September 8, 2016

Today in Politics: A Time Capsule For Your Grandchildren

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


I’m feeling overwhelmed. Everywhere I turn, I find yet another nugget that’s hardly worth a blog post but nonetheless feels like a nutshell version of politics this year. So consider this post a time capsule. Someday you can show it to your grandkids to demonstrate how far off the rails our country went in 2016.

Reporters have been griping forever about Hillary Clinton not holding a press conference. She’s been interviewed plenty of times by national reporters, but I guess that’s not good enough. So over the past few days she’s finally decided to open up more, and this morning she even held a full-fledged presser. Here is Chuck Todd’s reaction:

Hillary just can’t win, can she? Here’s a headline from The Hill:

There are two ways you can take this. Option 1: By God, we are going to make this story about the emails no matter what. Option 2: It’s a snarky acknowledgment of the fact that once they finally got their press conference, reporters didn’t even bother asking about the very thing they’ve been obsessed with for months. My money is on #1.

Moving on, the latest idiot right-wing conspiracy meme, promoted by lunatic late night conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, is that Hillary Clinton was wearing an earpiece at the Commander-in-Chief forum last night. Donald Trump Jr. passed along the news:

Followed by a retweet of this:

That’s right: the Republican candidate’s campaign is now passing along psychotic delusions from Alex Jones. Before long they’ll be channeling the ghost of Rasputin. Meanwhile, at last night’s forum Trump insisted that in his recent intelligence briefing he learned that President Obama had blown off the intelligence community. “I have pretty good with the body language. I could tell they were not happy. Our leaders did not follow what they were recommending.” This is a pretty outrageous breach of what’s supposed to be a classified briefing, and it’s also a lie. Intelligence professionals agree pretty unanimously that no briefer would ever do such a thing.

But did Trump really lie? Last night I used Trump as a flimsy excuse to name check famed physicist Wolfgang Pauli, so today I’ll use Trump as an equally flimsy excuse to bring up famed mathematician Kurt Gödel. In 1931 Gödel proved that in all mathematical systems1 there are true statements that are unprovable. Paul Waldman says that’s our problem with Trump. He uses Trump’s claim to have a secret plan to crush ISIS as an example:

Here’s the problem this presents. What he’s saying is so transparently phony that it just boggles the mind, yet you can’t do an “objective” fact-check on whether Trump has a secret plan to defeat the Islamic State, because you can’t prove that he doesn’t. But he doesn’t.

….Now let me point to a second exchange in the forum, when Lauer asked about the intelligence briefing Trump received….Just as with his secret ISIS plan, I can’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Trump is lying here, but he’s lying. If the briefers told him “what our experts said to do,” it would be unprecedented. And the idea that they communicated with their “body language” that they are unhappy with the administration’s decisions? Please.

We could call this Trump’s Incompleteness Theorem: In all political campaigns, there are false statements that are unfalsifiable. Literally everyone knows that Trump is bullshitting, but the rules of the game don’t allow anyone to say so.

In other news, Wells Fargo was fined $185 million because it opened 1.5 million bank accounts and applied for 565,000 credit cards—without telling the customers involved it had done so. That is not a typo. They opened fake accounts and applied for fake credit cards. This outrageous scam was uncovered by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Trump wants to eliminate. In fact, the entire Republican Party wants to eliminate it. They think it’s too tough on banks.

Finally, today is the 50th anniversary of the first airing of Star Trek in 1966. Normally, this wouldn’t be something I’d mention in a political blog, but the episode titled “Mirror, Mirror” is surprisingly apropos of this year’s presidential campaign. Whenever someone asks what’s going on, just say, “We’re in the Spock-with-a-beard universe.” That should be enough.

1Technically, his theorem applies only to mathematical systems complex enough to describe the natural numbers. In other words, every mathematical system we actually care about.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate