Breaking: Chris Murphy's take after classified briefing

[senseandsensibility]

Cabinet officials finally briefed the Senate about the Iran situation and Murphy has just spoken to the press about what he learned:
"The president was deliberately misleading the public when he said the program was obliterated."

I, for one, am not surprised.

[unblock]

1. What sucks is that the media won't punish him for lying, it will reward him with the excuse to bomb more

[senseandsensibility]

2. Yes, I wonder how much

coverage Murphy's remarks will receive.

[maxsolomon]

7. What form would that "punishment" take?

He does nothing BUT lie, and it's pretty well known by everyone at this point.

[unblock]

9. The media controls the narrative, frames the issues, and proves it easily when there's a democratic "scandal"

They are quite capable of destroying a political career if they want to. Or even just making sure you associate a politician with a particular topic or smear or whatever.

The whole thing about gore "inventing" the internet was ludicrous. They could easily have corrected this Republican lie every time, pointed out that gore did indeed do exactly what he said, which was to do more than anyone else in congress to help create the internet, and tell those republicans that they don't want to be used to push their lies.

They didn't because they love Republican lies, always have, and were happy to hurt gore's career.

Same for the Hillary email nonsense. It was very obviously nonsense from the get-go. Hillary did exactly the same thing the entire bush administration did, and her decision to use a private server for non-classified email traffic was never going to be a crime or every a legitimate controversy even if a few items of classified information accidentally slipped through.

The media could have pointed all this out and given it only a fraction of the coverage they did, or they could have made a major scandal out of the blatant abuse of confessional investigative powers to smear a political opponent, which was the only real scandal in all that.

But no, they didn't exactly what republicans wanted. They routinely reward Republican lies rather than punish them.

When a democrat has a scandal, the media generally ignores anything else. The media refuses to let a democratic politician talk about some other issue. "How can you govern effectively with this scandal over your head?" The media devotes tons or pages and airtime and questions to the scandal and very little to anything of substance. This destroys a politician's career.

They never come close to this with republicans and Donnie in particular. They routinely sweep it all under the rug. Then it's old news, or the voters decided, or whatever. Nowadays they even insist that it's "biased" to talk about anything negative involving republicans.

They started it all by rewarding Donnie with a to of helpful coverage launching his career over a blatant lie, he claimed to have investigated and had info about some kind of problem with Obama birth certificate. It was an obvious lie, the media rewarded him with all that airtime while refusing to demand prof of even having investigated it. A blatant fabrication and even after it all proved to be a lie, they let him move on as if it was just the next step in a genius political strategy.

A responsible media would have burned him for making them waste all that time and effort on such a lie. Responsible journalism doesn't fall over itself trying to get the latest lies. Responsible media would be telling us about the Republican propaganda strategy, they wouldn't air the latest lies.

They wouldn't have questioned biden's age and mental decline when Donnie is nearly the same age and unbelievably stupid

Once upon a time, the media had a daily new program about the hostages in Iran. Relentlessly coverage of a single issue until it was resolved. They could have done this about Donnie's sexual assault allegations or ongoing grifting or anything like that, but that would be "biased" because destroying Carter's career was fine, but dwelling on the criminality of a convicted felon is biased if it's a Republican.

There are many competing justifications for different editorial and journalistic decisions. They always seem to use whichever one suits republicans at the expense of democrats. It's nauseating.


Long story short, it serves republican interests to merely note that he lies, but continue to clamor for his latest statement when you know it' will be chock full of lies. It normalizes highly abnormal propaganda. If he lies this often, and really his whole motivation for saying anything is to push a false narrative, then why reward him by pushing the false narrative? An "oh by the way critics say it's a lie" merely supports them even more by painting everything, even the truth, as mere partisan opinion.

Why wouldn't the story be "journalists remain frustrated as administration official refuse to tell the truth, offering only lies." "American in crisis as trump double down on lies". Just be relentless until they stop lying.

But they don't even try to make a scandal out of the lying. It's just a ho-hum political strategy that democrats haven't figured out how to counter. Infuriating and disgustingly biased. Today's media is happy to be a cog in the Republican propaganda machine.

[maxsolomon]

10. The Right Wing Media frames the issues and drives the narrative with Dem scandals.

They have no reason or interest in doing so for any Republican pols anywhere at any level.

As far as I understand, you believe "the media" should punish MFer by having a daily program, somewhere, about his lying? But, to me, it's clear the non-engaged public isn't scandalized by anything he does. They're numb to it, or they think it's funny.

I don't think "the media" have the power to punish MFer - for anything. At least not the sad remnants of the Centrist corporate media that I think DU means when they attack "the media".

[unblock]

12. well, we're only at this point because the media refused to hold him to account all along.

if there was a part of the media that wanted to retain legitimate journalistic integrity, they would have made it clear that foxnews as right-wing propaganda early on, and refused to let them set the narrative. instead, the entire media let foxnews pick the topics and scandals and catchphrases and so on, and all any opposition could do was say "no, that's wrong".

it's been relentless. the public isn't "scandalized" by donnie's lies because the media has portrayed it as normal, or at least as "an exception we're all going to allow donnie because he's special."

people like aoc get massive crowds and applause and eyeballs when they cut through the b.s. and tell the truth. it's something people crave and miss and it's very rewarding to hear it publicly when all the propaganda is making people question their own eyes and ears and sanity.

but the media still isn't interested in tapping that market because they've got too much invested in supporting donnie, or at least in not overly offending him.

