Picking on typos, obvious errors and botched rhetoric is the lowest form of political criticism, but the Get Trump! forces have not been able to resist, given the President’s careless tweeting, 7th grade vocabulary and addiction to hyperbole and hearsay. Now such cheap shots are considered standard fare.
Over the weekend, CNN and others made a lot of fun of Fox News for showing a chryon that stated “TRUMP CUTS AID TO 3 MEXICAN COUNTRIES.” The Fox News talking heads correctly reported the story ( about the President cutting aid to three Central American countries), but the Left’s Fox News-bashers couldn’t help themselves.
Some wrote that the error was typical Fox News ignorance. Adam Serwer, a staff writer for The Atlantic, tweeted that “this is less an error than an expression of Fox News’ underlying sentiment towards most Latinos.” RAICES, a group that provides immigrants with legal services, called it “a new low for Fox News, when we thought they couldn’t go lower.” Journalists even suggested that “Fox & Friends Weekend” needs a more diverse staff.
This is remarkably stupid, for several reasons. Fox News was the only broadcast news source not thoroughly humiliated by the Mueller Report, which all the other networks had been hyping, falsely and unethically, for three years; if you listened to the Fox-bashers and ignored its reporting, you were bombarded by three years of fake news. Moreover, I see errors and typos on news crawls and cryons all the time, on all the networks. Low-level employees make mistakes in real time, and often without review. The “Mexican countries” gaffe was particularly bad, but for anyone to pretend that Fox News is any more prone to such errors than any other network is a biased fool. This is an easy Golden Rule situation, but then, I wonder how many journalists understand the ethical principle of reciprocity.
Ah, but that’s not all! Incredibly, the gaffe-prone, goof-happy, fake-facts but incredibly arrogant anyway Democratic Party star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez couldn’t resist taking her own cheap shot at Fox. “Just a reminder that these are the same folks who assert their superiority by belittling the intelligence and good faith of others,” tweeted the callow House member who is constantly belittling the intelligence and good faith of anyone who hasn’t swallowed her infantile world view whole.
This is risky for someone like Ocasio-Cortez, because, much like President Trump, she makes up facts as she goes along. And almost immediately, she made this one up:
“They had to amend the Constitution of the United States to make sure Roosevelt did not get reelected,” Ocasio-Cortez told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
Uhhh, NO. FDR made sure he wouldn’t get re-elected himself by dying in 1945; the 22nd Amendment limiting Presidents to two terms was passed in 1947. [ And, reader Glenn Logan correctly points out, not ratified until 1955.]
AOC’s gaffe is infinitely more troubling than the Fox News mistake. She’s an elected member of Congress: she’s supposed to to know her nation’s history, or if she doesn’t, at least not make people who trust her more ignorant than they already are. A relatively well educated 5th grader (if there are such things) could tell that “three Mexican countries” was a mistake, but how many Americans, especially Americans gullible enough to take Ocasio-Cortez seriously, know about the time-line of the 22nd Amendment?
Finally, while the Fox News reporters reported the story accurately, both calling attention to the mistake and correcting it by doing so, Chris Hayes didn’t have the guts, integrity, professionalism or historical knowledge—take your pick—to tell AOC that she was, once again, full of it.
Ethics Alarms 
I have a hard time thinking of Ocasio Cortez as a duly elected member of Congress. I’ve come to think of her more as the beneficiary of a Congressional session-long “Take your Daughter to Work” event. She’s treated by the media and punditry more like a cute (Amy Schumer’s term for her is “fuckable”) intern or foreign exchange student who’s been given the run of the place. Is there a feminine version of the name “Icarus?” (Icara? That’s probably Romanized “Greek.”) To use another apt metaphor, she’s certainly being given more than enough rope to hang herself, almost weekly. You go, girl!
I said it before, I’ll say it again; just keep a hot mic in front of her imbecilic pie-hole and she’ll do all the work herself.
The talented Ms. Ocasio-Cortez regarding the lessening of cows farting:
“We need to innovate and change our, our grain, uh, our, our cow grain, from which you know they feed in these troughs […] We need to look at regenerative agriculture. These are our solutions.”
Cow grain? Oy!
I’d give a lot to know what “regenerative agriculture” actually is.
”I’d give a lot to know what ‘regenerative agriculture’ actually is.”
Careful what you ask for, d_d; could be it’s some of that there: “We need to invent technology that’s never even been invented yet.”
Wait! Don’t cows chew there own cud? Haven’t they already invented regenerative agriculture!
I’m impressed…Snopes actually admitted AOC said that. After reading Jeff’s explanation “regenerative agriculture” sounds a lot like the Jeffersonian model we mostly use in Texas.
