Archive for October, 2024

Lies and deception on the 2024 campaign trail

Tuesday, October 1st, 2024

As we close in on the final weeks of what has been the strangest election of my life, I find myself sifting through all the lies and deceptions Americans have had to endure for the last eight years ever since Donald Trump came down the faux-gold, like him, escalator in Trump Tower. If history is a guide, we will one day exit this vice-filled hellscape and emerge to better days. Humanity has a way of, as William Faulkner put it in his 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech — ‘prevailing.’ That is the prize for our eyes.

Until that blessed time, we’re forced to endure lies and deceptions from creatures of the “dark side.” Here are a couple for your consideration.

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” – Vladimir Lenin

Of all the lies told during this presidential campaign, which do you think set the standard for all the others? Which has done the most damage? Which is the most believed, or, in Lenin’s parlance, which has become the truth?

I suggest the gold medal for lying goes to “illegal immigration.”

Everything Donald Trump has said and continues to say in ever more unhinged and strident ways about immigration at our southern border has been a lie. Over the weekend, for example, he claimed more than 600,000 immigrants, all convicted of violent crime, had been released around the country to do more damage.

First, he inflated the number by nearly 50%. It’s really 425,000. Second, he neglected to mention that the data is over a 40-year period, that the government follows these people, and that the numbers include many who are currently in jails and prisons serving criminal sentences.

Moreover, the former president asserts he was far more vigilant in rounding up the undocumented than either Barack Obama before him or Joe Biden after.

Trump and his sycophants would have you believe he is now the only thing standing between you and the millions of murderers and rapists pouring over the southern border heading for your home with plunder in their eyes. If Americans elect him, he will fix it all, and he’ll do it even before he’s inaugurated.

Just like he did in his first term.

Permit me to peel that noxious onion a bit.

According to the right-leaning Cato Institute, Trump did a terrible job removing/deporting illegal immigrants to the U.S. during his first term. He compares woefully to Barack Obama’s eight-year record before him, as seen below. If stopping illegal immigration is your yardstick, Obama’s first four years compared with Trump’s four years are a hands down win. And Obama kept it up in his second term.

Moving on, how does Trump’s immigration record stack up to Joe Biden’s? Not well. Once again, according to another Cato Institute paper, Trump released a greater percentage of immigrants crossing the border into the U.S. interior, and removed/deported a smaller percentage than has the Biden Administration, as seen in this Cato chart.

Yet, the main issue Republicans have latched onto for the battle for the White House is the Biden/Harris Administration’s awful performance on immigration.

Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” once again are on full display.

What about the charge (well, lie) that undocumented immigrants coming over the southern border are doing so much raping and murdering?

The truth is entirely different.

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) released a study two weeks ago that examined crime in Texas, the entry point for immigrants coming over the border. The study encompassed the period from 2012 through 2018 and used Texas Department of Public Safety data. The studies first paragraph said:

An NIJ-funded study examining data from the Texas Department of Public Safety estimated the rate at which undocumented immigrants are arrested for committing crimes. The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.

But that didn’t stop Texas Senator Ted Cruz from doing his best to capitalize on the grief of a Texas mother whose 12-year-old daughter was killed by two illegal immigrants from Venezuela.

In a 60-second emotional Cruz campaign ad playing on TV stations across the state, the mother, Alexis Nungaray, says her heart would break again if U.S. Rep. Colin Allred beats Cruz in November.

Cruz continues to milk Jocelyn Nungaray’s tragedy as an example of how “every day, Americans are dying — murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants,” as he put it during a primetime speech at the Republican National Convention this summer.

The MAGA messaging has grown especially loud, even desperate, in recent months as border crossings fell to their lowest point since February 2021.

And before we leave the immigration issue, I would be remiss if I failed to mention the lying and vile cruelty inflicted on the people of Springfield, Ohio, by JD Vance and his mentor.

During the one and only presidential debate with Kamala Harris, Trump asserted 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.”

This ridiculous story was completely debunked by every reputable news organization in the country, but Vance continued to push it, encouraging supporters to “keep the cat memes flowing.”

Nearly 40 bomb threats have been made against schools, government buildings and city officials’ homes since this malignity started, forcing evacuations and closures. In an irony-defining moment, Springfield was forced to cancel its annual celebration of diversity, arts and culture in response to the threats, and state police have been deployed to city schools. Citizens and their Haitian neighbors have been living in dread about what could come next.

Keeping in mind that Vance is the junior Senator from Ohio, have either he or Trump shown any remorse for putting the VP candidate’s constituents through this hell?

What a stupid question.

“Deception, deception, deception”¹

One of the things that characterizes politicians of the less upright variety is their ability to deceive, and to do it with utmost sincerity.

Such is the case with Republican Derrick Anderson, who is running in a competitive race for an open seat in Virginia’s Seventh District  against Yevgeny “Eugene” Vindman (D), a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, former ethics officer for the National Security Counsel (NSC), and twin brother of Alexander Vindman, also of the NSC, who testified during Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial about Trump’s infamous phone call with Ukraine’s President Zelenskii.

The Vindman/Anderson race is highly competitive with polls giving a slight edge to the democrat. Early voting began ten days ago on 20 September.

The mudslinging in this contest, both real and imagined, has been getting more ferocious by the day.

When not firing both barrels at each other, the two candidates are doing whatever they can to be seen in the best light. You know, family men of high character. Which is why Derrick Anderson’s team released an ad last week with this photo.

And that’s not the only photo. Another has the loving group sitting around a dinner table. Very homey.

There’s only one problem. Derrick Anderson is not married to this woman or any other and has no children. He’s JD Vance’s “childless” father.

Right now, you may be asking, “Well, who is the lovely lady with the big smile and the three kids?”

They are the mother and three children of an Anderson friend.

Anderson’s ad did not say that. It said nothing, leaving voters to infer, even assume, this was a picture of the happy Anderson clan.

In this day and age, you can’t hide this stuff, and so, in short order, the truth emerged with predictable results. The social media universe eviscerated the Republican candidate just as early voting was underway.

The Anderson campaign did not have to give the Vindman campaign this kind of ammunition. But it did.

Deception, when discovered, can have severe consequences. Maybe in this case it won’t. But in a race as tight as this with such voter polarity, little things, like faking a family, can reverberate in loud ways.

_________________

¹Amanda, to her daughter Laura, upon learning Laura dropped out of secretarial school weeks ago, but has left the house every day since, pretending to attend. From The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, 1944.