Donald Trump demonstrates primitive speaking skills even by the standards of an illiterate indigenous people.

Linguist John McWhorter

Courtesy of Trump Impeachment:  

Brian Williams interviewed linguistics professor John McWorter on the 11th Hour. McWhorter elaborated on Trump’s deficiency as a communicator. 

Williams: “What is the linguistics definition of this president?” 

McWhorter: “Donald Trump is unadorned. Linguistically, he is unadorned. This is the basics, this is what language was undoubtedly like when it first emerged among people who didn’t have writing and were first getting their verbal sea legs. This is where it started and so in that way as in so many others Donald Trump is an original.” 

Williams: “That would mean that education and schooling has had no effect on his use of language. He’s quick to remind us that he went to the best schools.” 

McWhorter: “And he learned nothing in them. He speaks like someone who has paid no attention to one of the goals of education, which is refine our natural, inborn proclivities of speech, which are great for casual circumstances, but he uses those same ways of speaking in what most of us used to consider formal and important circumstances.” 

Williams: “I think in your line of work they call it a ‘tag’ when something is added at the end of a sentence. The tradition is that often he will tag a sentence with ‘believe me, believe me,’ an enforcer, something he thought was lacking in the original sentence.” 

McWhorter: “Um, hmm. It’s that he’s reinforcing ...what we’re always doing is checking to see that the other person understands what we’re saying, that they’re in the same boat that we are, so that’s what ‘you know’ is, that’s what ‘LOL’ is in texting, but once again, he’s not doing it in texting, he’s doing it in formal circumstances. What that means is that he never leaves the realm of the casual when he speaks, which is unlike — even in indigenous societies, where there is no such thing as reading or writing yet, there’s always a high way of talking and a low way of talking; the Chief just doesn’t get up and run his mouth. Ours does.

Great, we have a guy in the most important political office on the planet who communicates worse than an indigenous tribe deep in the jungles of South America. 

That's so comforting.

Personally I cannot even bear to listen to Trump for more than a minute or so at a time.

Hearing him reminds of all of those hours spent transcribing Sarah Palin speeches and interviews during which at one point I literally checked to see if my ears had started bleeding.

It is hard to imagine that there are even six American voters who listened to Trump speak and thought, "Well he sounds like the leader we need in this country," much less almost sixty three million of them.

MSNBC to give Brian Williams his own show.

Courtesy of TV Newser:  

Brian Williams has his own show again. 

The former NBC Nightly News anchor will debut “The 11th Hour with Brian Williams” Tuesday night at 11 p.m. ET., MSNBC announced today. Williams’ likely move to the 11 p.m. hour was first reported last month. 

“This new assignment is a natural extension of the hundreds of hours of political coverage Brian has anchored through this campaign cycle so far,” said MSNBC president Phil Griffin in a statement. “He and Rachel Maddow and the team have been great on the big nights, and now he’ll build on MSNBC’s prime-time momentum by taking us live into the 11 p.m. hour every night.”

I have to admit that I was never the biggest Brian Williams fan when he was anchoring the NBC Nightly News. No real definitive reason, I just wasn't.

However I felt a little badly for him when he was asked to step down from his post for exxagerating about his experiences covering the war zones, and then this crazy person starting going after his jugular like it was a Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme.

When one of their own repeats a lie for 12 years but is excused with the help of the media's herd mentality, tragic distrust and despondency blankets our land. The veil is torn, however, with the revelation of exaggerated, self-centered falsehoods like NBC's perpetual lie that belittled our soldiers and their truly courageous missions. The face of that network’s news lied about combat experiences in Iraq and then with false humility accepted the title of "war hero" while the press ignores, disrespects, and often destroys the good name of our true war heroes. To me, that's like soiling sacred ground.

Leftist media and their minions in politics tried for too long to fundamentally transform America with their shared assumption we would fall in line and bend our backs as they rode us with reins to control our individual sovereignty. America said enough is enough and we strengthened our spine so we could fight for freedom, sometimes requiring battles against our own leaders. 

Damn, has she EVER made any sense?

So ultimately Williams was fired, and for quite some time laid low.

And when he showed back up earlier this year to start covering the election cycle and debates, I was actually surprised at how good he was with his dry humor and ability to keep things lively and interesting during hours and hours of coverage.

So I am looking forward to watching Brian Williams in his new show, and even though there is no promise that it will last beyond November I think we will soon see a permanent place for him in the MSNBC lineup.

