Trump and the Russians: will the real news please stand up?
That was a parody of a line from the old TV show “To Tell the Truth.”
It featured a person who had accomplished something but was not a well-known celebrity, plus two well-schooled imposters. The panel asked all of them questions about their alleged field of expertise and life history, and they answered. The group received points for each person on the panel that the imposters fooled into thinking they were the real deal.
And then at the end of the segment, the MC would say, “Will the real [fill in name] please stand up!” There was then a lot of fake standing and sitting, standing and sitting, until the real person finally was standing alone.
It was a fun show back in my youth. It’s not fun, though, when we can’t tell what news reports are real and what are fakes. I don’t just mean what stories are given a partisan spin and which are told straight; we can just assume that all of them are of the first variety nowadays, unless they’re about a subject so neutral that no one can make political hay of it (I’m not sure there is such a subject anymore). I’m talking about stories that are based on a premise that is false.
In other words, how to evaluate this set of lead stories on Memeorandum today? Good luck. What I do if I don’t have time to read everything (and who has time to read all of that?) is to go to my usually-trusted sources, or ones that seem to be most skeptical and reasonable about the story, and then read them and decide what I think about it.
And so we have this article from Lawfare. I’m not all that familiar with the blog although I’ve read it before, but the headline sounds reasonable and here’s some of the content, which also sounds reasonable and thoughtful:
This afternoon, CNN reported that President Barack Obama and President-Elect Donald Trump had been briefed by the intelligence community on the existence of a cache of memos alleging communication between the Trump campaign and Russian officials and the possession by the Russian government of highly compromising material against Trump. The memos were compiled by a former British intelligence officer on behalf of anti-Trump Republicans and, later, Democrats working against Trump in the general election…
This cache of memos has been kicking around official Washington for several weeks now. A great many journalists have been feverishly working to document the allegations within it, which are both explosive and quite various: some of them relate to alleged collusion between Trump campaign officials and Russian intelligence, while others relate to personal sexual conduct by Trump himself that supposedly constitutes a rip-roaring KOMPROMAT file.
We have had the document for a couple of weeks and have chosen, as have lots of other publications, not to publish it while the allegations within it remain unproven…
First, we have no idea if any of these allegations are true. Yes, they are explosive; they are also entirely unsubstantiated, at least to our knowledge, at this stage. For this reason, even now, we are not going to discuss the specific allegations within the document.
Second, while unproven, the allegations are being taken quite seriously…
Third, precisely because it is being taken seriously, it is””despite being unproven and, in public anyway, undiscussed””pervasively affecting the broader discussion of Russian hacking of the election…
There’s much more at the link; well worth reading. But I’ve read enough about this to say the truth is unknown, but the general story of collusion is very useful to the anti-Trump forces. Trump and his people are vociferously and vehemently denying those reports, of course.
Of one thing I’m pretty sure, however—and that’s that attacks on Trump will continue unabated. They will be harsh, they will be dirty, and they will be relentless.
One thing I would also love to know is: if this report is true, what’s the remedy? Attempt to impeach Trump before he takes office? I think it is an attempt to “impeach” Trump, but in the general legal rather than constitutional sense: “to bring an accusation against…to cast doubt on…to challenge the credibility or validity of…”
Those attempts will not ever end. Be prepared for it.
ADDENDUM: More here about fakers and their fake faking. Or is the report about the fakes a fake? They report, you decide.
ADDENDUM II:
For those of you who would relish seeing Trump tell CNN off, here it is:
In the days before “fake news” suddenly became the boogeyman of the Left, this might have been explosive “news,” true or not. But just as no one believes the cries of “racism” anymore because of its gratuitous misuse by the Left, now all news is suspect because of the way they tried to scam us with the “fake news” mantra. It’s the old boy-cried-wolf dilemma. In fact, Trump referred to this story as “fake news” in his news conference this morning, scoring against the Left with their own game. Touché, Mr. Trump.
hoax by 4chan.. duh
[interesting how people dont follow things… they dont care even if you tell them… then…………….]
and besides, the biggest example of fake news was ny times, walter duranty, holodomar…
>/pol/acks mailed fanfiction to anti-trump pundit Rick Wilson about trump making people piss on a bed obama slept in
>he thought it was real and gave it to the CIA
>the central intelligence agency of the united states of america put this in their official classified intelligence report on russian involvement in the election
>donald trump and obama have both read this pol/acks fanfiction
>the cia has concluded that the russian plans to blackmail trump with this story we made up
just let that sink in what we have become.
