The Phony Campaign

2016-06-26 Update

PredictWise says Bernie is back, baby, once again meeting our 2% criterion for inclusion in our poll. In other news, Hillary has retaken the phony lead in Google hit counts:

Query String Hit Count Change Since
2016-06-19
"Hillary Clinton" phony 571,000 +41,000
"Donald Trump" phony 455,000 -176,000
"Bernie Sanders" phony 357,000 ---
"Gary Johnson" phony 72,400 +2,500

  • Donald Trump made a speech about Hillary where … guess what?

    "Most people know she's a world class liar," Trump said. "Just look at her pathetic email server statements or her phony landing—or her phony landing in Bosnia where she said she was under attack, and the attack turned out to be young girls handing her flowers."

    Amusingly, even the left-leaning Politifact had little choice than to rate this claim true.

    The only flaw in Trump’s speech is he said Clinton was handed flowers. It was a poem, which seems like a trivial difference.

    I will embed this classic YouTube video on this topic from 2008, because it's funny:

    Politifact's analysis of 27 claims made in Trump's speech is here. Even discounting for its usual bias, it's not pretty. Donald, if you're gonna give a speech about someone else being a "world-class liar", you'd better be scrupulous about your own facts.

  • The NYPost reports: "Trump has been giving out fake diamond cuff links for years".

    Donald Trump has been doling out diamond cuff links to unsuspecting pals as presents — but they’re actually fabulous fakes, sources say.

    One of the people claiming that Trump attempted to pass off "cheap pewter and bad zirconias" as platinum and diamonds from Harry Winston is … Charlie Sheen, so who knows?

    Still, under a Trump presidency, the nightly news could well resemble four or eight bonus seasons of Two and a Half Men. Except being even less funny, and accompanied by real-world catastrophes.

  • Factcheck revealed "Gary Johnson’s False Marijuana Claim".

    Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson claimed that “no politicians outside of Bernie Sanders and myself support legalizing marijuana” at the “congressional, gubernatorial, senatorial level.” He’s wrong.

    When asked for a comment on the refutation, Johnson reportedly said: "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."

    Well, no. And I'm still voting for him.

  • And your tweet of the week:

    Sigh.


Last Modified 2019-01-07 12:41 PM EDT

In Edutopia, We Don't Overthink

I almost certainly would not have noticed this tweet:

… were it not for approximately three dozen conservative commenters, all asking more or less "Yeah, so where's the diversity in that picture?"

A cheap shot, of course. (On Twitter, given the character limit, it's a very rare shot that isn't cheap.)

But I clicked over to the Edutopia article anyway. It's by Jinnie Spiegler, credited as "Director of Curriculum, Anti-Defamation League". The article is loaded with earnest smugness and self-congratulation, all designed to make right-wing troglodytes (like me) roll their eyes and bemoan the indoctrination of kids with progressive claptrap.

Paragraph One sets the tone, with an example so hoary I remember a gag about it on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 70's:

When my daughter was three years old, I taught her the word "stereotype." She was just beginning to string words together into sentences, had determined that pink was definitely not her favorite color, and asked (demanded, actually) why all the "girl stuff" was pink and the "boy stuff" was blue. Because there's no three-year-old version for a word describing why colors are gendered in our society, I figured that planting the seed might yield fruit soon enough. And somewhat surprisingly, I was correct.

She was correct! And she claims to have been surprised by that, but I bet she wasn't.

Nevertheless, stereotyping is thoughtcrime in the Spiegler curriculum. Got that?

So I kept reading… all the way to Paragraph Three:

However, young children have a keen awareness of and passion for fairness. They demand right over wrong, just over unjust. And they notice differences without apology or discomfort.

You may notice that Mother Spiegler isn't really consistent on that whole stereotyping thing. Heck, even her three-year-old daughter might notice.


Last Modified 2019-01-07 12:41 PM EDT