David Letterman asks Bill O'Reilly what the difference is between his lies and those told by Brian Williams.

Courtesy of Mediaite:  

Comparing O’Reilly’s alleged mischaracterizations of past reporting to Brian Williams‘ exaggerations about his time spent in Iraq, Letterman asked, “Is there a difference?” 

“Only if I did something that wasn’t true,” O’Reilly replied, maintaining his innocence. “What I said was accurate,” he insisted, despite evidence to the contrary put forward by organizations like Mother Jones and Media Matters, among others. “It worked out OK for me,” he said, noting that he got “even more viewers” out of the whole thing, a 20% increase. 

“20% up when people thought you were making stuff up?” Letterman asked, incredulously.

O'Reilly goes on to say that people did not think he was making stuff up because he went on the attack. He also claimed that he never knowingly "fibbed" on the air, and went on to say that his ratings prove that his viewers trust him.

He never fibbed on the air?

I think a visit to Politifact quickly demonstrates the falsehood of that claim.

The fact is that Brain Williams was suspended because NBC News considers itself a legitimate news source, and Bill O'Reilly was not because Fox News knows it is not.

The Bill O'Reilly lies come in, the Bill O'Reilly lies go out, nobody can explain that.

So I thought it would be a good idea to do a kind of round up of where the Bill O'Reilly Lie-o-meter is today. Because, simply put, I LOVE this story.

First up we have some input from the former Bill O'Reilly producer and Fox News mole, Joe Muto, who claims that Billo will probably survive this scandal:

The only way O'Reilly can be seriously damaged is if more allegations about his statements come forward from sources other than partisan organizations, said Joe Muto, a former O'Reilly producer fired by Fox after he began writing an anonymous blog as the "Fox mole." 

"Ultimately, he'll survive this because he's not held — by his bosses, or the public, or himself — to the same standards of truth-telling as Brian Williams is," Muto said. "People expect a certain degree of hyperbole and exaggeration from O'Reilly. It's baked into the job description. It's part of his persona."

That seems to be the opinion of a number of news pundits, but it may not be accurate.

According to a new HuffPo/YouGov poll only 35% of Americans believe that O'Reilly should be considered trustworthy: 

The allegations building against Bill O'Reilly are apparently taking a harsh toll on his trustworthiness and favorability among Americans. 

Only 35 percent of Americans still find the Fox News host trustworthy, while 21 percent find him "very untrustworthy" and 16 percent find him "somewhat untrustworthy," according to a HuffPost/YouGov poll conducted this week. 

Thirty-seven percent of participants now have an unfavorable view of the host. 

The poll also revealed that half of Americans have now heard about the allegations against him.

I am not sure where the trust level was BEFORE these revelations came to light, but I am somewhat stunned that more than one third of Americans trust a single thing that falls out of this assholes mouth.

According to Media Matters the idea that all of this is not having a lasting effect on O'Reilly and Fox News may also be a misreading of the situation:  

Year after year, newsroom embarrassments like O'Reilly's undermine Fox's credibility to the point where it seems more and more journalists today start with a working assumption that Fox is not a legitimate news operation. That represents a major shift from President Obama's first year in office and it's a key reason why O'Reilly's fabrications matter. (The fewer journalists who view Fox News as being legitimate means that less of Fox's misinformation has an impact beyond the right-wing media bubble.) 

There are other clues that the ongoing O'Reilly storm has taken a toll: If the fabrication controversy has been such a home run for Roger Ailes and company, why has the rest of Fox team remained largely silent on the subject? If it represented a win, wouldn't colleagues help O'Reilly circle the bases while taunting the "liberal" media? 

Since this is reflective of the point I myself made last night, I of course find myself in total agreement with it. 

Right now Fox and O'Reilly are going to pretend that none of this matters, and that it is only another attack by the liberal media jealous of their success.

However that really only works with the original Fox News demographic.

In the real world, where people expect a certain level of accountability and trustworthiness from its journalists, this is going to leave a very sour taste. And that has an impact on Fox's efforts to attract new viewers who are NOT watching their program while strapped to an oxygen tank.

It should be noted that while the Brian Williams scandal hurt Brian Williams, it did NOT hurt NBC News who just posted the highest ratings in quite some time.

However Fox News, who get only a fraction of NBC's numbers, is already suffering a crisis of confidence among the viewing public, and this scandal can really only cause a further erosion of trust and, perhaps more importantly, of ratings.