-=-=-=-=-=-
4chan trolled Rick Wilson with the Trump piss story back in November 2016. Media or CIA added Russian spies themselves. THIS IS NOT A DRILL
-=-=-=-=-=-
and the newsers that didnt tell the details admit to alluding to them, and then claiming they had high morals. but the point was they were cautious enough to slime and not get caught, and mccain and others not only got slimed, but played “gossip” and embellished it more and more.
i guess the incompetent left dominates our state organs… notice how they also report that the DNC was broken into, but failed to note that if hillary was an angel, it owuldnt have matted… and they also fail to point out the RNC was also hacked, but there was nothing to get to… or else guess what we would have heard.
-=-=-=-=-=-
subversion by Russian communists supposedly died out with the Cold War. Of course, this is a ridiculous myth. There are communists everywhere. They are in the government. They simply refrain from properly labeling themselves. As for the death of communism, nothing like this ever dies unless someone kills its. And nobody killed communism. The communists simply announced that they were going away. Nobody was actually interested in where they went. Nyquist
What I don’t get is why, if this is true, it wasn’t released before the election. I suspect it’s fake news.
and that was BEFORE the election…
and its good hillary didn win, as its well known amoung the circles that know how this stuff works and doesnt that Trump was not the puppet, nor will be…
The leading clown of Russia’ s “democratic” circus, Vladimir Zhirinovksy, said in a recent interview, “Americans voting for a president on Nov. 8 must realize that they are voting for peace on Planet Earth if they vote for Trump. But if they vote for Hillary it’s war…. There will be Hiroshimas and Nagasakis everywhere.”
The looniest politician in Moscow blows kisses at Trump. Is that really supposed to help Mr. Trump? And do Americans like being threatened by Russians? If Trump is a puppet of the Kremlin, then they have given him away. They have bungled their puppetry!
meanwhile, take a look at the spratlies, taiwan, and otherwise… the conflict is coming as there is now no way to avoid it… no way to avoid it… and we as a people are not really looking at it as this bs distracts us from doing so…
John Dziak pointed out in his essay, “Soviet Deception: The Organizational and Operational Tradition,” the key Russian strategic concepts include: Proniknovenniye (Penetration), Provokatsiya (Provocation), Fabrikatsiya (Fabrication), Diversiya (Diversion), agent po vliyaniyu/agent vliyaniye (agent of influence), Dezinformatsiya (Disinformation), Kombinatsiya (Combination).
The weave is thus translated if we juxtapose the following proper and improper nouns: Barack Obama (Proniknovenniye), Aleppo, Syria (Provokatsiya), Donald Trump/Russian stooge (Fabrikatsiya), Russian hackers (Diversiya), Hillary Clinton (agent po vliyaniyu/agent vliyaniye), CNN/New York Times/Washington Post, et alia (Dezinformatsiya), the result of the 2016 presidential election in all the above (Kombinatsiya).
Dude. The whole 4 chan thing is now debunked. Stop spreading crap.
ex soviet comments on the fall of the soviet union, how it was in the inside, then what he sees when he came from the ukraine to whats happening now… only a tiny excerpt…
While the extent of Russia’s meddling in American politics this year has been greatly exaggerated (for obvious reasons), such an interference isn’t new and has existed since at least the 1930s. Imagine how much damage Russia’s interference, multiplied tenfold, can do to a weaker neighboring country with a Russian-speaking majority and frail democratic traditions.
