Finally. Finally.
The mainstream media is starting to point out something about Donald Trump that’s been clear from the moment he formally announced his campaign for the Presidency on June 16, 2015: the man is a serial liar.
Those of us who have spent too much of the past year screaming at our television as a prostrate press allowed The Donald to spew lies, damned lies and bogus statistics are heartened to see that fact-checking Trump has recently become the latest journalistic fad.
Hopefully, this fact-checking fad will catch on like Pokémon Go.
And what was the final straw that aroused the media to finally challenge Trump’s truthiness?
Was it when the nation’s print journalists, television anchors, reporters and pundits realized there was actually a chance that an unqualified, incurious, racist, thin-skinned demagogue could wind up with access to the nuclear launch codes?
Hardly.
It was when Trump embarrassed the media by suckering them into flocking to his newest hotel on September 16. The Trump campaign promised a press conference to clear the air after The Donald’s disastrous refusal to acknowledge Obama’s citizenship in an interview with The Washington Post.
But the press did not get their promised press conference.
Instead, they all devoted precious airtime to what turned out to be an extended promotional event for Trump’s newly opened luxury hotel in Washington, plus a string of testimonials from a collection of retired military figures –followed by a few words from Trump on the birther issue.
“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it, you know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.”
Burned by the great orange con man into investing network and newspaper resources on Trump’s shameless promotional bait & switch, the media did something they’d rarely done before: they all pointed out that most of what Trump has just said was a lie.
And then they actually started using the word “lie”.
They noted that the Clinton campaign did not start the birther thing.
They made it clear that Trump did not “finish it”. In fact, he’d fanned it. Right up until that Washington Post interview.
Headlines announced that Trump had traded one grudging truth for two falsehoods. The New York Times began calling it “the birther lie” – and said things like this:
So, as we await the first Presidential Debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton, everyone in the media is now talking about fact-checking – and, surprise, Trump and his surrogates are howling like stuck pigs.
That’s because Donald Trump is a big fat liar.
It’s the truth.
I finally read it in The New York Times.
Paul's Voyage of Discovery & Etc. 
Last week it was birtherism. This week it is “lies”. The talking points go out and the Democrat echo chamber goes into high gear. This time to try and overcome the latest revelation from the FBI’s dump of more “302’s” last Friday from their investigation of the email scandal that President Obama communicated to Hillary via a “pseudonym” (and separate email account because that’s how these things work) thus proving his claim that he first learned about Hillary’s private email account from the media as just another lie to the American people.
I find both candidates are unfit for office and will vote for neither. We would be better served by randomly selecting someone from the pool of registered voters. Or perhaps randomly selected from citizens who haven’t registered to vote because they are disgusted with a corrupt system.
That’s an interesting proposal, Bob.
Great summary, Paul.