99 times that Bill O'Reilly lied.

Courtesy of The Daily Dot:

Coming so quickly after Brian Williams lost his NBC anchor job for his own falsehood about war-time experience, the timing for this new wave of scandals is pretty bad for O’Reilly. Blood in the water, new charges of lying haven’t been refuted so much as they’ve been met with more lies. 

For a journalist, that’s a damning indictment. 

But O’Reilly transcends mere journalism, as made evident by the fact that he hasn’t received the slightest slap on the wrist for this ongoing series of transgressions. He’s a commentator, an entertainer, and a world-class rage salesman who has a mile-long history of professional wrongs. 

This isn’t a vague criticism; it’s provable by looking at objective fact and comparing it to O’Reilly’s words.

And as proof of that the Daily Dot offers proof of ninety nine lies told by Bill O'Reilly.

Here are the first ten:  

1. O’Reilly bragged repeatedly he won two Peabody Awards hosting Inside Edition in the 90s. He won zero. 
2. O’Reilly bragged that, woops, he actually had won a Polk Award hosting Inside Edition. He won zero of those, too. To be specific, the show did win that award—a year after O’Reilly stopped hosting. 
3. O’Reilly then said he never claimed to have won a Peabody Award. He actually did make that claim, repeatedly, using the award as proof that Inside Edition was not a tabloid show but very good journalism. He later admitted to making the original Peabody claim, but now he just says the Peabody guys are unfair liberals. 
4. Repeatedly claiming he’s “an average guy,” O’Reilly has claimed that he “came from nothing” and “you don’t come from any lower than I came from on the economic scale.” Actually, O’Reilly’s mother has repeatedly talked to the press about regular vacations the family took to Florida, that O’Reilly went to private school and college, and that they lived in an affluent New York suburb. 
5. In 2006, O’Reilly boasted that he gets 6 million viewers every night. He got 2 million then. Today, he’s posting “huge numbers” because he’s addressing the Argentina controversy—so he’s getting about 3 million viewers on a night. 
6. Responding to critics who say Fox News is too conservative, O’Reilly has long claimed to be a “normal guy” and a registered independent. It turned out, contradicting that claim, that he was a registered Republican. 
7. He insisted that he is really an Independent and that when he registered to vote in 1994, there was no independent option and that he was “somehow assigned Republican status.” In 2004, comedian (now a senator) Al Franken went back and looked at O’Reilly’s voter registration form. Actually, there was an Independent option right next to the Republican box. O’Reilly had chosen Republican and then lied about it for the next decade on television. 
8. NPR’s Mike Pesca reported O’Reilly’s political registration in 2001 on the radio. O’Reilly called it a “hatchet job” and said, “I’ve never heard of Mike Pesca.” Pesca had interviewed O’Reilly on tape for an hour for the report. 
9. In 2004, O’Reilly said Iraq was producing chemical weapons in the run up to the 2003 Iraq war. They were not. 
10. O’Reilly said Al Qaeda was working with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq even after the claims were widely disproven. They were not.

There are of course 89 more. Some are minor, some are quite major, but all of them are lies. 

Veteran's group accuses Bill O'Reilly of "stealing valor" and calling for him to be taken off the air. Also David Corn responds to Billo's rant against his Mother Jones article.

Courtesy of Media Matters:

VoteVets, a leading progressive veterans advocacy group, is calling on Fox News to take Bill O'Reilly off the air following revelations from Mother Jones that the Fox News host may have repeatedly misrepresented his experiences reporting on the 1982 Falklands War. 

"NBC acted completely appropriately in taking Brian Williams off the air and looking into claims he's made over the years. Fox News has to do the same thing," Jon Soltz, chairman of VoteVets.org, a 400,000-member organization that advocates for vets and military families, said in a statement. "The issue, for me, isn't that Fox has been caught off guard, and didn't realize O'Reilly was telling possibly false tales. That I can accept. It's what do they do about it now? That will tell us a lot about how seriously they take their news organization." 

 "Men and women have fought, died, been wounded, and scarred by war. There are many journalists who actually were in the crossfire, who died, trying to bring the story to the American people," Soltz added. "What Bill O'Reilly has done is steal their valor, and it is wrong." 

Soltz, a combat veteran of the Iraq War, said O'Reilly's misleading efforts are also an insult to veteran war correspondents.