In 1994 I emigrated to America, hoping to raise a family in a country ruled by reason and common sense. But lately I’ve been noticing a shortage of these commodities in the U.S. as well. While the ratio of reasonable people in this country may still be greater than elsewhere in the world, the ignorant passion for Soviet-style politics is very alarming.
Just as it was in the USSR, American media now publishes articles that read like Pravda’s updates on this week’s current truth. American entertainers and moviemakers are consistently pushing the politically correct party line. Social media giants are seriously considering political censorship. Indoctrination in American schools and colleges is worse than what I’ve seen in the Soviet Union, where getting a real education was actually important. And finally, just as it was in the USSR, more and more people begin to resent the “progressive” establishment and mock the lying media.
The way I see it, the proliferation of socialist ideas is largely a consequence of the decades-long Soviet meddling in American affairs, aimed at demoralizing the public and promoting the “correct” people and opinions in places where it mattered most. According to KGB defectors, only about 15% of Soviet intelligence activities here focused on actual espionage; the rest were influence operations. Their seeds have now blossomed, long after the “gardeners” have left this earth. Today’s left-wing radicals in the Democratic Party owe Russia a large debt of gratitude for their unearned power. Seeing Russia turn against them in the last election must have felt excruciatingly scary and painful; they still seem to be in shock.
sadly… all of what is going on now, ex soviets can see and knew it was coming and what is it about… that is the advantage of EXPERIENCE, even if handed down familialy and by friends and living apart in the same space…
while the details could not be said as they are opportunistic and have their own flow, the big flow was easy to predict.
you think they would star a conflict with their own kind of people in office? no, you start it with the opposition and then blame them..
so get a clue as to whats coming…
there is no way to avoid it now…
because the prior potus has let it go too far for it to turn back withotu such a thing at some point.
that was supposed to be in blockquotes… arrrggghhh..\
sorry
One thing about Trump, isnt it pretty hard to actually blackmail him?
It’s hard to believe that Russiansfound highly compromising material against Trump… that Obama and Clinton weren’t yet able to find.
Some kind of barely-legal business? And Russia found it while US IRS didnt? Not sure if that would be compromising for Trump or for the IRS.
Some kind of sexual tape? Yeap, that could be. But a video of Trump having sex with a bimbo chick would likely increase his popularity as the alpha-fucker. Good luck blackmailing him with that.
Esther:
LOL.
Yes, he might just be blackmail-proof in the usual sense. Although “conspiracy with the Russians” would be one way to do it.
But if they keep printing fake stories, no one would believe it if the real thing came along.
It’s easy to spin Donald up so this stuff actually works pretty well. His stream of tweets actually praising Putin set him up for this. I think Vlad knows some real stuff about Trump that is compromising if not actually criminal. The US intel guys are trying to get Trump to pay attention. Part of it’s turf and ego on the CIA’s part but a lot is also professional ethics and pride. This is important and for Trump to brush it off is unpresidential at the least.
My favorite item is the ‘neferious’ meeting between Michael Cohen, one od djt’s attorneys, in Prague with Russian agents. A Michael Cohen did visit Prague, but he wasn’t Trumps lawyer. Trump’s lawyer can prove he was in the good old USA when the alleged meeting took place.
In the future they will have to do a better job of creating their fake news. CNN and buzzfeed were criticized by MSNBC, how embarrassing!
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Here you have extraordinary claims with zero evidence, just like all the Russian hacking claims. I think pretty much all of both stories are complete fabrications- some may have even started out purely as jokes told between friends and online acquaintances.
Why wasn’t it publicized prior to the election? It had no “authenticity” yet- a seal of government approval- it was published this week because it does seem to have been included in some official briefing from the Obama Administration, and seems to have been releaked by the same.
Trump’s enemies in the press were afraid publicizing it without any evidence at all, and minus the ability to point to a government leak as the source, would backfire badly on Clinton that close to the election, and I think their judgment was correct on that. I think with the failure of the flipping the Electoral College, sheer desperation is starting to erode the last vestiges of professionalism that the left-leaning media had.
