Regarding the debate where cats and dogs were on the menu
The 2024 election is now 52 days away. Post debate polls are about to be released. Most people paying attention expect a small bump for Kamala Harris. We’ll see.
Donald Trump’s approach to the debate seems to have been to see how many weird and crazy things he could shoehorn into 90 minutes, and to do it all with ever increasing hyperventilating anger.
The highlight for me, and I suspect a lot of people, was his assertion that in Springfield, Ohio, illegal Haitian migrants, the ones he insists are murderers and rapists, were stealing and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs. When ABC Moderator David Muir told him ABC had verified with Springfield’s City Manager that no such stealing and eating had happened, Trump said he “saw it on TV.”
The origin of this lunacy was one Springfield woman, Erica Lee, who posted the bizarre anecdote in a local Facebook group. Then, on 5 September, a screenshot of the post was shared on X, which went viral. It’s now been viewed by almost one million people.
Fox News picked up the story and reported it. Then, when it became clear the story was totally made up, Fox reported it wasn’t true. Mr. Trump, Fox’s most devoted viewer, must have missed that second report.
Shortly after the debate, Ms Lee revealed her source for the baseless story, saying she heard it from a neighbor, who heard it from a friend, who heard it from the friend’s daughter. She also admitted that she doesn’t even know the daughter who started the whole thing.
Adding some fuel to that claim was a graphic video, viewable on YouTube, which shows the 16 August arrest of Allexis Telia Ferrell, who allegedly killed and ate a cat in Canton, Ohio. Stark County Court records for Ferrell, a non-Haitian American citizen, show she was charged with cruelty to companion animals.
Finally, JD Vance circulated the “story” on X, but did say it was “possible the rumors would not prove to be true.”
And that’s all the “evidence” there was for this brushfire of calumny.
Over the past couple of days, Haley Byrd Wilt, of Notus, tried to ask as many Senate and Congressional Republicans as she could get to stand in one place long enough what they thought of the migrant stealing and eating episode. You’d think she had thrown them into a pizza oven given the speed at which they tried to escape.
Only Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, a state chock-full of Haitian migrants who vote, and are therefore important to him, offered any kind of rational reply. Of Haitians eating cats, he said, “We’ve never had a problem with that in Florida.” And Rubio wasn’t worried that Trump’s claims would affect the considerable Haitian population in his state.
“The Haitian community in South Florida, in particular, is well-ingrained in the fabric of our community,” he said. “We all know each other. It’s not going to be an issue in Florida.”
But he was careful not to criticize Trump.
Meanwhile, back in Springfield, Ohio, population about 58,000, bomb threats forced the closing of City Hall and a couple of schools on Thursday. There were no bombs, but the citizenry is decidedly on edge and upset about its new undeserved fame as the cute little pet stealing and eating capital of the country.
For the record, in May 2021, the U.S. expanded Haitian eligibility for a humanitarian program granting deportation relief and work permits to an estimated 150,000 Haitians already living in the U.S. who cannot safely return to their home, Reuters reported.
Want to join Mar-a-Lago?
In 2015, before Donald Trump announced his candidacy, the cost of a membership at Mar-a-Lago was $100,000. After he won the election, he raised the price to $200,000. Today, it is $700,000.
In November, shortly after the election, four slots are coming open, and the price to buy in?
One million dollars. And all of it goes to Donald Trump. Maybe six bankruptcies helped him become a better businessman.
Enough said.
False equivalence at the New York Times – a continuing embarrassment
Margaret Sullivan is a journalist who was the first New York Times public editor, or ombudsman. Now, she writes for The Guardian and publishes a Substack column, called American Crisis. Her most recent entry is highly critical of her former bosses at the Times. While Sullivan asserts that, with its enormous resources, the Times does a lot of great work, she bemoans its coverage of the 2024 presidential election.
As an example, she wrote that she had been discussing this with her former colleague, the Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter James Risen, who was deeply disturbed by what he was seeing.
She wrote:
“At first, I thought this was a parody,” Risen told me. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Even more unfortunately, the lack of judgment it displays is all too common in the Times and throughout Big Journalism as mainstream media covers Donald Trump’s campaign for president.
“Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts,” is the headline of the story he was angered by. If you pay attention to the epidemic of “false equivalence” in the media — equalizing the unequal for the sake of looking fair — you might have had a sense of what was coming.
The story takes seriously Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of immigrants as part of his supposed “affordable housing” agenda.
Here’s some both-sidesing for you, as the paper of record describes Harris’s tax cuts to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers, and Trump’s deportation scheme.
“Their two visions of how to solve America’s affordable housing shortage have little in common …But they do share one quality: Both have drawn skepticism from outside economists.” The story notes that experts are particularly skeptical about Trump’s idea, but the story’s framing and its headline certainly equate the two.
This is a small example of how mainstream media, and particularly America’s “paper of record,” is covering this election. In a committed effort to be seen as fair and balanced, it is being anything but.
The nation deserves better.
Cartoonists do it better.
For hundreds of years, political cartoonists have afflicted the comfortable as no other group has. You won’t find much false equivalence coming out of this crowd.
I end this weekend read with a perfect example.
When Donald Trump desecrated Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, I wrote about it. However, I could never capture the callow disregard for the cemetery’s hallowed ground as well as Pulitzer Prize winner Darrin Bell did last week.
See what you think.