"It makes it seem like anyone can head on over to a war zone," he said via email. "But honestly it is more insulting to the war reporters who never bragged about their war experience, but just kept their head down and did their job. Some of them died doing that job. In my mind, those reporters were heroes."

Nicely put.

However since VoteVets is a progressive group they are undoubtedly classified as not REAL veterans, much like non-Fox News viewers are classified as not REAL Americans.

Still you have to know that this will get under O'Reilly's paper thin skin and drive him out of his little tiny pea sized mind.

Speaking of getting under his skin, yesterday David Corn responded point by point (Much like I did yesterday.) to O'Reilly's Talking Points Memo rant last night:

O'Reilly responded to the story by launching a slew of personal invective. He did not respond to the details of the story. Instead, he called me a "liar," a "left-wing assassin," and a "despicable guttersnipe." He said that I deserve "to be in the kill zone." (You can read one of my responses here.) And in his show-opening "Talking Points memo" monologue on Friday evening, he continued the name-calling. 

In a way, it's impossible to win a debate with O'Reilly because he is not bound by reality. In response to the article, he told Fox News' media reporter, Howard Kurtz, "Nobody was on the Falklands and I never said I was on the island, ever." Yet our article included video of O'Reilly saying in 2013, "I was in a situation one time, in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands, where my photographer got run down and then hit his head and was bleeding from the ear on the concrete. And the army was chasing us." Note the words "war zone" and "in the Falklands." 

If you read the article, and I suggest that you do, you will see that Corn addresses virtually all of O'Reilly's claims that the Mother Jones article was a hit piece, and once again points out the many discrepancies with O'Reilly's version of events around the Falkland war reporting, and the actual news reports that emerged from there during that time.

I have to admit that I kind of thought this story would really only be interesting for one or two days, but with O'Reilly's over the top attacks against Corn and his obvious inability to let anything go, this might actually become as big of a story as the Brian Williams Iraq exaggerations.

Here let me get the popcorn started.

It appears that Bill O'Reilly has his own Brian Williams problem.

You can read the entire story here at Mother Jones.

Here is a taste:  

Here are instances when O'Reilly touted his time as a war correspondent during the Falklands conflict: 

• In his 2001 book, The No Spin Zone: Confrontations With the Powerful and Famous in America, O'Reilly stated, "You know that I am not easily shocked. I've reported on the ground in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands." 
• Conservative journalist Tucker Carlson, in a 2003 book, described how O'Reilly answered a question during a Washington panel discussion about media coverage of the Afghanistan war: "Rather than simply answer the question, O'Reilly began by trying to establish his own bona fides as a war correspondent. 'I've covered wars, okay? I've been there. The Falklands, Northern Ireland, the Middle East. I've almost been killed three times, okay.'" 
• In a 2004 column about US soldiers fighting in Iraq, O'Reilly noted, "Having survived a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands war, I know that life-and-death decisions are made in a flash." 
• In 2008, he took a shot at journalist Bill Moyers, saying, "I missed Moyers in the war zones of [the] Falkland conflict in Argentina, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland. I looked for Bill, but I didn't see him." 
• In April 2013, while discussing the Boston Marathon bombing, O'Reilly shared a heroic tale of his exploits in the Falklands war: 

I was in a situation one time, in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands, where my photographer got run down and then hit his head and was bleeding from the ear on the concrete. And the army was chasing us. I had to make a decision. And I dragged him off, you know, but at the same time, I'm looking around and trying to do my job, but I figure I had to get this guy out of there because that was more important.

Yeah none of that happened.

It does appear that O'Reilly was present in Buenos Aires during a protest, which O'Reilly described like this:  

"A major riot ensued and many were killed. I was right in the middle of it and nearly died of a heart attack when a soldier, standing about ten feet away, pointed his automatic weapon directly at my head." A television cameraman was trampled, journalists were banged up, and O'Reilly and others were teargassed. "After a couple of hours of this pandemonium," he recalls, "I managed to make it back to the Sheraton with the best news footage I have ever seen. This was major violence up close and personal, and it was an important international story."

Only problem was that the news agencies present at the riot, including CBS News who O'Reilly was working for at the time, did not report any fatalities nor use of tear gas.

Now I know what you're thinking. "Well surely, much like Brian Williams, a trusted newsman like Bill O'Reilly will take a leave of absence and offer an apology for lying to his viewers all of these years."