I have written it many times, and it is more true today than ever- Trump couldn’t have picked better enemies if he had been allowed to choose them himself.
Yancey Ward:
I’ve noticed that, ever since Trump entered the 2016 race, his enemies have had a tendency to go way overboard in their allegations. Why they do this I don’t know, because there is enough real stuff to criticize and keep them busy for years.
I think he drives people sort of crazy.
Neo,
I think two things are probably true- they were already crazy, and they aren’t really all that intelligent to begin with- at least not in a common sense sort of way.
Trump probably only magnifies those pathologies by being such an outlandish figure all on his own actions. Where one could attack Mitt Romney by writing a story that he was a bully as a teenager, with Trump such a story would have no impact at all. No, with Trump you would have to claim he was a serial killer of the weak when he was in high school.
Also:
Trump has celebrity status- he has been the subject of National Enquirer headlines for decades. Even before he began the campaign, he had 99%+ name recognition, and not a lot of it in a good way. It is hard to make critiques of such a personality because most people have already heard all them.
The truth of this can be seen by the effect of the “grab them by the pussy” tape. Even I thought that the tape itself would sink his campaign, and I still think it cost him every state he lost by less than 3%. However, I thought if anyone could survive that it would be Trump. Any other Republican candidate would have lost in that circumstance in a landslide.
Just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks is pointless with Trump unless you have solid evidence of truth. The present story, without any facts, is going to just further inoculate Trump against even stuff that can be shown to be true.
FYI, Neo, To Tell the Truth is back on the air, as of two weeks ago.
Trump definitely drives the msm, dnc, and half the population crazy. I get it. They were convinced he could not win. (Heck, I thought he could not win.) Now, their frenzy has no bounds. Ttrump derangement will far exceed their campaign against GWB. But unless they find a real smoking gun with his finger prints on the trigger and powder residue on his body, he will continue to brazen a path through the msm horde.
Trump himself aside, there is nothing, nothing, quite so ironic as an organism of the collectivist left accusing another American of “treason”.
You can tell it’s fake because a Brit would have called it “The World Cup Football Championship,” not “The World Cup Soccer Championship.”
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but at this point if Trump were impeached or forced to resign, the Presidency go to Mike Pence? I can’t believe the leftists would want that. He’s an “Evangelical Catholic”, whatever that means. He would have to scare them more than Trump.
Waidmann
This morning I was scanning headlines, and one of the news outlets had something about Trump’s press conference, and the last part of that headline was “What you need to know”.
That, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with the MSM.
The Dems proved that all it took was a huff and a puff to blow their house down, and the MSM is next. They think they’re highly relevant – just as the Dems did – but they aren’t. They haven’t quite figured it out yet, but I expect them to implode.
Waidmann,
Trump can’t be impeached unless he officially the president. And yes, Pence would be president if djt was impeached and convicted. He will never be convicted, that many gop senator defectors is highly unlikely. Unless, something beyond the pale can be proved.
What we thought was fault with Trump’s tweety stuff turned out to be a feature because he just keeps on playing offense getting out in the middle of the crazy news. Every other politician would be playing defense and over explaining trying to win on the facts while Trump is beating the media at their own game hitting the messengers who really need some better trash to spread.
We are in for four years of Tilt-a-whirl dirty news which will be followed with a strong spin cycle and I don’t see it letting up as long as Trump is in office. I am appreciating Trump a little bit more every day when I see he seems to have the strength to stay in the game and perhaps we will see some real reform and change.
Innuendo was often all it took for the progs to sink a Republican. But now they are facing a man who not only has a media quick reaction team, he is the media quick reaction team. It is so unusual that heads are spinning and, in some cases, exploding. It’s a bit like watching a juggler who is juggling chain saws. It amazes you that he can actually do it, and you wonder when he’s going to miss and cut his arm off. When he doesn’t miss you begin to realize that he really knows what he’s doing.
