Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

I am pretty sure Katy Tur wasn’t always such a bootlicking sycophant.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

Giving up is unforgivable. ~Joe Biden

Pelosi: “He either is stupid, or he thinks the rest of us are.” Why not both?

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

When they say they’re pro-life, they don’t mean yours.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Everybody saw this coming.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Republicans don’t trust women.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Hail to the Hairpiece / A Note from History on “Alternative Facts”

A Note from History on “Alternative Facts”

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Mr. Pierce, at Esquire:

It was quite a weekend for official mendacity. Kellyanne Conway went sailing off into a truthless land into which not even Richard Nixon ever set down his polished cordovans. And she did so in defense of Sean Spicer’s very public episode on madness on Sunday evening. I think “alternative facts” is going to be sticking around as a meme, as the kidz call them, for quite a while now. But the real story of this weekend actually was something that happened in 1974.

In August of that year, the White House tape finally emerged that drove Nixon from power and placed in his stead Gerald Ford, an earnest congressional lifer whose record indicated that he would not be a crook, which pretty much was all the country was looking for in a president back then. Ford staffed his administration with people around whom he felt comfortable and, after six years of having an antisocial paranoid in the Oval Office, the country was OK with that, too.

Ford picked as his press secretary one Jerald terHorst, a longtime Detroit newspaperman who was at that moment writing a biography of Ford which, I would imagine, needed extensive rewrites. terHorst had the job for only a month…

On September 8, Ford pardoned Nixon for “for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.” This, as many people including me have argued, was a capital mistake and kickstarted the process of infantilizing the American public into people who would not be able to cope with impeaching Ronald Reagan over Iran-Contra, or probing too deeply into the events leading up to the attacks of 9/11, or bringing true justice down on the torturers and Wall Street brigands of the first decade of the 21st century…

It took terHorst less than a day to resign in protest against what Ford had done. His grounds were that he had stood in front of the White House press corps for a month and denied that a pardon would be forthcoming. Now, Ford had taken his legs out from under him and terHorst felt that he could not in good conscience continue to be a spokesman for an administration that had done so, even though he was a longtime personal friend of the president, and even though his departure would make Ford’s decision look even more dubious….

And that’s what the big story of this weekend was—that once, in Washington, there were people unwilling to sell their consciences so cheaply, and that there were people who knew that there were things bigger than The Job or The Boss…

YOU OWN THIS, REPUBLICANS!

Reader Interactions

66Comments

  1. 1.

    Mnemosyne

    The fact that the goddamned MSM rolled over for Spicer today after he recycled the exact same lies he told them yesterday is not exactly making me feel good about our future as a country. And that’s putting it mildly.

  2. 2.

    Mnemosyne

    Oh, and does anyone doubt that President Pence would immediately pardon Trump to short-circuit any further investigation or prosecution? They’ve successfully run that play twice already, so of course they’re going to run it again.

  4. 4.

    XTPD

    @Mnemosyne: Donald: Making Journalism Great Again

    And at least Ford had enough morality to know that pardoning Nixon got him a one-way ticket to Hell. The next Democratic president should start their term by throwing the entire Tapeworm* into a woodchipper.

    *new nickname for Donald’s occupancy

  8. 8.

    danielx

    @Mike in NC:

    I wouldn’t say I miss the skeevy bastard, but by comparison with the current incumbent…Nixon at least had an idea of the seriousness of the position he held, and didn’t take it lightly.

  13. 13.

    cmorenc

    It’s a bitter irony that had Ford won the very close 1976 election instead of Carter, the same national economic period of difficulties that were baked into the cake would have come home to roost under Ford’s watch, and it’s likely Ford would have been caught equally flat-footed by the Iran revolution and the hostage crisis. The upshot is that 1980 would have likely been a mirror-reverse “change” election in which Ted Kennedy was the change instead of Ronald Reagan – and we’d have had some form of universal health care two decades ago and the Supreme Court would have been vastly different. Our whole society would have gone a different, much better direction.

    Jimmy Carter is the best ex-president we’ve had in our lifetime – too bad he had to be such a consequentially unsuccessful President to get there.