“Regenerative agriculture” is a real thing. It’s a term usually used to describe a set of techniques and methods that increases the health of the system, as compared to “extractive agriculture”, which is the current Big Ag model.
Under extractive systems, the soil gradually gets worse and worse, and chemical fertilizers are used to compensate for this. It’s cheap and effective, but has long-term consequences (increased erosion, less nutritional value in the food produced, most chemical fertilizers come from petroleum, so costs can fluctuate widely with oil prices, water pollution from fertilizer runoff). Regen Ag uses methods like rotational grazing (moving animals through pasture in a controlled way that mimics migrating herds of herbivores in nature, allowing the plants and soil to recover between grazing periods), raising complementary animals and plants together instead of huge single-species farms, using landforms to catch and move water to reduce irrigation needs, mulching and minimizing tilling to reduce erosion, using compost and organic material to replenish the soil instead of chemical fertilizers, etc. Farming this way actually creates topsoil, instead of washing and blowing it away like conventional ag methods.
The idea is that the closer you mimic natural systems, the healthier the system will be, and the better the end product is. If you do a side-by-side comparison of feedlot-raised meat and pasture-raised meat, the difference in quality is pretty obvious. It’s also more labor intensive and less open to automation, so generally more expensive. It’s basically the way everybody used to farm up until around WWII, with a fancy 21st century name.
She’s also not 100% wrong with the grain thing – cows that eat grass produce much less methane than ones that eat grain. Their digestive systems are designed to eat grass, not seeds. However, that’s offset by the fact that cattle grow and fatten faster on corn than on grass, so they’re slaughtered at a younger age. The grass cow belches out less methane (most of the methane comes from the front end, not the back) per burp, but lives long enough to burp more than the corn cow…
That said, I am 100% certain that AOC doesn’t know any of this, and is just regurgitating some words someone told her to say when people make fun of the farting cows part of her plan.
Here’s the even dumber part about AOC’s comment: The 22nd Amendment wasn’t ratified until 1951!
So Roosevelt could’ve served two more terms (the one he did not complete, and 1948-1952) had he not croaked.
The 22nd did not apply to the current occupant (Truman). If FDR had lived he could have run as many times as he wanted.
You’re right! I forgot about that part.
Considering the Korean War, Alger Hiss, it’s really a stretch to think of him winning a presidential election againgst Ike.
Truman or FDR? FDR would have given Ike a run for his mone3y.
Oh, yeah. FDR was a virtual American dictator—cult of personality, great orator, ruthless, charismatic, the whole package. His corpse would have beaten Ike.
Or anybody else who ran against him. He’s probably spinning in his grave at the ineptness of…I was going to say the Democratic Party but let’s make it modern American politics.
Yep. But by the end of his fourth term he was a dying man. His foolish decisions at Yalta doomed 100s of thousands of men, women, and children to slavery, torture, and probably death in the Gulag. He should have stepped down after his third term.
Condescendingly and arrogantly Pelosi said:
“Show us the report and we can draw our own conclusions,” Mrs. Pelosi (D., Calif.) said. Referring to Mr. Barr’s document, she added: “We don’t need you interpreting for us. It was condescending, it was arrogant, and it wasn’t the right thing to do.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-department-official-says-mueller-report-is-more-than-300-pages-11553786698?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=4
Barr’s answer to her should have been you already have your conclusions you just want to see what you can use to justify it to the gullible.
It’s a mystery how anyone could now see or hear AOC without thinking of the old maxim “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”
It’s… Something.
You know, when I YouTube for Bernie Sanders quotes, even three years after the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton remains three of the top four returns. I don’t know whether that was a purposeful choice by the people writing the algorithms or just a happy accident, but social media really molds the way we interact with politics.
AOC benefits from the inverse of the Bernie problem, the algorithm likes her. In any other context, she’d be relegated to the backbenches where she belongs, but she gets a whole lot of attention she shouldn’t, and I think that what we’re seeing is media bias. Remember, the media is disproportionate to the population, has been forever. Last numbers I saw pegged something like 85% of the media as being registered Democrat, and the joke is that the other 15% lied. And even more disproportionate, I think, is the number of extreme progressives in that population.
I think AOC was molded, kind of the same way Obama was, but by a media losing control of the narrative.
The United States honors its late presidents in many ways but re-electing them is not one.
This is something I see from the left often.. in fact I think it is a feature of the left. The idea that they “know” what people mean even if that is not what they say. So, [this guy or that guy] is a Nazi, not because of what he says, but because of what he meant by saying something. They know better what you are thinking than you yourself know.
It is the height of hubris to think that you understand someones intention better than they do. That when they say one thing, they really mean something else, and only your enlightened mind can discern what other people mean by a statement. There is this constant reading into the intentions of others and then casting them into a disparaging light. This is probably the single most annoying thing about the left.