J.J.
We will have to wait and see. Getting the better of the media is a good start; the media may have to start doing their real job, reporting facts, or get used to being totally ignored. However, there is more to being an effective POTUS than just handling the media.
Anything really damaging would have come out during the campaign. There’s some real desperation here on the Left, where every previous attempt to stop Mr. Trump has failed. They are just having a very hard time accepting that he will be the next President.
NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt used something like the phrase “unsubstantiated allegations with no basis in fact” to refer to all this, using a tone that conveyed drama and seriousness. Of course, if they had said, “Mr. Trump is alleged to have hired Russian hookers to urinate all over a bed that Mr. & Mrs. Obama slept on” then the audience would have seen through it all immediately, and would have spent all night laughing at the media.
And then there’s Senator McCain, who took that seriously and hand-delivered a report to the FBI Director in the fall of last year, only to later on make a complete ass out of himself today.
But in the meantime, President Obama and his administration have been in charge of all the intelligence agencies for the last eight years. And the really damaging hacks have come from what the Chinese did with the OPM, and the secret e-mail server (and other devices) that Hillary Clinton had as Secretary of State. Who knows what was compromised with the latter, especially as Hillary was given cover for that like no one else was?
What the media doesn’t seem to get is that you do not have to like Trump, in order to despise them; and whatever becomes of Trump will not render the left – and that includes the collaborationist media – any less the enemy.
They chose sides and planted their flag as the NYT admitted. The hollowing out of the American middle class, the attempt to end our heritage of liberties in the name of “social justice”, the promotion of the federal government as the altar of Heaven, the attempted institutionalizing of neurotic campus snowflake moral sensibilities as some kind of default cosmic morality is not something they report on, but rather something which they actively work for. Their auto-fellating self-regard and nonchalant hypocrisy has placed them beyond the moral pale for many Americans.
They are the enemy. Plain and simple and admitted. Trump is almost irrelevant when it comes to that.
His antics, if you want to call them that, are the result of their antics.
Their waving the flag, talking about decorum, appealing to some residual sense of fellowship or community is about as convincing as Stalin praising the Orthodox Church during WWII; and amounts in substance to little more than the same gambit.
Kill off ObamaCare and I don’t care if Trump lasts even one more day than that in office.
Just imagine a Spence – Cruz administration.
Do feet of clay wash away in golden streams?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1VVso5uQ3Y
DNW.
Imagine a Cruz-Scott or Cruz-Fiorina administration. The msm and DC would truly go pedal to the metal moonbat. Trump is easy to label as a degenerate. He is so bombastic and over the top it requires no imagination to view him as unhinged…. not that I think he is unhinged any more than I think he is a Constitutionalist or really gives a damn about the concept of a republic, not a democracy..
Adrian Day,
Your name is not an Alex Jones psuedonym is it?
Funnily enough, I’ve been recording To Tell the Truth rebroadcasts on my dvr over the last few weeks. Really pleasant to watch.
Many good points made in the comments, but this is a particularly good catch:
Tatterdemalian Says:
January 11th, 2017 at 5:20 pm
You can tell it’s fake because a Brit would have called it “The World Cup Football Championship,” not “The World Cup Soccer Championship.”
* * *
That’s on page 2, sub-point #2 of the Memo:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984-Trump-Intelligence-Allegations.html
A blogger / commenter elsewhere (PowerLine??) points out that the Memo is headed “Company Intelligence Report” – because it’s from a private company, of course — but it can then be abbreviated “CIA” — gee, I wonder why?
The whole thing is reminiscent of Dan Rather’s trafficking in fake Texas National Guard memos.
* * *
neo-neocon Says:
January 11th, 2017 at 3:31 pm
….
But if they keep printing fake stories, no one would believe it if the real thing came along.
