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President Trump Changed His Story on Son's Meeting with Russian Lawyer

posted by martyb on Tuesday August 07 2018, @05:08PM   
from the "A-Tale-of-Flodden-Field" dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

5News reports:

President Donald Trump appears to have changed his story about a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower that is pivotal to the special counsel's investigation, tweeting that his son met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer to collect information about his political opponent.

[...] That is a far different explanation than Trump gave 13 months ago, when a statement dictated by the president but released under the name of Donald Trump Jr., read: "We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago."

also at Vox, MSN and Mic

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Original Submission

• Re:Untrustable Re:Untrustable (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 15 2018, @12:43PM (4 children)

  by khallow (3766) on Wednesday August 15 2018, @12:43PM (#721750) Journal

  But of course I wouldn't confirm my biases no matter what you said. Those biases were very specific. It's easy to assume I would, because bad faith argumentation is everywhere in the world. To confirm my biases, the ones I laid out, in front of you before you even started posting this hellthread, you'd have to argue some pedantic point through semantics and never acknowledge the core idea for what it was. You did exactly that.

  Again, you have yet to make any such point. First, we still don't know what group you're even speaking of (labels in the absence of any sort of criteria are useless, hint hint) or why they're supposed to be arguing in bad faith. Then you've run your mouth for a half dozen or so posts without actually saying anything. I get the impression you disagree with me about something, but not what that is supposed to be.

  (Also, no. No libertarian has ever done anything for freedom, ever,

  Let's look at what you refuse to see. Libertarians oppose (a non-inclusive list):

  • NSA whole sale spying and the FISA court (which let us note Obama didn't oppose! original reason I stopped backing Obama in the first place)
  • Tariffs and other economic manipulation by governments - more on the latter below
  • Forcing people to make speech that is against their religious convictions and criminalizing speech (such as "hate speech" laws).
  • Asset seizure laws.
  • The use of state power to crack on mostly harmless behavior that someone deems immoral (such as kids playing outside unattended, prostitution, gambling, smoking dope, amateur scientific research, reading certain books or listening to certain music, belonging to certain religions, and being the wrong ethnicity in the wrong place at the wrong time).
  • The use of regulation to force behavioral changes (sin taxes, bans on various sorts of toilets, light bulbs, plastic straws, etc).
  • profoundly stupid economic regulation (that typically hurts the people it's supposed to help, reduces employment, worsens our lives, and strongly encourages formation of large multinational businesses).
  • Huge spending in military and social policy.

  Now some can and do disagree about inclusion of various items on this list. But this list exists in the first place because we're not collectively doing enough to prevent this loss of freedom. At least libertarians are doing something.

  unless you a priori buy into the fundamentals of their, yes, far-right ideology about money and property representing freedom in some foundational way, which just as often impede freedom in a more philosophical and human sense.)

  Now we get into the Orwellian war is peace stuff. This alleged "far-right" ideology has one of the most liberal and non-conservative policy out there concerning money and property. And the rest of the libertarian philosophy such as backing democracy and freedom has little to do with much of the far-right agenda, such as it is.
  
  And what is the claim about "impeding freedom in a more philosophical and human sense"? Why is that something that should matter? Such fluff is typical of the counterarguments. People mouth off [soylentnews.org] about how monopolies and oligopolies are end states of "free markets" while ignoring that these are often even more the end states of the supposed cures to free markets' problems. We're not better off that most developed world countries have state institutions dominating such things as peoples' pensions, health care, and education. We're not better off that our heavy (and still growing) regulatory burden encourages the growth of large corporations (and the oligopolies that we supposedly care about preventing). We're not better off that a half century or more of allegedly pro-labor or pro-poor social policy hasn't and never will yield the advertised results.
  
  Instead, we're better off because we let people do their own thing.

  but I do need to deal with people honest enough to go "You know, Trump outright makes shit up daily, and that's pretty different from being wrong about the real world outcomes of a healthcare bill."

  It's a far less egregious case of lying for starters. Obama's lie hurt tens of millions of people. Trump's tweet lies hurt mostly Trump's reputation.

