Trump is the front runner to be the biggest presidential liar in U.S. history

NY Times      As a businessman, Donald J. Trump was a serial fabulist whose biggest-best boasts about everything he touched routinely crumbled under the slightest scrutiny. As a candidate, Mr. Trump was a magical realist who made fantastical claims punctuated by his favorite verbal tic: “Believe me.”

Yet even jaded connoisseurs of Oval Office dissembling were astonished over the past week by the torrent of bogus claims that gushed from President Trump during his first days in office.

“We’ve never seen anything this bizarre in our lifetimes, where up is down and down is up and everything is in question and nothing is real,” said Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity and the author of “935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity,” a book about presidential deception.

It was not just Mr. Trump’s debunked claim about how many people attended his inauguration, or his insistence (contradicted by his own Twitter posts) that he had not feuded with the intelligence community, or his audacious and evidence-free claim that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote only because millions of people voted for her illegally.

All week long, news organizations chased down one Trump tall tale after another. PolitiFact, a website devoted to checking the veracity of claims by public officials, published 12 “of the most misleading claims” Mr. Trump made during his first White House interview. The Chicago Tribune found that Mr. Trump was incorrect when he claimed two people were shot and killed in Chicago the very hour President Barack Obama was there delivering his farewell address. (There were no shootings, police records showed.) The Philadelphia Inquirer found that Mr. Trump was incorrect when he said the city’s murder rate was “terribly increasing.” (The murder rate has steadily declined over the last decade.) The indefatigable fact checkers at The Washington Post cataloged 24 false or misleading statements made by the president during his first seven days in office.

But for students of Mr. Trump’s long business career, there was much about President Trump’s truth-mangling ways that was familiar: the mystifying false statements about seemingly trivial details, the rewriting of history to airbrush unwanted facts, the branding as liars those who point out his untruths, the deft conversion of demonstrably false claims into a semantic mush of unverifiable “beliefs.”

Mr. Trump’s falsehoods have long been viewed as a reflexive extension of his vanity, or as his method of compensating for deep-seated insecurities. But throughout his business career, Mr. Trump’s most noteworthy deceptions often did double duty, serving not just his ego but also important strategic goals. Mr. Trump’s habitually inflated claims about his wealth, for example, fed his self-proclaimed image of a business genius even as they attracted lucrative licensing deals built around the Trump brand.

Nearly 30 years ago, in his best-selling book “The Art of the Deal,” Mr. Trump memorably extolled the advantages of “truthful hyperbole,” which he described as “an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.” It is one thing when the hyperbole comes from a reality TV star exaggerating his ratings to a roomful of television critics. The stakes are infinitely higher when it comes from the leader of the free world, and this reality is provoking alarm from many across the political spectrum.[...]

“In a democratic government, there must be truth in order to hold elected officials accountable to their sovereign, which is the people,” Mr. Schmidt said. “All authoritarian societies are built on a foundation of lies and alternative facts, and what is true is what the leader believes, or what is best for the state.”

Mr. Lewis argued that the president’s untruths were a deliberate strategy to position the nation’s leading news organizations as the enemy of his administration. “Fact-checking becomes an act of war by the media,” he said.

Indeed, last Saturday, on Day 2 of his administration, Mr. Trump told hundreds of C.I.A. employees that he had “a running war with the media” and called journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth.” The next day, his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, accused the news media of trying to “delegitimize” the new president and promised, “We are not going to sit around and let it happen.” By Wednesday, Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief White House strategist, was referring to the news media as “the opposition party” during an interview with The New York Times.

“It feels like this was part of the plan all along,” Mr. Lewis said.[...]

PolitiFact, for example, has scrutinized 356 specific claims by Mr. Trump and found that more than two-thirds of the claims were “mostly false,” “false” or, in 62 cases, “Pants on Fire” false.

“Trump is a different kind of figure than we’ve ever seen before in our 10 years of fact-checking,” Bill Adair, the creator of PolitiFact and a journalism professor at Duke University, said in an interview. “No one has come close to Trump in the high percentage of falsehoods.” [...]

What makes people reject science - despite being exposed to the facts

Science Alert

A lot happened in 2016, but one of the biggest cultural shifts was the rise of fake news - where claims with no evidence behind them (e.g. the world is flat) get shared as fact alongside evidence-based, peer-reviewed findings (e.g. climate change is happening).

Researchers have coined this trend the 'anti-enlightenment movement', and there's been a lot of frustration and finger-pointing over who or what's to blame. But a team of psychologists has identified some of the key factors that can cause people to reject science - and it has nothing to do with how educated or intelligent they are.

In fact, the researchers found that people who reject scientific consensus on topics such as climate change, vaccine safety, and evolution are generally just as interested in science and as well-educated as the rest of us.

The issue is that when it comes to facts, people think more like lawyers than scientists, which means they 'cherry pick' the facts and studies that back up what they already believe to be true.

So if someone doesn't think humans are causing climate change, they will ignore the hundreds of studies that support that conclusion, but latch onto the one study they can find that casts doubt on this view. This is also known as cognitive bias.

"We find that people will take a flight from facts to protect all kinds of belief including their religious belief, their political beliefs, and even simple personal beliefs such as whether they are good at choosing a web browser," said one of the researchers, Troy Campbell from the University of Oregon.

"People treat facts as relevant more when the facts tend to support their opinions. When the facts are against their opinions, they don't necessarily deny the facts, but they say the facts are less relevant."

This conclusion was based on a series of new interviews, as well as a meta-analysis of the research that's been published on the topic, and was presented in a symposium called over the weekend as part of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual convention in San Antonio.

The goal was to figure out what's going wrong with science communication in 2017, and what we can do to fix it.

The research has yet to be published, so isn't conclusive, but the results suggest that simply focussing on the evidence and data isn't enough to change someone's mind about a particular topic, seeing as they'll most likely have their own 'facts' to fire back at you.

"Where there is conflict over societal risks - from climate change to nuclear-power safety to impacts of gun control laws, both sides invoke the mantel of science," said one of the team, Dan Kahan from Yale University.

Instead, the researchers recommend looking into the 'roots' of people's unwillingness to accept scientific consensus, and try to find common ground to introduce new ideas.

So where is this denial of science coming from? A big part of the problem, the researchers found, is that people associate scientific conclusions with political or social affiliations.

New research conducted by Kahan showed that people have actually always cherry picked facts when it comes to science - that's nothing new. But it hasn't been such a big problem in the past, because scientific conclusions were usually agreed on by political and cultural leaders, and promoted as being in the public's best interests.

Now, scientific facts are being wielded like weapons in a struggle for cultural supremacy, Kahan told Melissa Healy over at the LA Times, and the result is a "polluted science communication environment". [...]

Hornsey told the LA Times that the stakes are too high to continue to ignore the 'anti-enlightenment movement'.

"Anti-vaccination movements cost lives," said Hornsey. "Climate change skepticism slows the global response to the greatest social, economic and ecological threat of our time."

"We grew up in an era when it was just presumed that reason and evidence were the ways to understand important issues; not fear, vested interests, tradition or faith," he added.

"But the rise of climate skepticism and the anti-vaccination movement made us realise that these enlightenment values are under attack."

Trump's lies and inability to acknowledge widely agreed upon facts that don't flatter his ego- Why we should be concerned

Guest post by Yehoshua

Sorry for the speech, but...

Many here have poo-poo’d Trump’s habit of stating falsehoods with a claim along the lines of “all politicians lie.” I would like to explain why the issue is a qualitatively different one here than with past presidents.

Let us contrast Trump’s reaction to two different claims: One, that the Russians interfered in the election on his behalf, and two, that there was overwhelming voter fraud in the election. With regard to the first claim, there is a fair amount of evidence that it is true. The intelligence agencies all agree that Russia did interfere in the elections, with the hacking and release of the DNC emails, as well as in other ways. There does seem to be some level of disagreement as to what degree of confidence there is that the interference was specifically to get Trump elected, rather than just undermining public confidence in democracy in general. Yet, even with regard to the unanimously agreed-upon assessment that Russia did intervene, Trump repeatedly refused to accept it as true. He famously said, several times, that it could have been China, or, as he said on another occasion, “some 400 pound guy in his parents’ basement” (forgive me if the quote is not exact.

Concerning the voter fraud claims, there is, in short, absolutely no evidence that there was any large-scale fraud in the election of 2016. There was a Pew report from years past showing that there is a lack of modernization of the voter rolls, which lead to deceased people not being purged as soon as they should be, or people being registered in two different states (Trump’s daughter being one example of that). But there was no suggestion that those inefficiencies have led to actual voter fraud, and certainly not on the scale that Trump is suggesting. Elections in the U.S. are run on a local level. Even in a Democratic-leaning state such as California, many many counties have Republicans on the local election boards, who are the ones to administer the elections. Not one of them (as far as I know) has suggested that there has been significant voter fraud, certainly not one the scale of “millions of votes.”

So why would Trump refuse to believe the reports of Russian intervention despite the great deal of evidence to it being true, yet believe in the voter fraud l=claim, despite there being no evidence for it being true?

There is a concept in psychology called “motivated reasoning.” From Wikipedia: “The processes of motivated reasoning are a type of inferred justification strategy which is used to mitigate cognitive dissonance. When people form and cling to false beliefs despite overwhelming evidence, the phenomenon is labeled "motivated reasoning." In other words, "rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.”

Trump seems to be subject to this fault as much as one can imagine.

Trump won the election. There is no question about that. Both campaigns ran their campaigns according to the rule that the Electoral College results are what matters. For Trump, this is not enough. He feels the need to believe that not only did he win, but that he is fabulously popular. Thus, his assertion that it was “a landslide,” when in fact, historically, it was a relatively close election. His need to believe that he is popular resulted in the ridiculous claims about how many people came to witness his inauguration, and that only through selectively changing the camera angles did the photos look like there had been more people there in 2009 (not true). Or that this was the first time that the grass was covered with a white covering, making it look emptier, (not true). Or that the Secret Service instituted new security measures, keeping people from attending (not true). Or that more people rode the Metro to downtown than in '09 and '13 (not true).

Presidents enter the office with certain beliefs. All do. It is inevitable that over the four years they serves, there will be times that the facts on the ground do not accord with their beliefs. When that happens, it is crucial that those surrounding the president inform him of the facts, and that the president be able to assimilate that information to change and act accordingly.

The first week of the Trump presidency has demonstrated that neither of those necessary elements are present here. Those who surround him are unable to convince him to stop claiming that there was widespread fraud in the election. This is despite his own lawyers stating as much in their briefs in the recount cases. His press secretary admits that he does not believe it, but that Trump believes what he wants to believe.

While the question of whose inaugural was better attended is a trivial one, and the ridiculous claims of voter fraud can be laughed off as well, the question is: What will happen when there is a similar challenge to Trump’s beliefs on issues of major importance? What if his rosy perspective on Russia is challenged by now aggression in Europe on the part of Putin? What if his economic team realizes that the tariff policy he wants to institute will lead to a recession? By all indications, it is difficult to believe that anything could change his views.

How Trump's twisted mind justified the claim that 3-5 million illegal votes were cast for Clinton

update: Bernhard Langer says he saw no voting fraud and never talked to Trump

New York Times

Gathered with the top leaders of Congress, President Trump on Monday apparently relayed the story in all seriousness: pro golfer Bernhard Langer had told him a story that really stuck with him.

ontinue reading the main story

As Mr. Trump relayed it, Mr. Langer had been in line to vote in Florida when he was told by an official that he could not cast a ballot. But people all around him who looked far more suspect — Mr. Trump tossed out the names of Latin American countries that the voters might have come from — were allowed to draw up provisional ballots.

There was a problem with the story: Mr. Langer is a German citizen.

Now Mr. Langer says he never talked to Mr. Trump, that he was told the story by a friend, then told the story to a friend who told it to someone with ties to the White House — who apparently told it to Mr. Trump. He certainly never tried to vote in Florida.

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Statement from Bernhard Langer on what amounts to a game of telephone re: voter fraud story with Trump:

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So, if the anecdote was important to Mr. Trump’s erroneous belief that millions of illegal immigrants gave Hillary Clinton her 2.8 million-ballot win in the popular vote, it was based on fourth-hand information.

========================================

NY Times

On Monday, President Trump gathered House and Senate leaders in the State Dining Room for a get-to-know-you reception, served them tiny meatballs and pigs-in-a-blanket, and quickly launched into a story meant to illustrate what he believes to be rampant, unchecked voter fraud.

Mr. Trump kicked off the meeting, participants said, by retelling his debunked claim that he would have won the popular vote if not for the three million to five million ballots cast by “illegals.” He followed it up with a Twitter post early Wednesday calling for a major investigation into voter fraud.

When one of the Democrats protested, Mr. Trump said he was told a story by “the very famous golfer, Bernhard Langer,” whom he described as a friend, according to three staff members who were in the room for the meeting.

In the emerging Trump era, the story was a memorable example, for the legislators and the country, of how an off-the-cuff yarn — unverifiable and of confusing origin — became a prime policy mover for a president whose fact-gathering owes more to the oral tradition than the written word. [...]

The witnesses described the story this way: Mr. Langer, a 59-year-old native of Bavaria, Germany — a winner of the Masters twice and of more than 100 events on major professional golf tours around the world — was standing in line at a polling place near his home in Florida on Election Day, the president explained, when an official informed Mr. Langer he would not be able to vote.

Ahead of and behind Mr. Langer were voters who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote, Mr. Trump said, according to the staff members — but they were nonetheless permitted to cast provisional ballots. The president threw out the names of Latin American countries that the voters might have come from.

Mr. Langer, whom he described as a supporter, left feeling frustrated, according to a version of events later contradicted by a White House official.

The anecdote, the aides said, was greeted with silence, and Mr. Trump was prodded to change the subject by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, and Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.

Just one problem: Mr. Langer, who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., is a German citizen with permanent residence status in the United States who is, by law, barred from voting, according to Mr. Langer’s daughter Christina.

“He is a citizen of Germany,” she said, when reached on her father’s cellphone. “He is not a friend of President Trump’s, and I don’t know why he would talk about him.” [...]

The story, the aide added, had made a big impression on Mr. Trump.

Trump lies to support his previous lies: Trump’s absurd claim the 2012 Pew report researcher was ‘groveling’

Washington Post

The Pinocchio Test

It is remarkable that the president of the United States continues makes a false claim with no support, then finds a five-year-old report that doesn’t support his claim, then attacks the researcher of the study when confronted with the fact that the report does not support his false claim.

Trump says Becker was “groveling” when he claimed his 2012 Pew study did not find evidence of voter fraud. Yet since the report was first released, and in contemporaneous news coverage, it is clear that Becker has consistently said his research did not find evidence of voter fraud.

We have given many four–Pinocchio ratings to Trump and his staff for his talking point. We award four more Pinocchios.

====================================================================

“Then he’s groveling again. You know I always talk about the reporters that grovel when they want to write something that you want to hear but not necessarily millions of people want to hear or have to hear.”
— President Trump, interview with ABC News, Jan. 25, 2017

For the first time since taking office, President Trump addressed the 2012 Pew Center on the States report that he and his staff have repeatedly — and unsuccessfully — used to support his claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election.

Trump once again referred to a 2012 Pew report as evidence of widespread voter fraud. When David Muir of ABC News noted the study’s author said he found no evidence of voter fraud, Trump said: “Excuse me, then why did he write the report?”

Then Trump claimed the author was “groveling.” Really?

The Facts

No.

David Becker, who directed the research for the Pew report, has said since the report’s release in February 2012 that there was no evidence of fraud from his findings.

The report, instead, found problems with inaccurate voter registrations, people who registered in more than one state (which could happen if the voter moves and registers in the new state without telling the former state) and deceased voters whose information was still on the voter rolls. Trump did reference these other findings correctly in the interview — but then claimed these findings are evidence of fraud.

In a February 2012 Q&A about the study’s findings, Becker specifically said researchers did not find evidence of voter fraud:

Q. Are these problems leading either to fraud or to efforts to keep eligible people from voting?
A. We have not seen evidence of that. These problems really are the result of an antiquated system — one that relies almost exclusively on 19th and 20th century technologies (paper and mail) to serve a 21st century, highly mobile society. About one in eight Americans moved during each of the 2008 and 2010 election years. Some Americans — including those serving in the military, young people and those living in communities affected by the economic downturn — are even more mobile.
One in four voters assumes that election officials or the U.S. Postal Service updates registrations automatically with each move, even though that is almost never the case, and about half of all voters don’t know they can update their registration at a motor vehicles office.
Election offices often are flooded with millions of paper registration applications from third-party voter registration drives right before Election Day, at a time when their resources are stretched the most.

Contemporaneous news coverage shows that Becker consistently said the research did not show evidence of fraud. Here are a few examples: [...]

In response to Trump’s comments on ABC News, Becker reiterated to The Fact Checker that the scope of his report did not address voter fraud.

“It’s all about the voter list. It was not about fraud at all,” Becker said.

Becker added that many improvements have been made since 2012 to make voter rolls more accurate and up-to-date.

“It’s a five-year-old report,” he said. “So many election officials from across the aisle and around the country have worked to leverage technology and data to make sure the voter lists are serving the voters. I don’t know that I would feel comfortable saying the estimates we reached in February of 2012 would be the same estimates that we would reach today, given the substantial improvements that have occurred in the last five years.”

The White House did not respond to our inquiry.

Women don't ask for marital relations directly - Refined character or curse?

In a recent post of the explanation of the Maharal - that the merit of being redeemed from Egypt was because of the lust of the women for their husbands - the question was raised why he omitted part of the gemora in Nedarim (20b)? The gemora presented a contradiction between the undesirability of relations with a brazen woman who asks directly for intercourse and the praise of women who are active in getting their husbands to have intercourse with them. This is what the gemora says:

Nedarim (20b): And I will purge out from among you the rebels, and them that transgress against me. R. Levi said: This refers to children belonging to the following nine categories: children of fear, of outrage, of a hated wife, one under a ban, of a woman mistaken for another, of strife, of intoxication [during intercourse], of a mentally divorced wife, of promiscuity, and of a brazen woman.

But that is not so: for did not R. Samuel b. Nahmani say in the name of R. Jonathan: One who is summoned to his marital duty by his wife will beget children such as were not to be found even in the generation of Moses? For it is said, Take you wise men, and understanding [and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you]; and it is written, So I took the chiefs of your tribes, wise men and known but ‘understanding’ is not mentioned. But it is also written, Issachar is a large-boned ass; whilst elsewhere it is written, And of the children of Issachar, which were men that had understanding of the titles?

— [It is virtuous] only when the wife ingratiates herself [with her husband].

The Maharal omits that it is praiseworthy for women to persuade their husband to have intercourse  only if they hint or ingratiate themselves with their husbands - but not if they ask directly.

One obvious possibility is that perhaps the Maharal doesn't think that women have to indicate indirectly. However that is clearly not true as can be seen from the following statement in his commentary to Bereishis.

Maharal (Bereishis 3:16): And your desire will be to your husband – to have sexual relations even though you are not so arrogant as to directly ask for it (Rashi). Because if you were allowed to directly ask for sexual relations then “to your husband will be your desire” is not a curse but rather a beracha and desirable. Furthermore what is the significance here of saying “And he will rule over you”? Because even before Eve was cursed the Torah (Bereishis 1:28) said, “And will have control” is written without a “vov” to teach you that the man is to have control over the woman that she should not be constantly leaving the house (Rashi). [So what is added by this verse?] It is to add additional subservience - that even though the woman’s desire is for her husband and he controls her but she is not to be so brazen as to ask directly for sexual intercourse. In other words, everything has to come from him and nothing comes from you. That is the curse. Because she is not to be so brazen as to ask for intercourse but everything is from him and not from you.

The Maharal clearly says that the requirement to ask indirectly is a curse that was given to Eve - and thus to all women.

Further research seems to indicate that there is a dispute amongst authorities whether this requirement for women is 1) simply a desirable behavior for all women not to be brazen or 2) it is a punishment and curse for the Sin of Eve.

Desirable personality trait for all women not to be brazen

Ramban (Bereishis 3:16): And to you husband will be your desire - for sexual intercourse. Even so she should not have the arrogance to ask for it directly. Rather he should rule over you that everything is from him and not from the wife. This is Rashi’s explanation. But it is not correct. This verse is in fact a praise of the wife as it says in Eiruvin (100b) that this is a beautiful characteristic of women. Ibn Ezra says that the expression “your desire will be to your husband” means that she will obey all that he says, because the woman is in the domain of the husband to do all that he wishes. However I have found no instance where this language of “desire” means obedience – it always means passion or lust. It appears correct to me that she was punished that she would have very strong desire for her husband and she would not be concerned with the associated suffering of pregnancy and birth and the fact that the husband treats her as a slave. It is not normal that a slave should desire to have a master but rather the slave wants to escape to freedom. However this is measure for measure because Eve gave the fruit to Adam and commanded him to eat it. Therefore she was punished that she would no longer be his boss but that he would boss her according to his wishes. 

 Eiruvin (100b): And you shall have desire for your husband – this teaches that she has a strong desire for her husband when he set out on a journey. And he shall rule over you - this teaches that a woman asks with her heart while her husband asks directly for intercourse. But this is a good attribute for all women [not to be brazen and it is definitely not a curse]? [The curse is] that she must act seductively and ingratiates herself with him but can not directly say what she wants.

Rambam (Hilchos Issurei Bi'ah 21:13): And similarly our Sages have said that any brazen woman who directly asks for intercourse…. will give birth to children who are rebellious and sinful who will be purified by the affliction of Exile 

Rashi (Nedarim 20b): [She is acting virtuously in getting her husband to have intercourse] Only by ingratiating herself with her husband – But she does not directly ask her husband to have sexual intercourse but rather ingratiates herself with him. That means that she shows from her words that she is interested as Leah did and as a consequence she will have good children,. 

Curse as the result of the Sin of Eve to be seductive to obtain it

Eiruvin (100b): Rav Yitzchok bar Avdimi said, Eve was cursed with 10 curses as it says Bereishis (3:16), “To the woman, He said, and I will greatly mulitply.” That is referring to two drops of blood – one being that of nida and the other that of virginity.”your pain”, refers to the pain of raising children. “And your travail”, refers to the pain of pregnancy. “and in your pain you shall give birth to children” is literally birth pains. “And your desire shall before for your husband” teaches that a woman has a desire for her hsuband when he is about to go on a journey.”And he shall rule over you” teaches that while the wife expreses her desire for her husband with her heart, the husband does exresses his desire for her with his mouth. But this is a fine character trait of women? What it meant is that she needs to ingratiate herself with him. But these are only seven? When Rav Dimi came to Bavel he explained, She is wrapped up like a mourner, she is banished from the company of all men and she is confined within a prison.(Mishlei 44:14).

 Eiruvin (100b): And you shall have desire for your husband – this teaches that she has a strong desire for her husband when he set out on a journey. And he shall rule over you - this teaches that a woman asks with her heart while her husband asks directly for intercourse. But this is a good attribute for all women [not to be brazen and it is definitely not a curse]? [The curse is] that she must act seductively and ingratiates herself with him but can not directly say what she wants.

So why did the Maharal omit the requirement? I think it was because it is well known that the women in Egypt were righteous and therefore they obviously had a refined character and would clearly not ask directly but provide hints  - so there was no need to mention it.

Pischei Teshuvos (O.C. 240:13): Rambam(Hilchos Ishus 15:18) said, And the Sages commanded the woman that she should be modest within her house and not to talk a lot or display levity before her husband and she should not directly ask him for intercourse nor should she talk about intercourse. However the intent of our Sages was that she shouldn’t ask and speak about intercourse in a manner of brazenness and arrogance as the Sages said, “children of brazenness”. However if she speaks in a clean manner such as saying “Come to me” [as Leah said to Yaakov] or she makes him interested with words of enticement and she beautifies herself with cosmetics in order that he think about her [then that is appropriate] – then they will have proper children.

The Banal Belligerence of Donald Trump

NY Times by Roger Cohen

The soldiers, millions of them, came home from the war. They dispersed across the country, in big towns and small. It was not easy to recount what had happened to them, and for the dead it was impossible.

Something in the nature of their sacrifice was unsayable. The country was not especially interested. War had not brought the nation together but had divided it. The sudden flash, the boom, the acrid stench and utter randomness of death were as haunting as they were incommunicable.

This was war without victory, the kind that invites silence. For the soldiers, who fought in the belief that their cause was right and their nation just, the silence was humiliating. They bore their injuries, visible and invisible, with stoicism.

Resentments accumulated. The years went by, bringing only mediocrity. Glory and victory were forgotten words. Perhaps someone might mutter, “Thank you for your service.” That was it. There was no national memorial, for what would be memorialized?

Savings evaporated overnight in an economic meltdown engineered by financiers and facilitated by the abolishers of risk.

Democracy, the great diluter, slow and compromised, was inadequate for the expression of the soldiers’ emotions. Reasonable leaders with rational arguments could not assuage the loss. They seemed to belittle it with their parsing of every question and their half-decisions.

No, what was needed was a leader with answers, somebody to marshal a popular movement and cut through hesitations, a strongman who would put the nation first and mythologize its greatness, a figure ready to scapegoat without mercy, a unifier giving voice to the trampled masses, a man who could use democracy without being its slave.

Over 15 years national embitterment festered and yearning intensified. But which 15 years? Anyone these days may be forgiven for moments of disorientation. The 15 years from the devastating German defeat of 1918 to the electoral victory (with 43.9 percent of the vote) of Adolf Hitler in 1933? Or the 15 years from the devastating 9/11 attack on the United States to the electoral victory (with 46.1 percent of the vote) of Donald Trump in 2016?

National humiliation is long in gestation and violent in resolution.

German soldiers, two million of them killed in the Great War, came home to fractious and uneasy democratic politics, the ignominy of reparations, the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, the crash of 1929, and the paralysis of a political system held hostage by the extremes of left and right.

Some 2.7 million American soldiers came home to a country that had been shopping while they served in the Afghan and Iraqi wars, with 6,893 killed and more than 52,000 injured. They returned to an increasingly dysfunctional and polarized polity; to the financial disaster of 2008; to the mystery of what the spending of trillions of dollars in those wars had achieved; to stagnant incomes; to the steady diminishment of American uniqueness and the apparent erosion of its power.[...]

I have tried to tread carefully with analogies between the Fascist ideologies of 1930s Europe and Trump. American democracy is resilient. But the first days of the Trump presidency — whose roots of course lie in far more than the American military debacles since 9/11 — pushed me over the top. The president is playing with fire.

To say, as he did, that the elected representatives of American democracy are worthless and that the people are everything is to lay the foundations of totalitarianism. It is to say that democratic institutions are irrelevant and all that counts is the great leader and the masses he arouses. To speak of “American carnage” is to deploy the dangerous lexicon of blood, soil and nation. To boast of “a historic movement, the likes of the which the world has never seen before” is to demonstrate consuming megalomania. To declaim “America first” and again, “America first,” is to recall the darkest clarion calls of nationalist dictators. To exalt protectionism is to risk a return to a world of barriers and confrontation. To utter falsehood after falsehood, directly or through a spokesman, is to foster the disorientation that makes crowds susceptible to the delusions of strongmen.

Trump’s outrageous claims have a purpose: to destroy rational thought. When Primo Levi arrived at Auschwitz he reached, in his thirst, for an icicle outside his window but a guard snatched it away. “Warum?” Levi asked (why?). To which the guard responded, “Hier ist kein warum” (here there is no why).

As the great historian Fritz Stern observed, “This denial of ‘why’ was the authentic expression of all totalitarianism, revealing its deepest meaning, a negation of Western civilization.”

Americans are going to have to fight for their civilization and the right to ask why against the banal belligerence of Trump.

Maharal: Because of the lust of women in Egypt - Jews were redeemed

Maharal (Sotah 11b): This that the gemora says that for the sake of the righteous women of the generation they were redeemed from Egypt. This has very incredible implications. Because when these women had very great desire for their husbands they gave birth to children who were deserving of freedom. And a proof that when a woman has a great desire for her husband she gives birth to children who deserve to be redeem is (Nedarim 20b),” Rabbi Yochanon said that all men whose wife asks them for sexual intercourse will have children that even in the generation of Moshe didn’t exist. For it is said, Take you wise men, and understanding [and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you]; and it is written, So I took the chiefs of your tribes, wise men and known but ‘understanding’ is not mentioned. But it is also written, Yissachar is a large-boned ass; whilst elsewhere it is written, And of the children of Yissachar, which were men that had understanding of the times.” 

The explanation of this is that when a woman asks her husband for intercourse then the woman cleaves to her husband who is characterized as the Form while the woman is Substance. When the Substance attaches itself to the Form the woman is being completed by the Form and therefore she has children who are understanding because everything is drawn after the Form and is distant from the Substance. Similarly regarding redemption, when the women desired their husbands they had children who deserved to be redeemed. As we have explained in many other places that enslavement is to Substance in particular while the Form is inherently free. Thus when a wife desires her husband there is a perfection of the Substance by the Form and therefore they give birth to children who are wise and understanding and fit to be redeemed. 

And this explains the statement that the women recognized their Creator as they said, “This is my G-d and I will praise him. It all follows from what we said, because they did not have the deficiency and foolishness of Substance – they recognized their Creator. And this that it says that they had intercourse in the sheep pens – this shows that they had so much desire for their husbands that they had intercourse with them whenever it was possible. And this that it says that it took place in the sheep pens is something very deep because it means that they had total unity when they had intercourse and that is called “in the sheep pens’’. That is because there the boundaries were joined and unified. And through the complete unity that comes from intercourse the wives cleaved to their husbands and the child that was born was not Substance because of the joining of the Substance and the Form as we have explained. But when there is separation in this joining, then the inherently materialistic woman makes her child Substance because there is not a cleaving of the Substance to the Form.

When you understand further the words of wisdom you will know that when there is unity of intercourse because of the desire of the woman - then in fact it becomes a divine pairing as we have explained many times. That is because division is a materialistic thing while unity is divine. That is because unity is relevant only from that which is separate from material while distinctiveness and separation are always materialistic. Therefore when there is a joining in complete unity it is something divine and not mundane. That is meant by saying that they had intercourse in the sheep pens which is between the boundaries of the field and between the field itself which is unique. This all comes to tell you that when they had intercourse together they had a divine connection because of the complete unity that they had. And thus “in the sheep pens” which was between the two borders which were separate from the field, they had a joining together which was distinct from the body. The comparison is totally comparable to the sheep pens when properly understood because the sheep pens is the border which is separate for itself between the two fields. Understand this.

When you understand these words of wisdom, you will also understand how great are the words of our Sages which is a hidden secret. That in the name man (ish) there is the letter “yud” and in the name woman (isha) the letter “hey”. When these two letters are joined we have the name of G-d. This shows that when there is a joining in unity it has the quality of divine holiness because of the name of G-d that results from their unity.

 From all this we can understand that the reward for intercourse in the sheep pens which is the divine level as we mentioned – caused also that they would have the spoils of Egypt. That is because this achievement that they acquired by means of the sheep pens caused them to have silver and gold. That is why it says, “As the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her pinions with yellow gold (Tehilim 68:14). Because through the unity of intercourse which is a divine quality – it draws silver and gold just as the wings are drawn after the dove. It is called a dove because of the unity of the joining. It mentions in Shir HaShirim Rabbah (4) that if the mate of the dove dies, the remaining bird will not mate with any other dove. That is why the relationship is called dove because the mating of doves is a complete intercourse and afterwards it mentions being covered with gold and silver because the two wings follow after the body which is a one body. Because when there is a joining of male and female in one attachment until they become one body –then there is the attraction to this of the two wings and these two wings are silver and gold as the verse said, To Me is the silver to Me is the Gold. This all follows after this unity. You shall understand this extremely well.[...]

Massive Women’s March turnout shows Trump’s opponents are done underestimating him

Vox

Every previous winning presidential candidate — and a good number of losing ones like John McCain and John Kerry — have been popular. Even Bill Clinton, who kind of limped into office with 43 percent of the popular vote in 1992, enjoyed approval ratings in the mid-to-high 60s during his post-election winter.

Donald Trump is not like that. While Barack Obama won the votes of a decent number of people who also had a favorable impression of McCain, Trump triumphed in the face of a badly divided opposition. Perhaps his most impressive political feat was trouncing Hillary Clinton 47-30 among the 18 percent voters who viewed both candidates negatively. He got 17 percent of the vote of people who said he wasn’t qualified to serve as president, 19 percent of the vote of people who said he lacked the temperament to be president, and 23 percent of the vote of people who wanted the next president to be more liberal than Obama.

A normal person would have responded to this kind of strange victory with some sort of effort to reassure people or shore up his support. But rather than pivot or mature, Trump spent his transition months feuding with the intelligence community, offered the most divisive inaugural address in memory, and then on his first full day in office went to Langley to deliver what amounted to a campaign rally in front of the CIA’s Memorial Wall.

These antics have taken Trump much further than anyone predicted they possibly could, and so he evidently has no intention of abandoning them. But in parallel on Saturday, millions of people took to the streets in cities and towns around the country to do the one thing his opponents never really did during the campaign — take the prospect of a Trump administration seriously. After benefitting mightily from a fractured opposition that systematically underestimated his candidacy, Trump is now finally in for the fight of his life.

Donald Trump won 46 percent of the popular vote on the way to victory — a victory driven by capturing the electoral votes of seven states in which he failed to capture a majority of the vote: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, and Utah.

He was elected anyway because many people who didn’t want him to be president couldn’t bring themselves to vote for his opponent. Some of that was her own fault. But some of it was because Trump, in an odd way, was the beneficiary of the perception that he couldn’t possibly win.

People who felt he’d be a bad president felt secure in dissenting from the Democratic Party to either the right (Gary Johnson) or the left (Jill Stein) because everyone knew Clinton would win anyway. Almost everyone who had any kind of serious policy doubts about Clinton invested vast time and energy in exploring them, regardless of whether or not they had much more profound doubts about Trump, because everyone knew Clinton would win anyway. Mainstream journalists spent more time poring over potential access-seeking at Clinton’s undoubtedly life-saving charitable foundation than they did detailing the fact that Trump’s foundation was a potentially criminal fraud that appears to have had no legitimate public benefit.

Everyone knew Clinton would win anyway.

That was, obviously, a miscalculation. But it’s important to be clear about what the miscalculation was. Trump’s opponents failed to unify around a single compelling alternative. He wasn’t popular on Election Day and he wasn’t popular on Inauguration Day. And he’s not doing anything to try to turn that around.

Like any sensible pundit looking back on 2016, I am getting out of the political predictions game. But what we saw in Saturday’s demonstrations is that nobody is taking Trump’s defeat for granted anymore. The women and men who marched in cities and towns all across the country undoubtedly have different opinions about taxes and foreign policy and government email server protocol and single-payer health care and bank regulation. They agree that Trump is alarming and that it is incumbent upon them, personally, to try to come together and do something about it.

The absence of that kind of attitude among the 54 percent of Americans who didn’t vote for him last November is one of the primary reasons he was able to win.

Now that it is present, he has lost one of his main advantages.

Trump is a president who is in many ways unusually vulnerable to protest. He’s not a policy wonk who has the disposition to tune out the street theater and focus on issues. And his policy agenda, as far as we can tell, consists largely of unpopular causes like cutting taxes on millionaires, deregulating banks, and stripping millions of their health insurance. His administration’s first policy action was to prevent homeowners from getting a small scheduled mortgage discount.