Only problem with that is suggesting that Fox is a trusted news source or that Bill O'Reilly has an ounce of integrity.

And both assumptions are incorrect.

No he will continue to do his same bullshit job, at the same bullshit cable news station, catering to the same bullshit loving demographic. Nothing changes when your job is nothing more than shoveling excrement for a living.

P.S. It turns out that O'Reilly got wind of this Mother Jones piece and he is none too happy:  

Bill O'Reilly says a new Mother Jones report alleging that the Fox News host made false claims about his Falklands War experience is "a piece of garbage" and that its principal author, David Corn, is "a liar." 

In a telephone interview with the On Media blog, O'Reilly called Corn a "despicable guttersnipe" who has been trying to take him down "for years." 

"It's a hit piece," O'Reilly said. "Everything I said about what I reported in South and Central America is true. Everything."

P.P.S. David Corn, the "despicable guttersnipe," caught wind of O'Reilly catching wind and he stands by his reporting:

"He said he was in the war zone during the Falkland Island conflicts -- the conflict was in the Falkland Islands, it was not in Buenos Aires," Corn said. "He covered a protest after the war was over in Buenos Aires. I don't think that's a reasonable definiton of a combat situation. If you look up 'combat situation' in the dictionary, it's not 'an ugly protest'."

He's got a point.  However I stand by my earlier statement that this will have virtually NO impact on O'Reilly who is after all an entertainer, and NOT a journalist.

Jon Stewart addresses the Brian Williams controversy and went after the media for their hypocrisy in calling for accountability here but not holding themselves accountable for publishing lies in the run up to the Iraq War.

Click image to play segment.

"Never again will Brian Williams mislead this great nation about being shot at in a war that he probably would not have ended up in if the media had applied this level of scrutiny to the actual fucking war."

Stewart then shows a number of correspondence from across cable news going after Williams and discussing his lack of credibility in the face of this story. And then flips the script and talks about how the media allowed the Bush administration to lie to the American people on a daily basis in the runup to the Iraq War.

"So I love that now the media pretends that they must guard the crown jewel of their credibility when we've already seen it's Al Capone's vault."

Stewart then plays incredibly embarrassing footage of various news types making excuses for why they did not do their job when it really mattered. When the country was about to go to war based on lies.

 "But maybe this incident will cause reflection on your part. You’ll go back now and look at other instances of media maleficence that lead our country to the most catastrophic foreign policy decision in decades.”

Of course that won't happen so instead the Daily Show plays footage of talking heads discussing further investigations into past reporting done by Brian Williams.

Because you know that will help them redeem their credibility.

Sarah Palin uses debunked story about middle school boy being denied right to read his Bible in order to complain about Atheists, being sued, and of course to pimp her book.

Palin starts off telling the story of poor Loyal Grandstaff, a middle school student who complained that while he was quietly reading his book of fables, you know the Bible, a teacher told him he was not allowed to do that.

Well of course this caused the Right Wing to marshal their forces and start writing blog posts and sending nasty tweets and e-mails at the school.

Only thing is, that is not really what happened: 

A public school principal in Missouri pushed back against a middle school student’s claim that a teacher banned him from reading the Bible in school, claiming that the incident did not unfold as was alleged and that students are more than welcome to read their Bibles in school. 

Lance Tobin, principal of Bueker Middle School in Marshall, Missouri, told TheBlaze on Friday that claims made by Loyal Grandstaff, a 7th grader at the school, had not been substantiated when a local outlet published them and that the situation has since been resolved.

Of course Palin does not seem to care that this has been debunked, after all it's not like Brian Williams was the one caught in a lie of anything, and she continues to blow it out of proportion, before suddenly turning it around and making it all about her.

"Normal people don't want to go through the hassle of litigation. I've been through it how many times now? People suing me over stupid things? It's not fun. It's expensive. It's ah such a waste of resources. But normal people then understanding that litigation is a hassle, don't like going through it."

"So angry Atheists know that, so they use their inflamed rhetoric to coerce teachers, and principals, their forcing them, to take away the religious freedom of their students."

Yeah, didn't happen and doesn't happen.

Reading your Bible, Koran, the Vedas, at school is not a problem. And the only time it would be is if the teacher, or another authority figure were to try to teach lessons from any of those religious texts on school grounds.

And that did not happen in this case. So no, there are no "angry" Atheists "coercing" teachers and principals by threatening a lawsuit. 