[robbob]

14. I agree with what you've written, just one note:

It’s ALL of the MSM; they are all Right Wing Media now, and have been for some time. Sure, CNN or NBC might have a few opposing voices, and some of them are very good, but in general, a Democrat party “scandal” gets nonstop coverage for weeks, while the absolute horrors of this current administration, for example, get mentioned in passing, if at all.

[Skittles]

21. how about treating these repukes the same they would treat a Democrat behaving this way

let's start with THAT

[SLClarke]

16. He could have said ...

Murphy could have, instead of saying tRump was misleading us, he could have pointed out that our President was speaking from his dementia. Murphy et al, is also being very "nice" about the cognitive decline.

[unblock]

18. I don't disagree, I'd like to see democrats have stronger, united counter-frames

But it's a challenge with the media the way it is. The media will allow certain responses from politicians they'll continue to paint as normal, and generally anyone who goes beyond that gets branded an extremist or radical.

Some, like aoc, are fine with this and she can forcefully make her points. It helps bring from a very liberal district. People like Murphy aren't in as good a spot. Connecticut is blue, but doesn't really embrace the radical label.

Also, we don't see what goes on behind the scenes, but the media decides who gets airtime and who doesn't and if they don't like what you say or how you say it, you don't get invited back as often.

[senseandsensibility]

25. I agree with all your points

and it's definitely an uneven playing field for Dems. And even get me started on female Dems. The press would never let Murphy get away with being flat out rude to the POTUS (even if he was telling the truth). It's infuriating.

[wnylib]

17. I don't know about punishing Trump, but three different media (radio) sources

that I've heard (ABC, NPR, BBC) have been countering the phony spin with facts, often after playing a recording of a press conference or a Trump media post.

[unblock]

20. Oh, sure, they're great at the occasional footnote correcting the lies.

And it is nice to see them say things like "we're just correcting 4 of the falsehoods here but we counted 47, the full list is on our website"

But in the end, putting out the lies first and relegation the facts to footnotes and corrections really only helps push the lies.

The story needs to be that he lied, and the actual lie needs to be one of the footnotes.

If they run a story about rfk jr and blare out some antivax propaganda in the headline, then say experts disagree in the 7th paragraph, that still pushes the antivax nonsense and fewer people will get vaccinated as a result, even if they say experts disagree 97-3. The headline should be something like rfk jr gets the science wrong.

[ShazzieB]

28. According to a video I just watched, the corporate media is terrified to tell the truth about him.

This is a 31 minute video. The main topic is Schlump's mental decline, but towards the end (about 25:23), they discuss how the media is whitewashing everything and why they afraid to tell the whole truth about what's going on with him.

The whole thing is very interesting, imo, but if you don't want to watch it all, you can fast forward to the last 5 or 6 minutes to hear what they say about the media.

[BoRaGard]

3. That the republicans again lied to America

is about as predictable a news story as "dog bites a-hole pestering magat man."

[Marie Marie]

4. And this is why Trump has stated that Congress will no longer have access to these

types of reports. We will only hear what the Liar-in-Chief wants us to hear from his lying mouth.

[senseandsensibility]

5. He's having some kind of "event" to promote the big ugly bill

soon according to a chyron I saw briefly on MSNBC. He'll probably use that to spread more BS about this topic as well.

[sakabatou]

6. Of course the orange anus would lie to the Public

[calimary]

34. Well, that's what he does for a living.

That’s what he’s done for a long time, and to who-knows-how-many people.

He speaks with a forked tongue. That’s his “thing”. And that’s really about all you ever need to know about him.

He just lies.

Or, if you want to be a little more “tidy” about it, you can call it “misleading”. But it’s STILL J. A. L.: Just Another Lie.

[thought crime]

8. Another Official Truth

And everyone knows it's a lie.

[TheProle]

11. More from Murphy per AJC:

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said the strike appears to "have only set back the Iranian nuclear program by a handful of months."

“There's no doubt there was damage done to the program,” said Murphy, but “allegations that we have obliterated their program just don't seem to stand up to reason.”

“I just do not think the president was telling the truth when he said this program was obliterated,” he added.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250626210627/https://www.ajc.com/news/2025/06/trump-officials-give-their-first-classified-briefing-to-congress-on-the-iran-strikes/

[Karasu]

13. Even the Pentagon had already said as much. I have no idea why the fuck we needed secret briefings to confirm this.

https://democraticunderground.com/10143485166

[moniss]

15. Maybe he will get

a Nobel for being the biggest liar. Oh wait. I don't think that's a category.

[Skittles]

19. THE PRESIDENT IS A LYING SACK OF SHIT

there, I FIXED IT

[canetoad]

22. LOL

Preach it!

[wiggs]

23. Correct! That's the headline. Oh...and we should all check our wallets after leaving press conferences and briefings nt

[rubbersole]

24. And make sure you still have both kidneys.

[Eliot Rosewater]

26. No more Covid vaccinations if you're healthy

And the election was rigged

Go onto YouTube, please, for God sake and type in these words

Christopher Titus rigged

[riversedge]

27. kick

[Arazi]

29. Lindsey Graham reports Iran's enriched uranium stockpiles weren't hit at all

Lindsey Graham: "I don't know where the 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium exists, but it wasn't part of the target set."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-06-26T19:47:03.221Z

[senseandsensibility]

30. Yup

Looks like we didn't get the real story from trump. I know everyone's shocked.

[Martin68]

31. Well....duh. We saw his lips moving.

[RandomNumbers]

33. I was going to say, "and the sky is blue"

although yours is more apt. The sky is not always blue. TSF / F47 ALWAYS is lying.

[58Sunliner]

32. Dog and pony show. Orchestrated by Putin?