Trump and the Disabled Reporter

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This story is a good summary of what happens with current events, a hyper-partisan media, and why we're so polarized.

Media meme: Donald Trump knowingly mocked a disabled reporter (Kovaleski) he's known for years, for no good reason, and they have it on video tape. This is a new low for Presidents, showing how unpresidential and classless he is. The media celebrates and replays the story, none bothering to offer the actual facts.

Truth: Turns out, WaPo "fact checked" Trump on a claim about arabs in NJ celebrating after 9/11. They claimed it was false. But the reporter that did the fact check had written an article detailing the celebrations back in 2001. Trump was mocking WaPo stammering trying to walk back their lie that he was wrong, and used a gesture of flailing arms that he'd used many times before to animate being flustered. They still-shotted him with his wrist bent (as the reporters disability caused, not flailing) and claimed he was mocking the reporter, because Trump had maybe met the guy in person 30 years earlier during one of hundreds of interviews he'd had with the financial Press. The press omitted all that context from their reports.

Videos detailing what happened

Detailed summary

The surface story told by the media is Trump mocks the disabled. It's become such an often repeated lie that the gullible and Democrats (but I repeat myself), often repeat it. Yet, there's no real evidence. Context of what happened changes everything. We live in different worlds: the medias reality, versus the rest of us.

The TL:DR version:

  1. Trump said, "thousands of arabs in New Jersey were cheering/dancing when the twin towers came down" (and he corrected it to "many").
  2. The "fact checkers" at WaPo/etc., said "no such thing happened" and smacked Trump for making it up, and dozens of other places parroted that report as proof of Trump making shit up.
  3. There's video of multiple reports of it happening, including an article in WaPo's own newspaper the day after, by Serge Kovaleski, where he said 2 hours after 9/11, law enforcement detained/questioned mulsims who were celebrating the attacks and having a tailgate parties on their roof, while watching the smoldering ruins across the river.
  4. Once the fact checkers were caught being lazy and revisionist, Kovaleski issued a denial, "I don't remember that" (an article he wrote from 14 years before).
  5. Trump was mentioning that during a speech: that a reporter got caught denying his own article, and being flustered. The always animated Trump used a flailing gesture he'd used on multiple prior occasions to symbolize someone flustered (like Ted Cruz and an Army General when struggling with a question about ISIS)
  6. Gotcha: the Press claimed that Trumps gesture was making fun of Kovaleski's disability (arthrogryposis), while omitting his prior uses of a similar gesture, and instead taking an out-of-context picture of trump with one hand bent that looked like the disabled guys position
  7. After the liberal Press attacked Trump for mocking the disability, Trump claimed he didn't know the author, so how would he know about the disability?
  8. Kovaleski called Trump a liar, because he had covered Trump... nearly 30 years earlier.
  9. The Press then attacked Trump lying for forgetting about Kovaleski... while omitting how long it had been since Trump had been in contact (we don't know how few contacts were every in person, or how many other reporters Trump had been in contact with since then), and omitting the fact that Kovaleski couldn't remember his own article, from half that time. The only possibility could be that Trump lied about forgetting, and Kovaleski didn't about forgetting his own article that Trump was referencing.
  10. And the Wikipedia entry, of course, omits most of this context (or buries it in the fine print) to portray Trump from a far left (false) point of view.

And tada: that's how journalism works in America today.

This isn't a one-off anomaly either, every event I researched that the Press has covered, and the liberals repeat about Trump, is a caricature of what actually happened. It's like the myth of Sarah Palin saying, "I can see Russia from my House" -- that was a SNL skit that has been repeated so often, people like Barbara Walters think it actually happened. The left's version of history, and the real one, are parallel universes.

Irony 1: Chicago 4

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This meme refers to an horrendous kidnapping and abuse of a disabled kid. The Hollywood hypocrites repeated their shock at the fiction of Trumps mocking the disabled, and omitted that if they care about the disabled, they should have had something to say about the Chicago 4. But nary a peep from those criticizing Trump. (They don't care about disabled, they care about political opportunism).

Irony 2: NBC/SNL

2018.11.04 SNL Hit Piece - While Trump never mocked a disabled Reporter, Saturday Night Live did. Here's SNL star Pete Davidson mocking GOP congressional candidate Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL who lost an eye fighting in Afghanistan. Davidson referred to Crenshaw as looking like “a hitman in a porno movie.” Keeping it classy. Of course the News ran how bad this was for years, like they did when they thought Trump did it... oh, wait, the FakeNews never complained about it.

Conclusion

I don't care how people vote. There are reasons to like/dislike all the candidates. Trumps sloppiness with words, or exaggerations (like thousands, instead of many dozens) is something to dislike. It's part of why I did not vote for him. But I do care when people are repeating a falsehoods and hate, or whining about the mote in their brothers eye, while ignoring the log in their own. (Hypocrisy gets my goat).

The media calling Trump, the disability philanthropist, "anti-disability" is the biggest mistruth since McCarthy. Using all the lies of omission in this story has worked: the gullible, uninformed, Democrats (commas optional), all think this was an example of something that the informed know it wasn't.

❝ It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so. ❞
❝ He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. ❞

The media controls both the present and past, at least for those either too busy to be skeptical, or too partisan to care. For the rest of us, we're infuriated by the injustice of liberal media spin. The intellectually lazy will call us Trump apologists for not buying the same distorted view of events that they've been spoon fed.

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📚 References

Written 2016.10.18