Trump’s Fake News

[EasyAce]

How can you claim to honor people you are lying to?
By Mona Charen
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/trump-claims-about-military-pay-fake-news/

Remarkable, isn’t it, that Donald Trump has made decrying “fake news” his calling card? Is the press hostile to him? Sure. Do they lie about him? For the most part, no. Then again, the truth is not everyone’s friend. As William Randolph Hearst once quipped: “If Mr. Hughes will stop telling lies about me, I’ll stop telling the truth about him.” Or, even better, William F. Buckley said of Gore Vidal: “Anyone who lies about him is doing him a favor.”

On his visit to Iraq, the president lied to the troops. How can you claim to honor people you are lying to? Lying signals contempt. “We are always going to protect you. And you just saw that, ’cause you just got one of the biggest pay raises you’ve ever received. . . . You haven’t gotten one in more than ten years. More than ten years. And we got you a big one. I got you a big one.”

Sure. Here’s the Pentagon’s online account of pay raises over the past ten years. The military received raises each year for the past ten years.

Mr. Trump wasn’t finished. “They had plenty of people that came up, they said, ‘You know, we could make it smaller. We could make it 3 percent, we could make it 2 percent, we could make it 4 percent,’” Trump told the troops about the latest pay raise. “I said, ‘No. Make it 10 percent. Make it more than 10 percent'" . . . did Trump request a 10 percent pay increase for the troops? No. Trump’s administration requested an increase of 2.1 percent for 2018. Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which included a 2.4 percent raise. In 2019, the troops will receive a 2.6 percent increase, which is the largest in nine years. But, even in the Trump era, 2.6 is not ten . . .

. . . So even while visiting the troops — a good deed — he managed to soil it by flinging lies in all directions.

[Right_in_Virginia]

Trump Did NOT Lie to the Troops, Media Types Just Can’t Add
Townhall, Dec 28, 2018, Kevin McCullough

[…]

Don Lemon, do you see anywhere in the quote above that says the president claimed he provided a 10% raise in a single year? Nope. Joe Scarborough and Jim Sciutto you’re both just wrong.

Trump never indicates in his statement that he isolated the raise the troops were receiving under his watch as being accomplished in the calendar year of 2018. Many of the media outlets breathlessly reported that he had said as much, but look at his own words—he didn’t.

What he did imply is that he had given them a raise of roughly 10%. At 2.4% per year times 4 years he will have overseen a raise of 9.6% for the troops in his first term. Comparatively over Obama’s last 4 years that administration served up a whopping 1.25% pay raise per year equalling roughly half of Trump’s raise over an equally comparable period of time.


https://townhall.com/columnists/kevinmccullough/2018/12/28/trump-did-not-lie-to-the-troops-media-types-just-cant-add-n2538155

[Frank Cannon]

Remarkable, isn’t it

The only remarkable thing is that Mona and the rest of the dead enders over at NR are taken seriously anymore.

[Wingnut]

Remarkable, isn’t it

The only remarkable thing is that Mona and the rest of the dead enders over at NR are taken seriously anymore.

Mona's problem is she is in dire need of a good hard .... cover book to keep her company in her loneliness.

[aligncare]

Mona's problem is she is in dire need of a good hard .... cover book to keep her company in her loneliness.

One-minute time out: use of foul imagery!

Hey, there are children present (mostly on the politics board – but you know how kids run around).

[EasyAce]

Mona's problem is she is in dire need of a good hard .... cover book to keep her company in her loneliness.

With a husband and three sons I'm pretty reasonably sure loneliness isn't one of her problems.