Have you ever played the game “stupid or liar”? It was created by podcaster Adam Corolla. The premise is that whenever someone says something that is blatantly false, you must figure out if he or she is either incredibly stupid or a bald-faced liar.
Like when your boyfriend tells you he has no idea who Jameka is and why she sent him 17 texts at 3 a.m. Like when Donald Trump says he’s going to build a wall along the Mexican border: Is he too stupid to know that it will cost $15 billion to $25 billion, or is he just knowingly telling a lie?
Or, better yet, when conservative news outlets and the low-IQ Donald disciples we here at The Root affectionately refer to as “TrumpPets” cite James O’Keefe’s clip of CNN commentator Van Jones calling the Russian investigation a “nothing burger,” are they lying their asses off, or is it possible that they are really that stupid?
Anyone who knows Jones immediately understood what he was talking about in the delicately framed, out-of-context clip. Jones knows that the Republican House, the Republican Senate and the Trump-appointee-led Department of Justice have no interest in finding out whether Trump colluded with Russia in undermining the 2016 elections. And anyone who knows O’Keefe knows this is all bullshit.
You know James O’Keefe. He’s the guy who exposed the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now when he secretly videotaped ACORN workers committing voter fraud and instructing him how to commit tax fraud. The brouhaha caused ACORN to shut down, but when the California attorney general, the New York attorney general, the Government Accountability Office and an independent investigator looked into ACORN, they could find no evidence or fraud or wrongdoing, and all admitted that the tapes were heavily edited to create a false conclusion.
Maybe you know O’Keefe from when he edited a recording of NPR’s chief to “intentionally lie or mislead” the public about NPR funding. Perhaps you know him for his fake Planned Parenthood videos. Or the “fake protester” videos. Or the time he dressed up like a pimp and told workers about his “hos” to get black people to trust him.
O’Keefe can’t be trusted with a camera. If O’Keefe slides into your DMs to send dick pics, it’s more than likely someone else’s penis. He is the chief of fake news, and anyone outraged by his videos must be stupid.
After all, the Republican base and white people are the only people who still think Trump is doing a good job as president. (Dear people in the greys: I don’t want to sound racist, but facts are facts. Only conservatives and whites give the president a 50 percent approval rating or higher, according to the latest Pew Research poll.)
I’m not saying the people who want the wall, the Muslim ban and the Mexican-roundup shuttle buses are necessarily stupid, but they are the same folks who believed Infidelity Castro was going to “drain the swamp”—then watched him fill his Cabinet with millionaire corporate shills. These are the people who wanted to repeal Obamacare but love that genius health care law called the Affordable Care Act. These are the people who hate welfare and entitlements but will fight to preserve Medicare and Social Security.
I’m not saying they are stupid, because when you look at the facts, I don’t have to say it.
But maybe they are liars.
Breitbart, a real friend of Chief O’Keefe, aired the video, but it is also the only site that still stands behind the idea that then-President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower; that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told troops in Benghazi (yes, they are still on that), Libya, to “stand down”; and that there was a sex ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor. Breitbart still occasionally publishes a piece on Obama’s birth certificate.
Fox News is no better. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade-float-sized head of Sean Hannity can only be broadcast in widescreen as he screams lies into the “fair and balanced” network’s cameras that Trump seems to love. The network stubbornly refuses to report on the president’s lies to get softball exclusives with Puffy Comb-over, and its only reports about the Russia investigation are “no evidence” updates and tweets like this:
So this whole Van Jones video “bombshell” is not a big nothing burger. It exposes TrumpPets, the conservative media and the White House as either ignoramuses or hucksters. Jones is just the latest black man used as a tool for James O’Keefe’s trickery to further the conservative agenda.
Jones is wrong about one thing, though. The fact that the elected representatives of this country (both Democrat and Republican) have unabashedly put their parties ahead of what lies at the fundamental base of American democracy—fair and unsullied elections—is a huge double ghetto burger with cheese and bacon. If the Russians actually changed vote totals in the 2016 election, are you confident that the public would ever know? Do you believe that if Republican senators found out that Trump actually broke the law, they would stand up and say, “I was wrong”?
Do you think any of those millionaires would ever say, “Let’s forget about our party affiliations, re-election or our personal political gain, and—just this one time—do something for the American people, for democracy, for truth”? Do you think that is even possible?
If you do, you must be stupid ...
Or a liar.
Read Van Jones’ op-ed here.