* * *
Not completely on topic, but apropos:
http://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog/the-people-s-cube-entry-has-just-been-deleted-from-wikipedia-t19170.html
” Where one could attack Mitt Romney by writing a story that he was a bully as a teenager, with Trump such a story would have no impact at all.” [Yancey Ward @ 4:05]
This is, perhaps, the primary reason I posited during the campaign that Trump was possibly the only of the 17 Republican candidates who could have won the election. His entire lifestyle has insulated him from such attacks. Remember that Romney was an evil mega-millionaire who cut people’s jobs? Romney’s wealth pales beside even the low estimates of Trump’s wealth but we never saw any coordinated MSM attack about that.
“What we thought was fault with Trump’s tweety stuff turned out to be a feature because he just keeps on playing offense getting out in the middle of the crazy news.” [Old Texan @ 6:46]
Yep. Even conservatives who repeat the refrain “That’s not presidential” fail to understand that these Tweets are like chum in the water that attract MSM attention and allow Trump some control of the news cycle. I wish some of them were better worded, but they serve the purpose.
“. . . there is more to being an effective POTUS than just handling the media.” [OM @ 7:23]
You are correct there is more to being president, but handling the media is the first step of any opposition president. A Dem president need no worry, but if a Republican president can’t do this, he consistently fights an uphill. battle.
“What the media doesn’t seem to get is that you do not have to like Trump, in order to despise them; and whatever becomes of Trump will not render the left — and that includes the collaborationist media — any less the enemy.” [DNW @ 7:48]
Very well stated.
“{The Dems] waving the flag, talking about decorum, appealing to some residual sense of fellowship or community is about as convincing as Stalin praising the Orthodox Church . . . .” [DNW @ 7:48]
See Ted Cruz’s performance at the Session’s hearing today as he ticks off all the contradictions of the Dems now citing the importance of the rule of law. There is a nice video over at Legalinsurrection.com
Are you really a neo-con? the neo-cons hate Trump and vice versa. They backed Jeb, and when he failed, backed Hillary.
Trump’s ideas liken to those of paleoconservatism and populism.
Lets not give DJT too much credit. The media overplayed their hand over the last 8 years. I think any other Republican could do what he is doing by just fighting back.
The media chose to hold repubs to a different standard, that always was going to have a time limit. Trump did see that the time had come to go on offense by looking at the way the public views the media. Thats not rocket science, thats just seeing a trend in the market, and seizing it.
So sure Trump is gonna have leeway for a bit. But lets not get cocky. He has to deliver, and no way in hell does he do that, if we do not hold his feet to the fire when he goes off the reservation.
george:
What oh-so-helpful george doesn’t know about neocons could fill several volumes.
If you want to actually learn something about the term, however, go to the right sidebar and click on the category “neocons,” and then start reading.
” I think any other Republican could do what he is doing by just fighting back.” [Jim Doherty @ 12:41]
Any Republican could do what Trump is doing, at least to some extent, but history has shown that almost none of them will.
The solution is very simple–fight back from your own turf not the turf set by the opposition–which makes it all the more frustration to watch a decades long fecklessness on the part of the Republican party.
IMO the problem is that establishment Republicans always shared a love of big govt with their Dem opposition. It was just who would be in control which was the issue.
Trump has brought new playing field to politics because he comes to the issue with an entirely new pedigree—a business pedigree, not one of professional politician. I, personally, have been waiting fro this since my 1992 vote for Ross Perot.
AesopFan Says:
“That’s on page 2, sub-point #2 of the Memo:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984-Trump-Intelligence-Allegations.html”
I actually haven’t read them myself, because golden showers just aren’t my bag. I only knew about it because, a few months ago, I suggested to 4Chan’s /pol/ that they use the “World Cup Soccer” thing as a tell, so people in the know would recognize a false news report if the media ever did pick it up. More recently, they mentioned it again, and apparently actually used it (the “golden shower” part was 4chan’s, the Russian and CIA spy stuff was apparently added by the grapevine).
Nice to know I”m contributing to the media overlords’ downfall by posting anonymously on a Mongolian marionette forum.