The RNC weaponized exhaustion [View all]

[babylonsister]

I'll say; they've beat us all down.


The RNC weaponized exhaustion
The sheer volume of lies and illegal behavior from Trump and the Republicans is what allowed them to get away with it.
By Zack Beauchamp@[e-mail] Aug 28, 2020, 12:30pm EDT


The most consistent theme of Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention wasn’t that Joe Biden was a puppet for radicals. It wasn’t even that rioters and looters are coming to your home and only Trump can protect you from the radical left.

The clear theme of the RNC was a flagrant and brutal disregard for the truth.

The first night of the RNC featured more false and misleading claims than all four nights of the DNC put together, according to a CNN fact-check. The second night starred an anti-abortion activist whose tale about the horrors of Planned Parenthood had been exposed as a fraud more than 10 years ago. On the third night, Vice President Mike Pence suggested that the murder of a police officer by a far-right extremist was a crime committed by left-wing rioters. It was all capped off by President Trump’s Thursday night speech, a farrago of falsehoods that even veteran Trump fact-checkers found stunning.

“Basically everything Trump says about Biden’s proposals is false,” the Washington Post’s Philip Bump writes. In a tour-de-force segment, CNN’s Daniel Dale spent three minutes debunking the speech at a rapid clip — and still didn’t cover all the lies:

Link to tweet

Writing honestly about the RNC requires centering the dishonesty. But adequately describing the sheer breadth and brazenness of the lying that was on display these past four days would take volumes. And after a certain point, the whole thing reaches diminishing returns: Some depressing political science research suggests that pointing out when Trump is lying doesn’t actually change the way voters feel about him.

And that’s the dark brilliance of the RNC, and maybe the entire Trump presidency. If you just lie and break legal rules frequently enough and brazenly enough, the sheer volume of misconduct will overwhelm the systems that are designed to check them.

more...

https://www.vox.com/2020/8/28/21405144/trump-rnc-speech-fact-check-lies-hatch-act