  Parent

• Re:Untrustable Re:Untrustable (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday August 15 2018, @02:23PM (3 children)

  by ikanreed (3164) on Wednesday August 15 2018, @02:23PM (#721782) Journal

  It's a far less egregious case of lying for starters. Obama's lie hurt tens of millions of people. Trump's tweet lies hurt mostly Trump's reputation.

  Yeah, I'm sure completely untrue merit lies about putting children literally innocent of any crime into fucking 8x8ft dog cages, where some die of preventable illnesses because no one was paying attention because their parents were illegal immigrants, and publicly claiming not days before it came out that they all were given foster homes and good schools ("or something") is just as bad as your maliciously misreading a statement to make it wrong.

  You scum fucking dishonest fuck. You complete horseshit of a human being. Don't bother to tell me, I know you don't personally approve of the concentration camps that you knowingly voted for.

  Fuck you. Fuck everything about your ideology. Fuck you as a human being. The world deserves better than you.

  Parent

  • Re:Untrustable (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 16 2018, @03:03AM

    by khallow (3766) on Thursday August 16 2018, @03:03AM (#722033) Journal

    Yeah, I'm sure completely untrue merit lies about putting children literally innocent of any crime into fucking 8x8ft dog cages, where some die of preventable illnesses because no one was paying attention because their parents were illegal immigrants, and publicly claiming not days before it came out that they all were given foster homes and good schools ("or something") is just as bad as your maliciously misreading a statement to make it wrong.

    As I noted before, Obama's lies hurt a lot of people. Trump's lie here hurt himself. The children weren't imprisoned even a day longer by those Tweet lies.

    You scum fucking dishonest fuck. You complete horseshit of a human being. Don't bother to tell me, I know you don't personally approve of the concentration camps that you knowingly voted for.

    That in a nutshell is your problem not mine. How much more ugliness will we find when we peel you back even further?

    Fuck you. Fuck everything about your ideology. Fuck you as a human being. The world deserves better than you

    Called it.

    Parent

  • Re:Untrustable (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 16 2018, @12:35PM

    by khallow (3766) on Thursday August 16 2018, @12:35PM (#722145) Journal

    To continue on the subject, here's what PolitiFact had to say [politifact.com] on the matter:

    But what really set everyone off was when Obama tried to rewrite his slogan, telling political supporters on Nov. 4, "Now, if you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law, and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law passed."
    
    Pants on Fire! PolitiFact counted 37 times when he’d included no caveats, such as a high-profile speech to the American Medical Association in 2009: "If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what."

    That was over a several year period. Let us also keep in mind that it wasn't a mystery that such changes in health care plans would have come, just due to the large changes in the cost of such health insurance. Changes and dropping health care plans would be a typical and easily foreseeable consequence of law that raises the price and liabilities of health insurance.
    
    And Obama didn't throw this out on Twitter one dark night, but repeatedly made the claim over several years in many public speeches. Then when the original statement became untenable to continue, claimed he didn't really mean it. As to the tweet(s), I think SN commenter, theluggage has a sound take [soylentnews.org] on the value of Twitter speech:

    Ah, Twitter - all those stupid things human beings say when they're drunk, stoned, upset, lonely or just plain bored - once forgotten by the morning after, now recorded, preserved for posterity, made available to all and mistaken by journalists as a source of news.

    [...]

    What's really frightening is the degree of seriousness that some people apply to tweets (buying/selling shares, voting for orange people, etc.)

    Finally, if you're having trouble with people quoting PolitiFact in order to defend the Orange One, perhaps you could instead acknowledge the truth of the observation and continue with your own, namely that a certain other US president has obtained Lie of the Year status for the last three years (and probably will have a lock on the thing for the rest of his tenure as president). But I suppose debate requires thinking and that's hard for you, right?

    Parent

  • Re:Untrustable (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 16 2018, @12:47PM

    by khallow (3766) on Thursday August 16 2018, @12:47PM (#722152) Journal

    As a final remark, notice how your sole concrete example of the nefarious bad faith you're supposedly arguing against ended up with you creating this rhetorical cliff and then diving off of it. You shifted from the original argument to you voluntarily defending some pretty egregious lies as not lies. That's yet more supporting evidence for my claim that the sole common factor is you. You didn't have to do that. But even if you did, you didn't have to do it in a way that was guaranteed to lose.

    Parent