Ok, the headline above does exactly rhyme but you know what? It doesn’t matter because I saw it’s so. (I mean, I’m from the South. You ought to hear what we’ve done to the English language. And yet they get mad about people speaking Spanish.) That’s basically how things have been for well over 20 years now. There once was a time when politicians told “white lies” or fudged the facts around the lies. It was called “spin.” Yet, getting caught in a straight-up lie where there was audio and or visual recording of the lie was a no-no.
But now, people just don’t care. They’ll flat out lie and accuse you of being the one who is foolish for not believing them. As the South has been ravaged by two of the most dangerous hurricanes within just two weeks, Donald J. Trump, who is running for President, tried to spread the lies and misinformation about the government’s efforts. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a strict conservative, has called him out for it. And even Laura Ingram, a Fox News celebrity, who has basically been complicit in spreading Trump’s earlier lies over the years, has called him out on it as well.
What sucks is if this was anyone else talking like this, it would be investigated the same way someone screams “Fire!” in a crowded place to cause chaos. Or how someone talks about shooting up a public place or event or says how they want to assassinate the President, an investigation would be underway faster than you can say, “fake news.”
William Jacob Parsons, 44, who lives in Rutherford County, N.C., was arrested on a misdemeanor complaint of going armed to the terror of the public on allegations he violently threatened or harassed officials with FEMA. This is the result of Trump and his lackey Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Congresswoman from northwest Georgia, saying that FEMA and state officials are denying aide to the people affected by he storm.
Roy Cooper, the Democrat governor of North Carolina, also said it’s Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, is behind the misinformation. Robinson is a Republican and the gubernatorial candidate nominee. He’s also black and has called himself a “black Nazi” as well as other things. People unfamiliar with the western part of North Carolina may not know that it’s in Great Smoky Mountains of Appalachia. There are a lot of twisting and winding roads.
And all you have to do is Google “Chimney Rock” to see that it’s left in total destruction. How do you think emergency vehicles are going to get through something like that? Or there are reports that part of Interstate 40 along with Tennessee/N.C. border was washed away. The government is helping but it takes time. They are trying to locate people. Cooper says about 81 people are still unaccounted for as of this post. Communities in the mountains being ravaged by tropical storm winds and massive flooding is a one-in-a-lifetime event.
Back during the Winter of 2011, we had the worst blizzard in Oklahoma history come through. The Greater Tulsa Metropolitan area basically came to a stand-still. I had snowbanks about three feet high all around my house. And the meteorologist say we just barely missed the really bad stuff to consider it a blizzard. So, I was working from home because I still had power. A local resident took a great photo of an ambulance having to call a wrecker. Thankfully, no one had died in the area but it was a perfect representation of the storm as emergency responders were even hindered by the elements.
My cousin is part of an electrical crew out of northwest Georgia that has gone to help the people affecting by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Now, he’s probably more of a conservative. But there are people helping regardless of political ideas or religious affiliations. Any damned fool can fly their jet to an airport not affected and drive to the lesser affected areas to shake hands with people. It takes a really compassionate person to roll up their sleeves and help.
Yes, the electric crews are getting paid. But they’re also having to sleep on cots or the backseat of an SUV. My stepfather worked for Georgia Power. He said sometimes they had to sleep in the front seat of trucks because the nearest motel/hotel was at least a half-hour drive away and they had to remain on site until everything was fixed even if it took days. They ate take-out food that was already cold. They’d have to drop their pants and defecate from a few hundred feet in the air because it takes so long to climb down and take their gear off.
Now, Trump knows all about having emergencies of the human gastrointestinal system. But I doubt he’d ever do anything electrical. I felt bad my first year in college because I thought my desk lamp attached to the wall near my bad had gone out. It just needed a simple light bulb change. It happened so close to the time we checked in and I had complications with my blinds in my dorm room that I had to put in a work request form.
So, when some guy came in with a fresh light bulb to check it, I felt like an idiot. I apologized but I soon learned others had done worse. One person in another residence hall started a kitchen fire when they put the leftover pizza still in the box in the oven. A friend was telling me of someone he knew who thought cruise control on a car meant you didn’t have to still operate the steering wheel and turned around to start talking to someone in the back.
