Friday, July 8, 2016

WHERE ARE THE FACT CHECKERS WHEN WE NEED THEM?


By now you probably have heard about Donald Trump’s latest venture into fantasy, his claim yesterday that Saddam Hussein was somehow anti-terror:
[Saddam] killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read ’em the rights. They didn’t talk. They were a terrorist, it was over!
If you substitute “opponent of his regime” for “terrorist,” you have a true statement. Otherwise, as Jay Nordlinger reminds us, Trump’s claim is absurd. Saddam was a major sponsor of Islamic terrorism, and he himself used terrorist tactics to subdue Iraq’s population. Donald Trump’s view of Saddam Hussein is as false, and as dumb, as Michael Moore’s portrayal of Saddam’s Iraq as a kite-flying idyll.
So this is what I want to know: will the fact checkers of the liberal media, like the Washington Post and Politifact, who have rushed to declare other Trump statements false even when they were mostly true, and award them undeserved Pinocchios, call Trump on his ignorant falsehood about Saddam Hussein? I hope so, but I am not holding my breath. Fact checking, like most of what appears in the liberal press, is usually tailored to serve an agenda. And telling the truth about Iraq is not, to put it mildly, on the Left’s to-do list.

No comments:

Post a Comment