, would have been to ensure that the database of emails NOT be lost, either due to hardware failure, or other problems. I'd be very surprised to hear that they didn't have some sort of automatic, daily backup policy, to guarantee that in no circumstance, more than one day of emails might be lost due to such an eventuality. These were only emails, probably 99% text-only emails at that. How big could the database be? How they ended up even THINKING they had somehow deleted every copy of those emails, is well beyond my imagination. This leads me to the inexorable conclusion that Platte River MUST have been 'in on it', along with virtually every other significant Hillary Clinton staff member. http://www.denverpost.com/2016/09/08/a-fish-story-in-platte-river-networks-purge-of-clinton-e-mails/ )× No 'hacking' by Russia would have been needed, in the then-future. So there was simply no way that Trump could have been properly accused of asking Russia to "continue spying on his opponent". × I think the answer here is obvious. Ever hear of a 'strawman'? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man It's a logical fallacy, which is also a FACTUAL fallacy too. It's based on the principle that it's far easier to attack a deliberately-sabotaged, phony position that the other person DIDN'T make, In almost every case where a Trump statement or action is picked up and criticized by the MSM, what has actually happened is that the people in that MSM are deliberately misrepresenting what he said or did. That's not to say Trump never makes mistakes. Of course he does! And, he does it enough so that the MSM would have plenty of material to focus on, honestly, if they chose to limit themselves to that. But they don't. The simply lie about what Trump said, or did. That might please their base, the disappointed pro-Hillary people, but it angers people who actually value logic and accuracy, even if they didn't vote for Trump in the first place. Jim Bell