Yes, some people think they can just cross their arms and tilt their heads down like I Dream of Jeannie and things get done lickety-split. Something that would take a lot of time would be the hand count of ballots. But thankfully, Superior Judge Robert McBurney of Fulton County, Ga., agreed to block the rule’s application. The crazy laws in place in Georgia and other states to make sure the election isn’t rigged are because Trump and others still spread this lie.
J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate (and one-time major critic), is a U.S. Senator from Ohio, who said Wednesday that he doesn’t think that Trump lost the 2020 election even though there have been no evidence of a rigged election. If anything else, these lies are just to create doubt among the most ignorant. I look at people like Parsons who looks like the type of person who would believe batshit crazy lies about FEMA. Politicians are just blurting these lies because they know some of these people will believe it.
It’s the same reason a defense attorney in a trial will ask or say something they know the prosecution will object to. And they know the judge will sustain the objection and asked the jury to disregard it. It’s already been blurting out. You can’t take it back. Relying on all 12 jurors and even the back-up jurors to wipe the slate clean is the good faith we take in the judicial system.
But there’s always mistakes. Look at the people who were charged with killing Emmett Till. Or how about the O.J. Simpsons murder trial? Do you really think Kyle Rittenhouse was totally within his rights? Of course not. Jury duty is mostly considered a thankless civic duty because we’ve reduced it that way. The same way we in many ways turned voting in a pointless activity. That was before 2020. And you couldn’t really blame people for not wanting to vote. As the old line says, “The only thing worse than a politician is a child molester.”
But I wouldn’t doubt Trump isn’t one. He’s obviously been exposed as a sexual predator. He even said to a 10-year-old that he would be dating her in 10 years. And at one point, a hot mic recording “Grab ’em by the pussy!” would be the end of a political campaign. Sadly, we’re in the era where we’re supposed to dismiss things we’ve seen and heard as lies and instead believe things that no one really has any evidence of. Everything is “I heard someone say that someone else saw this thing happen to someone who knows this person.”
During my time as a journalist, I had a saying, “I don’t work on tips.” If someone isn’t really going to go on record and get their butt in a sling if it’s not true, then I’m not going to mess with it. I cringed to hear other people who hung around in barbershops and nail salons and listen to gossip. Jesus Christ! Small-town gossip isn’t fucking news.
What sucks is now we’ve expanded that to the national and international realm. Ronald Reagan was a son of a bitch, but even he wouldn’t said half the crazy shit Trump has said and he probably had dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease from day one of his Presidency. The sad problem is people know Trump is incompetent. They know he is lying. They know nothing of this stuff is happening. They don’t want to be seen in the same company as these people like Parsons, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, and many more who did spread lies and false information while using violence and intimidation.
No. They don’t believe it all. And they don’t want to associate it with all. However, they really don’t want Kamala Harris to be President. They’re not racist or sexists. But they still think that Trump and Vance will buckle down and do what needs to be done for everyone. What’s funny is that we’ve already seen Trump as President and it wasn’t what people thought it was. There’s a reason you fire people from their jobs.
Years ago, the sheriff had fired some people. They campaigned for the challenger who won. And he hired them back. Then the new sheriff realized why his predecessor got rid of them. And if you had an employee who constantly lied on the job, would you still want them on the job? Maybe it’s because our lack of good education in this country and having civics being taught by football coaches has led to ignorance on a massive scale.
This past Monday, Oklahoma state official still acknowledge Christopher Columbus in a statement. Oklahoma has a high percentage of Indigenous Native Americans. Yet the state officials are still spreading lies Columbus was a great visionary. He was actually very hated in his time for his cruelty. No, he was in fact mythologized by Europeans immigrants especially Italian immigrants because there was a growing number of discrimination in the early 20th Century.
People have believed lies for decades and centuries. When people say they “do their own research,” they are just wanting to hear what others say that align with ideals. And the reason they hate the media is they don’t report the lies. Or at least they’re not supposed to. Fox New is a news station the way Columbus was a great explorer.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 