  14. 14.

    Bonnie

    In the immortal words of Richard Nixon: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.” So, Trump release your taxes. Also, this tune has been running through my head for weeks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULx9k2QkL94

    Someone needs to keep after these liars and constantly remind them they are liars. Is this what they teach their children? Ask them that. Resist. So far, every one in Trumps closest confidantes have shown themselves to all be Snakes.

  15. 15.

    Wapiti

    @Mnemosyne:

    does anyone doubt that President Pence would immediately pardon Trump to short-circuit any further investigation or prosecution?

    Once pardoned, doesn’t the pardonee have immunity, so they cannot take the 5th, and must testify against others? Not that I’d take Trump’s word in a court of law…

  16. 16.

    Mnemosyne

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    @efgoldman:

    We had one good day that the media is already pretending never happened even though we all watched and participated in real time.

    I was actually holding together pretty well until I read that “funny” essay in Politico and realized that, yes, we are an autocratic one-party state now, and there’s very little that we the people will be able to do to reverse it since we the people chose to hand every lever of power over to the autocrats last November. We can march and protest all we want, but it will have approximately the same long-term effect that it does in Saudi Arabia or Egypt.

  18. 18.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Mnemosyne: Cool, work on encouraging people to give up. That will help a lot.

    ETA: I think we have differing views of what happened this weekend. And I think you are too depressed right now.

  19. 19.

    Peale

    @mike in dc: ooh. I like the idea of a government in exile. However…do you really want to relive the primary? Can we just throw out Bernie and Hillary and rally around Larry Lessing instead?

  20. 20.

    PJ

    @Mnemosyne: Until the states and the federal government stop holding elections, or effectively restrict them to one party only (along the lines of Putin’s “managed democracy”), the people still have the power. And Republicans know it, which is why they try to disenfranchise people and make them feel like they have no power (as you seem to be feeling.) But if you went to one of the marches, I think you would have felt that we are strong, and we can do this. It will not be easy. The mainstream media will probably not help us, if not being actively against us. But the number of real Trump supporters is relatively small (under 30%, I’d say), and I may be overoptimistic, but I think that the decent people of this country are in the majority. In the short term, we can call our representatives and call the Republicans out on every piece of bullshit they try to pass. In the longer term, we have to run solid candidates and get people out to vote and win elections. It is not impossible. Even the police were cheering us on in DC – how often does that happen?

  22. 22.

    PJ

    @Peale: Ha ha. Yes, he’ll be in alternative office for a few weeks to get his one piece of alternative legislation passed in the imaginary Congress, before he steps down and lets his imaginary vice president take over.

  23. 23.

    Anne Laurie

    @Mnemosyne: If we award you the official “Most Politically Percipient, Creatively Brilliant & Totally Woke BJ Commentor of All Time” plaque, will it sooth your enflamed consciousness enough that you can take the rest of the evening off?

    I’m still recovering from the ‘flu, there’s only so much I can bear right now.

  25. 25.

    danielx

    @Wapiti:

    Not that I’d take Trump’s word in a court of law…

    Nor yet anywhere else – for chrissakes, during bankruptcy proceedings his own lawyers would only meet with him two (lawyers) on one (Trump) because he lied so much.

    Which is going to be interesting. He, Trump, has never faced the kind of scrutiny he is under right now. He loves media attention as long as it’s positive; even some negativity is okay to a point under the theory that if they’re talking about you, you’re winning. Being dumped on (deservedly so) from day one in office is going to rock his world in a way it’s never been rocked. Every single public lie he tells is going to be dissected in excruciating detail, and since he lies as naturally as he breathes, if not more so, sooner or later it’s going to sink in on even his supporters (well, some of them anyway) that hey, this guy is not only untrustworthy but off his rocker. You can only go on proclaiming the sun rises in the west for so long before people start to notice. The upside is that we’ll be treated to some really entertaining whoppers (YUUUUGE! the best whoppers).

    And the leaks…..jaysus mary and joseph. This is not a man who inspires loyalty for his own sake, and he has publicly stated he is at war with the media.

