Call it “ethics dominoes.”
Long ago I added Snopes.com to the Ethics Alarms blacklist of untrustworthy websites for a series of dishonest and pro-Left “fact-checks” that were nothing of the kind. (You can see the once “urban legends” site’s Ethics Alarms dossier here.) For some reason—-maybe they want to restore their tarnished reputation before the 2024 campaign so they can be an effective Democratic Party hit squad again?—the site did a fact-check on this anti-Trump tweet, another volley in the current Big Lie #3 assault by the Axis of Unethical Conduct as it shifts into first gear in its “by any means necessary”effort to save Joe Biden and defeat Trump:
Snopes concluded that the Biden-Harris claim was contrived and false:
Of course Trump wouldn’t say “We’ve been waging an all-out war on American democracy,” even if that’s what he was doing. The Biden-Harris claim is another flaming example of bias making the Trump-Deranged stupid, in this case, confirmation bias. Nobody would believe that claim who wasn’t already Trump Deranged or stupid, making it a gratuitous fact-check. (Again, I suspect Snopes will perform a few of these inconsequential checks on Democratic Party narratives just to regain some trust from the gullible before the 2024 campaign.)
It must also be said that this is also another example of how Trump’s sloppy rhetoric and tendency to spit out whatever mush happens to land in his cerebral cortex gets him in trouble. This propensity is why anyone assuming he’s going to win next November is deluded. Trump could literally say anything at any time. Mitt Romney’s father, George, was on the way to the White House until he said that he had been “brainwashed” on his trip to Vietnam. That was in an earlier era when there was less tolerance for politicians who said strange or dumb things: after the two Bushes, John Kerry, Hillary, Trump and Biden, a candidate would almost have to proclaim he was Marie of Romania to be ruined by a verbal outburst, but if there was ever a politician who could do it, it’s Donald Trump. The C-Span transcripts say that Trump said,”We’ve been waging an all out war in American democracy.” What kind of English construction is that? Well, Trump’s kind.
But wait—there’s more!
Aaron Rupar, former editor at Vox, the far-left, completely partisan and also-banned news source at Ethics Alarms, who has been welcomed onto the op-ed pages of the Washington Post as well as other Axis stalwarts, reacted to Snope’s minor turn-coating with this:
He went full Dan Rather! (You never go full Dan Rather.) It’s fair to publish false claims and accounts about what Trump says because he’s really thinking the worst thoughts possible. It’s true even though it isn’t accurate. This is the attitude most of the news media has had toward Trump for eight years now, since 2015. It’s also the attitude of the departed Ethics Alarms commenters who objected to EA questioning the Russian collusion hoax because they felt it was obvious that Trump was guilty regardless of the evidence; after all, he’s just a bad guy (Big Lie # 3 again) and “everybody” knows it.
The most valuable aspect of the Snopes fact-check is that it prompted Rupar to reveal the scummy ethical standards journalist like him embrace now.
Ethics Alarms 
Jack,
Glad to see that you are OK. I hope you don’t live in the vicinity of the house that exploded. I have followed it on the news all morning. Please take care of you and yours!
Jack,
Writing this, I recall, now that you live in Alexandria. Still, hopefully everything is all right.
Well, at least we haven’t exploded! But the blast shook the house, and it was a fair piece away. Things have been better going into the holidays, but we’ll survive one way or the other.
I appreciate the concern. Thanks.
I thought the video reflected your house because your head exploded from an particularly violent ethics breach.
jvb
I do believe that extemporaneous remarks during a speech or discussion without a teleprompter must be given some latitude with respect to one’s sentence construction. Trump’s or any other politician’s verbal remarks must be viewed within the totality of the message being sent.
I myself find that I make serious construction mistakes in my comments here when start having a stream of consciousness on a given topic. I rarely find those mistakes when I am using my cell phone to comment. When I comment using my computer, I have more capacity to edit yet still miss some because I don’t spend the time proofing the entire comment.
What should be pointed out is that every statement made by some are excused as being taken out of context when the meaning is unambiguous, yet when Trump speaks the assumptions and biases of the media who wish to paint him as a tyrant create ambiguity if not falsity in the meaning.
Professional writers have time to or have editors that pore over every word they write. Even then, I often see these professionals make obvious grammatical mistakes when they use the word less when the correct word would be fewer. The same is true for the words lie and lay. I would bet good lawyers would examine every sentence in a brief or contract before making it available for public display.
I wholly agree with journalistic hack Rupar that the segment of a speech is an absurd thing to fact check.
But, in the context of the DNC clipping and spreading it in viral fashion makes it exactly the thing Snopes is known for.
If the DNC hadn’t lied, Snopes wouldn’t have needed to check it, and Rupar wouldn’t have Streisand-effecting it into Ethics Alarms and elsewhere.
Exactly.
So what did Aaron Rupar say about this 2020 clip?