He’s also a president who is uniquely vulnerable due to his conflicts of interest. Past wealthy presidents have held their assets in diversified funds managed by blind trusts in part to avoid corruption. And his conflicts run both ways — a non-corrupt president wouldn’t want his political adversaries to be able to use his private business interests against him. Million-person mass demonstrations can’t be done every day. But even relatively small-scale demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience targeting Trump-branded hotels, golf courses, office buildings, and apartments can be dramatic and telling.[...]

He won because people didn’t take the threat of him winning — or if him trying to govern as he campaigned — seriously enough to go out and stop him.

This weekend, that ended.

Trump repeats lie that 3-5M illegal ballots cost him popular vote, cites no evidence

CBS News

At a small reception for a bipartisan group of congressional leaders, President Trump claimed that 3 to 5 million illegal ballots cost him the popular vote, CBS News’ Nancy Cordes and Catherine Reynolds confirmed on Monday night. The claim is unproven.

Mr. Trump made a similar claim before. After the election, he tweeted that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” but he cited no evidence to back up his claim.

Politico first reported Mr. Trump’s comments, which were made at the Monday evening White House reception for congressional leadership, his first meeting with them at the White House.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi were among those who met with Mr. Trump.[...]

Advance notice: Disqus is switching to free version only with ads

Just letting you know that as of February 8 Disqus will be adding ads to their free version. Of course they also provide the option of ad free for $10/month. I will be going back to Blogger. Not sure what it will do to all the responses

Neil Postman: The End of Education

Rav Shmuel Kaminetsky's contribution to the welfare of Klall Yisroel: Measles outbreak grows in L.A.'s Orthodox Jewish community

Los Angeles Times

Six months after California’s strict vaccine law took effect, a measles outbreak has infected 20 people, most of them in Los Angeles County, prompting a search for others who may have been exposed to the highly contagious virus.

Most of the patients live in western areas of the county, including L.A.’s Westside, the Santa Monica Mountains and the San Fernando Valley. Santa Barbara and Ventura counties each reported one case.

At least 15 of the 18 L.A. County patients either knew one another or had a clear social connection, said Dr. Jeffrey Gunzenhauser, interim health officer for the L.A. County Department of Public Health. None of the 18 could provide proof of vaccination, he said.

Gunzenhauser said the first person was diagnosed in early December, followed by 16 cases in the last three weeks of 2016, and then one more case last week.

“I’m hopeful that we’re getting to the end of this,” he said.

Hershy Z. Ten, a rabbi who runs Jewish healthcare foundation Bikur Cholim in L.A.’s Beverly Grove neighborhood, said county health officials told him a measles outbreak was affecting the county’s Orthodox Jewish community. He convened a panel last week to discuss steps that Jewish day schools and synagogues could take to stem the outbreak and ensure unvaccinated children are immunized.

“Measles is very, very serious,” he said. “Those children are at risk and they put other children at risk.”[...]

The traditional way of reporting on a president is dead. And Trump’s press secretary killed it.

Washington Post      The presidency is not a reality show, but President Trump on his first full day in office made clear that he’s still obsessed with being what he once proudly called “a ratings machine.”

He cares enough about it to send his press secretary, Sean Spicer, out to brazenly lie to the media in his first official briefing.

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe,” Spicer said. And he added a scolding about widespread reports that differ from his evidence-free assessment: “These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong.”

Crowd size experts estimate Trump’s audience at far fewer than the million or more that Trump is claiming, and at far less than the size of the following day’s women’s march, which the new president has said little about. And side-by-side photographs showed the contrast between the comparatively thin gathering for Trump’s inauguration and the record-setting one in 2009 for former president Barack Obama’s first.

Ari Fleischer, a former George W. Bush press secretary, saw Saturday’s bizarre session for what it was.

“This is called a statement you’re told to make by the President. And you know the President is watching,” Fleischer wrote. (MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski pegged it as “Sean Spicer’s first hostage video.”)

The mainstream media, including The Washington Post, appropriately made clear note of the falsehoods about crowd size. The New York Times called out “false claims” in a prominent headline, and many broadcast journalists challenged Spicer immediately — although they didn’t get a chance to do so to his face, since he took no questions.

CNN wisely chose not to air the briefing in full, but to report on it and to show parts, providing context. Fox News showed it in its full glory, infomercial style.

Some journalists, afterward, sounded stunned at what had transpired.

“Astonishing,” said Jim Acosta of CNN. “Jaw meet floor” was the reaction of Glenn Thrush of the New York Times.

The reaction is understandable. Some semblance of truth from the White House ought to be reasonable enough, especially on Day Two.

But nothing about this should shock.

Anyone — citizen or journalist — who is surprised by false claims from the new inhabitant of the Oval Office hasn’t been paying attention. That was reinforced when Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told “Meet the Press” Sunday that Spicer had been providing “alternative facts” to what the media had reported, making it clear we’ve gone full Orwell.

Official words do matter, but they shouldn’t be what news organizations pay most attention to, as they try to present the truth about a new administration.

White House press briefings are “access journalism,” in which official statements — achieved by closeness to the source — are taken at face value and breathlessly reported as news. And that is over. Dead.

Spicer’s statement should be seen for what it is: Remarks made over the casket at the funeral of access journalism. [...]