  27. 27.

    Chet Murthy

    @PJ:
    @Mnemosyne: I understand your fear, and your depression. I feel the same a lot of the time. But let me note something really, really new that happened. For the first time in my memory, the cops were on our side, this past weekend. And why? because -women- led. Mnemosyne, I’m a cis-male saying this to you: the path to victory is going to be trod by women, and by women -leading-. And you have a chance to do this, where we men do not.

    I don’t wnat to get into why. But I hope you can reflect on the las tfew days and see that it’s true.

  31. 31.

    Mnemosyne

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Like I said, that Politico story hit way too close to home. I do now think that we’re probably past the point of no return. Hopefully this is just a phase and I’ll feel better tomorrow, but I am not able to be optimistic right now. Sorry.

  35. 35.

    Yarrow

    @Mnemosyne: Sometimes the toughest days are the days after a big, exciting event. The adrenaline wears off and it doesn’t seem real and it’s hard to see your way forward. Taking a break from it all is okay too. Sometimes we all need to a break regroup.

    We’re not Saudi Arabia, though. Or Egypt. Our history and culture is very different. We have more options and ways to fight back. We can. We just have to keep at it.

  36. 36.

    Emerald

    @PJ:

    There is a reason that dictators, even including Hitler and Stalin, use propaganda constantly.

    Even as dictators, they know they have to keep the public at least marginally bamboozled. And even with our M$M working on the dictator’s side, I think social media has gone far enough that the M$M won’t be enough to keep people conned.

    So yeah, even if they do so much voter suppression we can’t win another election–all these people in the streets actually do have the power to take them down.

    Once the people decide they’ve had enough, dictators fall. See: Soviet Union, East Germany, Romania, Italy in 1945, just to name a few. We can win this, and probably more quickly than we think.

  37. 37.

    Anne Laurie

    @Mnemosyne: I am very sad that some women, especially women of color, had negative experiences at the march. (Although even your linked exemplar started by saying her experience there with her peers was empowering!)

    But consider that it might be termed colonizing, as well as patronizing, that you are taking it upon yourself to lecture us, using women of color’s stories, about how the white women who showed up to march have no right to feel positive about their own lived experience.

    Especially since those women went to the trouble of showing up! Which I didn’t! Nor did… many of us here!

    I’m a woman, I’m used to multi-tasking. We can celebrate all the good things that happened, and will happen, through the Women’s March while still working to correct our errors towards our companions who had less happy experiences.

  38. 38.

    PJ

    @Mnemosyne: I’m sorry to hear that some people had a bad experience. I am sorry that some people were not treated with respect. But this was a crowd of over 500,000 people at a highly disorganized event. You can’t take an incident or two out of proportion. Speaking anecdotally, there was no information or opportunity to even notice anyone doing their special thing unless you happened to stumble upon them, and most people were fixated on getting to see or hear the speakers (which ended up being impossible for most people). I talked with dozens of strangers (black, white, hispanic, whomever), and it sounds all kumbaya, but everyone was full of good vibes and solidarity. I did not see any hostility or even orneriness (which was what I fully expected given the disorganization).

    Somebody’s always going to do something shitty somewhere. That’s just humanity. If you are going to let that get you down and not do anything, honestly, I think you should seek professional help (no snark) because you are always going to be depressed and pessimistic, and seeking to spread that around. That is not good.

    BTW, reflection on an event that happened only two days ago that involved millions of people around the world is not a matter of “patting ourselves on the back”, it’s about taking that feeling and that motivation and applying it positively to make change. There are millions of people of goodwill out there – they came out of the woodwork Saturday. We are not alone and we can do this.

  39. 39.

    Peale

    @Emerald: I still think he has to break something first (let’s hope it’s not Southeast Asia. I’ve got travel plans in April). Something needs to crash hard, because a lot of folks at the elite level did back him and they need to pay up, too. I. Thinking specifically of folks like Icahn and Ross and their Private Equity minions. I’m thinking of the moneybags who bankrolled the Congress. They should not simply get their “Resonable Pence” and “intellectual Ryan” without feeling something because otherwise we’ll get this same shit in two years. I don’t know how to do it, but we need a shock for them this time.

  42. 42.

    Spinoza Is My Co-Pilot

    So, Mnemosyne simply writes — in many more words, of course — essentially what our esteemed blog host has said about our, umm, “situation” (that we are “well and truly fucked”) and she gets dog-piled for wrongthink?

    I’m also on Team Well and Truly Fucked (and believe that to think otherwise is delusional whistling past the graveyard) but I’m not giving up, nor am I encouraging anyone else to give up. I see Mnemosyne’s commentary the same way.

    I think we are in incredibly dire straits — far more dire than those who are looking toward the 2018 mid-terms or 2020 elections or whatever seem to recognize. We’ll be fortunate if we’re able to put off nuclear strikes until global warming causes massive resource wars later this century, when the use of nuclear weapons will become all but inevitable.

    But I’ll still fight fascism, and encourage others to do likewise however they can. Not because I have much hope we’ll thereby create a “better world” in the foreseeable, but because it’s the right thing to do.

  44. 44.

    Yoda Dog

    @Spinoza Is My Co-Pilot:

    and she gets dog-piled for wrongthink?

    I dont believe thats an accurate description of what’s written in this thread. Alot of love and support here for Mnem who is obviously just feeling down tonight. We all have highs and lows; its not a big deal. This will be a marathon of a fight, not a sprint. And it could last many years or even decades so we might all do better to remember to pace ourselves since giving up isnt an option.

  45. 45.

    PJ

    @Spinoza Is My Co-Pilot: I think that pretty everyone who reads this website would agree that we are well and truly fucked. Where some of us apparently disagree is in what to do about it. If someone thinks that we as a country, or a planet, can’t make anything better because someone was mean to someone somewhere, I think that person needs a reality check. None of this is going to be easy, but it is also not impossible. I do think that people who spend a lot of time on the internet reading Facebook or Twitter or Reddit or whatever have a skewed view of what people are like and what reality is like that makes them more negative.

  46. 46.

    Morzer

    I look at President Pissrinse* and think that even Nero managed a good first five years. Donnie Putinobitch hasn’t even managed a good first five hours.

    *Well, how do you think his “hair” assumed that utterly unconvincing blond patina on top?

  47. 47.

    patroclus

    Well, the lies about the voter fraud and the size of the inauguration crowd and whether the CIA employees clapped are all interesting, but the worst things that happened today were the EO’s prohibiting funding of women’s liberty around the world and the cancellation of TPP, which was the re-negotiation of NAFTA that everyone always wanted (because Mexico and Canada were both signatories) and the handover of the U.S’s trading dominance in the ASPAC region to China, which will have a long-term negative impact on the U.S. economy. Sure, the next President can re-install the funding and re-negotiate bi-lateral agreements but for at least four years, those are gone. The economy and women’s liberty took a huge hit today – I’m with Mnem.

  48. 48.

    Morzer

    @patroclus:

    The Trumpzis are now trying to saber-rattle in the South China Sea, which is not going to end remotely well for them. The best outcome is probably a disastrous trade war, the worst.. well, the CCP have stayed in power by feeding the masses a diet of hardcore patriotism and denunciation of any and all “attacks” on China. Given that Trump and his idiot Nazi Bannon want to whip up the right-wing crazies with similar propaganda in the US, it’s easy to see a situation unfolding in which neither side thinks it can afford to step back. What will be left of the world afterwards is unlikely to be enjoyable.

  49. 49.

    EBT

    @patroclus: Ronnie Raygun started poisoning the system, and this is the last gasp of our institutions dying. Something radical will come next.

  54. 54.

    cckids

    @Bonnie: I heard this yesterday, and DT, the media and the election all came to mind. The whole thing fits to a T.

    “Give ’em the old Razzle Dazzle – Razzle Dazzle ’em.
    Give em an act with lots of flash in it, and the reaction will be passionate

    Give em the old hocus pocus; bead and feather them.
    How can they see with sequins in their eyes?

