Saturday Reads: Lies, Damned Lies, and Deadly Lies

Good Morning!

It appears I’m back on line after five days of utility hell! Katrina taught me how to camp out efficiently in my own home and endlessly harass “service” providers. However, it’s a skill I’d rather never use again. The last hurricane was bad enough. This 1 day outage of electricity and 5 day outage of tv/internet was made worse by me having to stick around the house waiting, calling, and watching.  I watched the forum last night and Z Nation on my old college TV which finally brought me back in to the world at large.  The new TV in the front took a hit from the power surge so all is not completely well.  I’m still waiting for the carpenter to fix the faschia board  on the gable.  So, let me see what’s going on in the world before I try to go back and catch up with lost work.

I’ve noticed that one thing about living in the information age with plenty of ways to chase down information and plenty of ways to document and spread information, we’ve got a lot of opportunities to catch up with big fat liars and their lies.  Most of the public seems to not avail itself of the tools necessary to fact check. Indeed, they appear to chase straight for the sites and people that peddle lies.  But, we’re seeing an entirely new reality when the actual reality burbles its way through the web and media.

No where is this more noticeable than when officer’s invent stories that are not backed up by the material evidence collected at the scene.  Thank goodness for police body cams and dash cams!  We’re beginning to see more and more examples of police using unnecessary deadly force and then being caught creating absolute lies to cover up their actions. There are two recent examples worth noting.  The first comes from N.J. where a dash cam shows that a suspect did, indeed, have his hands up which conflicts with officer accounts.

Two police officers who accused a motorist of trying to grab one of their guns were convicted Thursday of misconduct in part because a dashcam video showed the motorist holding his hands up.

Bloomfield Officers Sean Courter and Orlando Trinidad were found guilty by an Essex County jury of conspiracy, official misconduct, tampering with and falsifying public records and lying to authorities. Courter, 35, and Trinidad, 34, face mandatory minimum prison sentences of five years when they’re sentenced in January.

Courter, of Englishtown, and Trinidad, of Bloomfield, initially said motorist Marcus Jeter tried to grab Courter’s gun and struck Trinidad during a traffic stop on the Garden State Parkway in 2012. Jeter was charged with resisting arrest, aggravated assault and other offenses based on video from one of the officers’ dashboard cameras.

But Jeter acquired a second police dashcam video through an open records request. Combined, the videos showed him with his hands in the air for virtually the entire encounter.

Prosecutors dropped charges against Jeter and charged Trinidad, Courter and a third officer.

“They accused Mr. Jeter of criminal acts that led to him being charged and indicted,” assistant prosecutor Berta Rodriguez, who tried the case, said Thursday. “He was facing five years in prison. But for the dash camera in the second police vehicle, he might be in prison today.”

The third officer, Albert Sutterlin, pleaded guilty in 2013 to falsifying and tampering with records.

This next example had a tragic result.  A six year old boy was killed as city marshals in a small Louisiana Town near Texas used deadly force on his unarmed father. The two were seated in a car. Two city marshals now face second degree murder charges. 

Two city marshals in the central Louisiana town of Marksville will be charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of a six-year-old autistic boyfollowing a car chase involving his father, authorities announced late Friday.

Norris Greenhouse Jr., 23, a reserve officer, and Lt. Derrick Stafford, 32, were arrested Friday night by the Louisiana State Police, which is leading the investigation, CBS affiliate WAFB reported.

Jeremy Mardis was shot and killed Tuesday after his father, Christopher Few, led law enforcement officers on a chase. Few was wounded in the incident and is hospitalized in critical condition.

The marshals will also be charged with attempted second-degree murder of the father, Louisiana State Police Col. Michael Edmonson said at a news conference late Friday night.

Lt. Jason Brouillette and Sgt. Kenneth Purnell were also involved in the chase but have not been charged. All four officers were placed on administrative leave.

One of the officers was wearing a body camera which recorded the chase, the shooting and its aftermath.

“It is the most disturbing thing I’ve seen, and I’ll leave it at that,” Edmonson said, adding that the footage, witness interviews and forensic evidence led police to file charges.

According to the Marksville Police Department, Few led the law enforcement officers on a short pursuit Tuesday night and stopped on a dead-end road.

“The initial statement to my investigators was that the vehicle was backing up, they feared for their lives and they started firing,” Edmonson told CBS News correspondent David Begnaud Friday morning.

