Tuesday, July 7, 2020

Senator Duckworth and Most of the Press Are Lying about Trump’s Speech

National Review  "Senator Tammy Duckworth says that, during his address at Mount Rushmore on Friday, President Trump “spent all his time talking about dead traitors.”
"This is a flat-out lie. It is entirely untrue. It is invented from whole cloth. You can read the speech here and see for yourself.
"One doesn’t have to like President Trump — or to have enjoyed his speech — in order to acknowledge that Duckworth is lying. One needs only to read what was said.

. . . Bash listens to Duckworth uncritically


"Trump did mention statues, but the names he mentions in connection are “George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, abolitionists, and many others,” as well as “Andrew Jackson.” In addition, he mentions the other two men on Mount Rushmore — Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt — and, in a variety of contexts, name-checks the “Reverend Martin Luther King,” “Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody,” “the Wright brothers, the Tuskegee airmen, Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Jesse Owens, George Patton, General George Patton, the great Louis Armstrong, Alan Shepard, Elvis Presley, and Muhammad Ali,” Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Irving Berlin, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Bob Hope.
"None of these people were “traitors” — not one — which may go some way to explaining why The Hill approvingly quotes Senator Duckworth’s lie, and cites a CNN tweet that claims that Trump “defended Confederate monuments” but provides only this as evidence:
"If the truth matters, it matters all the time, including when reporting on Donald Trump. That Trump lies himself does not change this. That Trump is often incoherent does not change this. That Trump has said some awful things over the past five years does not change this. This was not a speech about Confederate monuments, it was not a speech about traitors, and it was not a speech that equivocated on the question of racial equality. Senator Duckworth is lying, and the press is helping her do it. Do they think we’re incapable of reading?". . .

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