    Throw em a fake and a finagle, they’ll never know you’re just . . . a bagel
    Razzle Dazzle em – and they’ll never catch wise. “

  56. 56.

    jenn

    A bit of a depressing thread in some ways. Thanks to those keeping up the fighting spirit! For me – not that I don’t occasionally falter, because I do! – I am trying to keep a few things in mind:

    1. Keep the main thing, the main thing. For me that’s protecting the vulnerable, protecting our democracy, and protecting our environment, and doing whatever I can to build and maintain a civil society (in all senses of the phrase).
    2. Put my focus where I can act, not where I can’t. I can try to influence my governmental representatives at all levels, I can contribute to the food bank, I can volunteer at the neighborhood school, I can be polite to all and sundry, and I can be on the lookout for and stand up against bullying behavior.
    3. Keep positive. Not foolishly pie-in-the-sky; positive. Keep the end goal in mind, and work toward it. Are we going to win every time? No. But we’re not going to win anything if we don’t hold fast to that vision of a nation built on that self-evident truth, that we were all created equal, and endowed with inalienable rights; a vision of a nation where we care about our neighbors – locally, nationally, globally. Where we care about our natural resources, both for our own well-being, and for their own sake. So yeah, we’re going to lose some – but I’m not going to dwell on our potential defeats, I’m going to dwell on our potential victories, and how we can gain them, and make sure I’m doing my part.
    4. I only spend enough time news-watching to ensure that I am informed – when I reach the point where the bad news starts to impair my ability to act, I cut it off. Some days, that limit is about 2 minutes of finding the next set of phone calls to make and then I’m out for the day. Other days, I can keep digging for hours. (Also, I almost never listen to the news – hateful voices stick with me in an adverse way. I can intellectually deal better with news that is written.)
    5. I seek out mental conditioning coaches online, and have gleaned a lot of things from them that have been incredibly helpful to me the past few years – and I feel certain I will be leaning on these tools a lot in the coming years.

    Best wishes, everyone!

  58. 58.

    Russ

    @Mnemosyne: that you see the march as white with few people of color is how the media leads us around by our noses. They always have a wedge to drive between us.

  61. 61.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @PJ: The Soviet Union fell do to a popular uprising. Even police states are ungovernable once they lose legitimacy in the eyes of the majority.

  62. 62.

    Brookshire Walker

    If Ted Kennedy could later see the wisdom of what President Ford did, then I think it’s reasonable that we on the left can do the same. Gerlad Ford, an honest decent man who served us well as President (although I was not for him in 1976 as a teenager), is not responsible for those who present occupy the center of power in Washington; we are, period, for espousing tolerance, but practicing condescension, for believing in group politics that pointedly leaves out a specific segment of the “American people,” and for allowing ourselves as progressives to be saddled with a choice of candidates ranging from the righteous and entitled (HRC), the weird (Lincoln Chaffee), the “givernment solves everything,” but I won’t condemn Castro’s human rights abuses” (Bernie Sanders). the copycat (Martin O’Malley) and the too conservative for us (Jim Webb). We can do better than all of that and stop blaming people like President Ford for our own choices and their consequences.

  63. 63.

    chopper

    @PJ:

    right. you put a million people together, even mostly women, and there’s gonna be some of that. especially given that a great number of people who came out to march were new to this sort of stuff. lots of suburban types who never really identified with politics until trump, not the sort of people who have had a great deal of what you could call “sensitivity training”.

  65. 65.

    Miss Bianca

    @Brookshire Walker: Yeah, we can also do better than blaming the Democratic candidates we have, rather than the ones we wish we had. Whom I notice you *don’t* name. Is that because you *can’t* name them? Does anyone meet your standard of purity, old chap? Or maybe we should just resurrect Gerald Ford, and get him to run as a Democrat this time?

  66. 66.

    fuckwit

    I heard that Dread Pirate Roberts, of SilkRoad Bitcoin infamy, after he absconded with millions of dollars looted from SilkRoad, shrugged and said “You knew I was a snake when you picked me up.”

    Yes, America, we knew Troll was a snake. A majority of us thought it best NOT to pick him up though.

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