“There were a lot of shots fired that night and they were coming in one direction. There’s nothing for us that indicates that any fire came from that SUV,” Edmonson said. “There was no weapon found in that SUV.”

You can read more about this case on the NYT.  We are clearly doing many things wrong in our criminal justice system.  I hate to disturb you on a weekend morning, but reading about this small victim and his unnecessary death is vital to realizing we need reform and we need it now.

BB wrote quite a bit about the fanciful tales spun by Republican candidate Ben Carson yesterday.  More and more media outlets are finding and checking out his tall tales.  The WSJ has found more examples of completely untrue anecdotes that show up in Carson’s book and speeches.  Carson’s poll numbers have started to fall.  WTF is wrong with Republicans that they blindly accept all of their jerks at face value?  Are they completely incapable of critical thinking and fact checking?  Brian Beutler discusses this in an article in the Republic. 

Ben Carson’s popularity among conservatives has been marked by their imperviousness to questions about his honesty and fitness. Carson has made dozens of statements about federal policy that have transcended garden-variety conservative over-promising and reached the realm of Chauncey Gardner-esque absurdity. He has also faced serious questions about the veracity of stories he tells about his youth and young manhood. Through it all, conservatives have not only stuck by his side, but actually become more taken with him. They’ve brushed off scrutiny with glib mockery, accusing white liberals of “othering” a black man for having the temerity to leave the “thought plantation.”

That all likely changes now that Carson has confessed to fabricating a seminal story about having declined admission to West Point in his youth. When you’ve lost Breitbart, it stands to reason that you will also lose talk-radio fawning, viral email forwards, and all the other mysterious sources of conservative cult status.

But there is room for genuine doubt here: Could Carson’s supporters prove so uninterested in his genuine merits and demerits that they might look past this transgression? The very fact that this doubt exists incriminates both the conservative-entertainment complex and the nature of the Republican electorate.

I always cringe at the representation of these Republicans as “conservative” because they are anything but conservative.  Many tend to be outright theocratic and most really support insurgency and radical change.  There’s nothing conservative about the stories they invent to justify insurrection.  Kevin Drum at Mojo has made a short list of some of his most egregious fabrications.

Because we have synchronous and widespread  sources of news, it’s really difficult for politicians to get away with these tall tells.  Carson gave an absolutely unhinged presser yesterday where he tried to blame the media for all these misunderstandings.   Blaming the “liberal” media has been staple of Republican pols since Nixon.  The entire last Republican debate was an exercise in blaming the media for gotcha questions when mostly what was happen was good old fashion fact checking and holding to account.

Again, we have an excellent example of this in Louisiana in the David Vitter race.  Vitter ran an absolutely blistering set of ads against his two Republican opponents in the election.  They were so bad, that our Republican LT. Governor has now endorsed the Blue Dog Democrat who faces Vitter in the run-off.  Many of the the supporters of the other Republican who came in a very close third have also put their support behind John Bel Edwards.  Now, the Republican party is coming after  LT. Governor Jay Dardenne with machetes and stating that JBE latest ad has brought the race to a new low.  Oh, really?  Where were you a few weeks ago when Vitter was attacking fellow Republicans?  Lies can be told but it takes very little effort these days to unearth the truth.

The JBE ad is a must see.  Bobb Mann writes about it for Salon,

On the evening of Monday, Feb. 25, 1991, only five hours before Baghdad Radio would tell Iraqi troops to begin withdrawing from Kuwait, all hell rained down on a U.S. Army barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. It was, as the New York Times described it the next day, “the most devastating Iraqi stroke of the Persian Gulf war.” An Iraqi Scud missile struck the barracks, killing 28 Americans and wounding 100 more.

 The barracks had been home to the 475^th Quartermaster Group, an Army Reserve unit from the small western Pennsylvania town of Farrell.

Reading the grisly details of that night’s events still evokes horror and grief. Here is how New York Times reporter R.W. Apple, Jr., described the aftermath in his Feb. 26, 1991, story, “This morning, under the pitiless glare of portable floodlights, excavating equipment began plowing through the blackened remains of the building. Servicemen joined in the search for the missing, using picks and shovels, as some of the survivors milled about. Many wept.”

Fast-forward ten years to February 27, 2001: On the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives members were preparing to host President George W. Bush, who would deliver his State of the Union address that evening.