Palin goes on to say that the principal stated that the "teacher acted against school policy" though if you read the link up above you will see that what the principal actually said was, “There is no teacher involved whatsoever.”

But in Palin's eyes the truth can never stand in the way of a good anecdote, and besides she has a reason for going after this like a dog with a bone.

"In my book 'Good Tidings and Great Joy' I talk about  how our religious freedom is being eroded by angry Atheists with attorneys."

So you see this was just another opportunity for Palin to once again plug a book that her ghostwriter wrote a freaking year ago. And plug it by the way to a group of subscribers that have undoubtedly already purchased at least one of the books already.

Good marketing that.

But hey I guess we cannot blame her too much because apparently it is a family trait, as her brother is now using the Brian Williams kerfuffle to pimp HIS stupid ass book: 

After these new revelations show that Williams has a history of not only embellishing stories, but flat out lying (in detail)... I understand why he didn't want our book to get any national exposure. In 2008, Williams lied about Sarah on air, accusing her of banning library books when she was mayor of Wasilla. We pointed out lies like this in our book. No wonder he didn't want to help us out.

Yeah, THAT'S why he did not want to help promote the book. I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that it was full of falsehoods and revisionist history designed to refute facts uncovered about the family and to make a fast buck off of a person whose fame was rapidly dwindling.

So I guess to the Palin family it is not so much about WHAT lies are being told, but more about WHO is telling them. And of course WHO can profit by telling them.

(H/T to Wonkette.)

For those conservatives jumping all over Brian Williams it might be a good idea to check the quality of the glass their house is made out of first.

Courtesy of Salon:

When it emerged that NBC News anchor Brian Williams had misled the public for years with a harrowing account of coming under enemy fire on a military helicopter during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, observers were quick to draw comparisons with other public figures caught telling tall tales about combat experiences. Some hearkened back to Hillary Clinton’s bogus 2008 assertion that she had landed “under sniper fire” during a trip to Bosnia a dozen years earlier; in reality, video from the trip showed a smiling Clinton and her daughter walking calmly on the tarmac, with no sign of trouble whatsoever. 

There’s another figure who merits mention in this discussion, one whose serial blurring of lines between fiction and reality was a mainstay of his public career. That figure, of course, was Ronald Reagan. 

Reagan’s fibs were manifold. They included his campaign-trail tale of a “Chicago welfare queen” with 80 aliases, 30 addresses, and 12 Social Security cards, whom he alleged had claimed “over $150,000″ in government benefits. The woman whom Reagan made infamous was convicted of using only two aliases, used to collect $8,000. 

Once in office, Reagan’s deception in the Iran-Contra scandal briefly threatened his presidency. First, Reagan flatly denied wrongdoing, publicly declaring, “We did not — repeat, did not — trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.” Months later, when subsequent revelations rendered that assertion untenable, Reagan delivered an Oval Office address in which he tried to reconcile his public claims with the factual record. “A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages,” Reagan said. “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.” 

But Reagan’s fabrications also included whoppers about conflict zones reminiscent of those put forth by Williams and Clinton. During Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s November 1983 visit to the U.S., Reagan told Shamir that during his service in the U.S. Army film corps, he and fellow members of his unit personally shot footage of the Nazis’ concentration camps as they were liberated. Reagan would tell this story again to others, including Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal. But Reagan was never present at the camps’ liberation. Instead, he spent the war in Culver City, California, where he processed footage from the liberation of the camps.

I think compared to lying about being present during the liberation of the concentration camps in World War 2, lying about your helicopter receiving enemy fire in Iraq is small beans. 

Look I'm not defending Williams. I think that when a trusted figure  is caught fabricating stories of bravery that is newsworthy and he should suffer some blowback.

But let's face it conservatives lie like some people draw a breath. It is the most natural thing in the world for them.

One of their major right now is Ted Cruz, who has been caught telling untruths twice as often as he has been caught telling a truth, or half truth.

The same is true of Chris Christie and Rand Paul. And do we even need to include George W. Bush and Sarah Palin?

Look there are liberals liars and exaggerators as well.  (Anthony Wiener springs to mind. Pardon the pun.)

However they are not the ones gleefully calling for the destruction of a man's career based on one lie.

Nor are they the ones who have deified a man who so clearly manipulated the truth as often as dear old Ronnie.

Cartoon of the day.