A cavalcade of lies

Yesterday, USA Today published an op-ed by David Rothkopf so incredibly fact-free that it can serve as a guide to most of the slanders the Left pushes about President Trump. Let’s go line-by-line.

• “A corrupt and fraudulent family foundation.” You can be excused for thinking he should be talking about the Clinton Foundation, which was a pay-for-play Clinton enrichment scheme. But he’s not. He’s talking about the Trump Foundation, which paid out the vast majority of its funds to various charitable causes.
• “Hush money to mistresses to help swing an election — felony violations of campaign finance laws.” There’s no doubt that Trump paid women to be silent (which they did not do). But there’s no evidence that they were mistresses. The best the Left has is a “he said/she said” allegation. As for the payments, they were perfectly legal. Wealthy men are often targets of false allegations like these. They pay the women off because it’s cheaper than pursuing a slander suit, and the slander suit itself would create the false publicity and family damage they are trying to avoid. Then it gets interesting.
  The payment to Karen McDougal happened in 2014, a year before Donald Trump became a candidate. Making that into a campaign finance violation boggles the imagination. The payment to Stephanie Clifford did happen while Trump was a candidate, but we have to recall the fundamental fact that if it helped the campaign (recall that there were multiple other similar allegations), it also served private purposes. And it wasn’t paid out of campaign funds, to which Trump could legally add unlimited amounts from his own pocket. Two former FEC Commissioners, Bradley Smith and Hans von Spakovsky have pointed out that this “dual use” makes the campaign finance charge into nonsense.
• “Seeking and embracing the help of an enemy to win an election.” This persistent argument is a classic case of Herman Goebbels’ “Big Lie.” “Tell a lie loud enough and often enough, and people will believe it.” To date, not a single piece of evidence has surfaced that Donald Trump sought out the Russian government for assistance in the election. And no person has presented evidence that Russian actions resulted in the compromise of a single vote that was legitimately cast.
• “Repeatedly obstructing justice to cover up those crimes.” Please explain how this is even possible! Article 2, section 1, sentence 1 of the US Constitution states, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” This gives him plenary authority over the executive branch, of which the Department of Justice and the FBI are a part. He has the authority to fire the Director of the FBI (James Comey) for any reason or even for no reason at all. But even the Left will have to admit that he did nothing to stop the investigation or to force the staff of investigators to even be balanced politically.
  The only way that the President could obstruct justice would be to suborn perjury or block an investigation into actual crimes he has committed (18 U.S. Code § 1503). Oh. I forgot. There’s no evidence that a crime was committed. Further, the Mueller investigation is into “collusion,” which isn’t even a crime.

Whew! We’ve finished the opening paragraph. It’s four sentences long, and each sentence is a major falsehood. USA Today is obviously not being careful to publish the truth. But is is an op-ed, someone else’s opinion, so they are OK to print it. Let us continue.

• “Selling out American interests to patrons overseas.” Once again, you could be excused if you thought he was talking about Hillary Clinton and Uranium One, or Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Crime Family Foundation, but he’s not. Presumably this refers to the fact that Trump has business interests all across the globe. But the author isn’t going to be specific enough to allow us to show in detail how wrong he is.
• “Profiting from the presidency.” In fact, Donald Trump’s net worth has declined each year in office. It reminds me of the old saw about making a small fortune. You start with a large fortune.
• “Helping foreign murderers cover up the murder of an American permanent resident.” This is obviously the Jamal Khashoggi incident. But one has to ask how the President has covered this up when it’s all over the news. I thought a cover-up kept the media from learning about something. What he has done is to state that the information about who ordered the killing is not clear. And no one in the media has access to the security service sources that the President has. You can suspect, but you can’t know. Of course, the op-ed writer knows.
• “Attacking our allies. Destroying the international architecture that has been the foundation of our strength.” This time it took two sentences to complete another lie. Many NATO countries weren’t paying their share for defense. NATO has specific requirements, and the President said that members should live up to their obligations. The response has been for the other countries to start paying up. This has made America stronger by reducing our costs, and has made NATO stronger by increasing the mutual commitment to defense.

We’ve gotten through two paragraphs. Rothkopf goes on for five more paragraphs of outrageous lies. You’d quit reading if I went through them all. It’s really quite stunning that the Left is so bereft of critical thinking skills that they accept all this drivel. They believe, as USA Today says, that “Trump stole the office with the aid of our enemies, and he has done grievous damage to this country ever since.”

One has to wonder what planet these people live on. We have the lowest unemployment in history, with this extending to even black teens, the worst off under Obama. We have an economy growing at a steadily rising rate over 3%, when under Obama we were told by Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times contributor Paul Krugman that we needed to get used to 2% or less as the “new normal.”

The problem is that the Left believes these lies. For the hard Left, there is no possibility of convincing them of their errors. All we can hope to do is to show, much as Tucker Carlson does on a nightly basis, how stupid they look when matched up against the facts. Then perhaps the middle will realize that what the Left really wants is to control every facet of their lives and take us into a brave new Venezuela. Defeating them at the ballot box will be easy then.