Before hearing from Bush, however, the House had some business to conclude – considering a resolution “honoring the ultimate sacrifice” made by those killed and wounded that horrible day 10 years earlier. When the votes were tallied at 5:27 p.m., the resolution passed overwhelmingly, 395-0.

Thirty-five members, however, did not vote that afternoon. Among them was U.S. Rep. David Vitter, a Republican from suburban New Orleans serving his second term.

Vitter may have missed this vote because he waiting on a return call from an escort service based in California that sold the services of women in the Washington, D.C., area. As his colleagues and constituents would later learn, Vitter was a regular customer of the escort service.

Meanwhile, the poor Lt. Governor is getting hate mail from Republican officials all over the state.

Saying “David Vitter’s governorship will further” damage a Republican brand “damaged by the failed leadership of Bobby Jindal during this last term,” Dardenne threw his support behind Edwards at an event on the LSU campus.

Fine, be angry or disappointed with Dardenne, who has faithfully carried the Republican banner since childhood when he handed out push cards for Barry Goldwater, for his decision to break a promise not to endorse in the runoff. It is also OK to criticize the Republican for endorsing a Democrat even though this particular Republican has a long history of being a) independent and b) shunned by the very party officials who now brand him a traitor.

But to rank Dardenne on the hate meter with Satan, Alabama football coach Nick Saban, “the socialist” Barack Obama or a jilted husband taking violent revenge on his ex-wife goes well beyond the pale — even in this day of nasty, hyperbolic political discourse.

The worst, by far, is the despicable letter fired off by Peter Egan, chairman of the St. Tammany Republican Parish Executive Committee. In the unique worldview of Egan, Dardenne endorsing a Democrat — rather than toe the party line and endorse Vitter, or at least stay silent — is “a vehement act of retribution” for being knocked out of the race in the open primary.

Mr. Egan goes on pontificating, declaring “the behavior of endorsing Edwards is akin to that of a jilted man firing indiscriminately at his ex-wife’s car, mindless of the collateral harm and injury to many innocent people.”

I’m all for hyperbole to make a point, but exactly who are these innocent people Dardenne has harmed?

No individual who answers the call of public service deserves hate-speech like this, and especially a man who has done an impeccable job of serving the state he loves.

Where were all these “Republican or die” people when Vitter, a fellow Republican, was assailing Dardenne’s character and GOP service to Louisiana? Is the message that vicious Republican-on-Republican attacks — whether they come from Vitter or Egan — are fair game, but endorsing a man who did not eviscerate your character is a crime punishable by political death?

So, now I’m closing with the professional liar class of pundits who make a huge living peddling lies on Fox News as “conservatives”.  It appears there’s a family feud between Bill O’Reilly and George Will. 

FOX News’ Bill O’Reilly has a heated argument with network contributor George Will over his latest columnwhich accuses the O’Reilly Factor host of slandering former President Ronald Reagan in his latest book,Killing Reagan.

“It is not a laudatory book,” Will said about O’Reilly’s Killing Reagan. “It is doing the work of the left which knows in order to discredit conservatism it must destroy Reagan’s reputation as president. Your book does the work of the American left with its extreme recklessness.”

“You’re a hack,” O’Reilly said to Will. “You are in with the cabal of the Reagan loyalists who don’t want the truth to be told.”

So, I guess no one calls O’Reilly’s book a “No-fact Zone”.

Conservative columnist George Will attacked Bill O’Reilly’s new book, “Killing Reagan, in the Washington Post on Thursday — calling it “a tissue of unsubstantiated assertions” that “will distort public understanding of Ronald Reagan’s presidency more than hostile but conscientious scholars could” — and to the surprise of absolutely no one, O’Reilly shot back last night.

 Will’s criticism was admittedly harsh. He warned readers of O’Reilly’s book to beware, as they were “about to enter a no-facts zone,” and referred to the book as “nonsensical history and execrable citizenship,” so it’s not as O’Reilly wasn’t within his rights to be offended.

And offended he was. He began by noting the difference between “slander” and “libel,” which Will misused in his column — because, of course, noting one error in an otherwise sound review of a book invalidates all of the other valid criticisms contained therein.

You should go watch the video if you can stomach it.

So, the deal is that we can in fact ferret out the truth in many many ways these days and we can rely on some media sources and fact checkers to do so.  The deal is this.  The lie tends to resonant louder than then the correction.  It’s usually buried deep and less accessible.

What’s a voter to do?

So, that’s it for me today.  What’s on your reading and blogging list?