Pirate's Cove

Previously, it was Politico trotting out the meme that Trump tweeting is a threat to national security, now we the far left New Republic’s Jeet Heer giving it a whirl, with something new

The Washington Post has created a nifty tool designed to address one of the novel problems of our political era: a president-elect who persistently uses Twitter to spread lies. A web-browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, RealDonaldContext annotates some of Trump’s tweets with fact-checking from the Post. For instance, last month Trump tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Below that, if you use the extension, is a note saying, “This is incorrect or false,” with this explication: “Trump didn’t win in a landslide in any sense—but more importantly there is absolutely no evidence that there were a significant number of votes cast illegally, much less ‘millions’ of them.”

Remember how the Washington Post did this for all of Obama’s tweets, whether from the POTUS account, White House account, or the BarackObama one run by his old Organizing for Amerika pals? No? And the media wonders why people seem them as biased and overly partisan.

Yet fact-checking, while necessary, is also only a partial solution. Trump’s core supporters, and the Republican Party that has decided to appease them, have proven willing to swallow his lies wholesale; they are immune to fact-checkers. Moreover, the problem with Trump’s tweets isn’t just that they often contain falsehoods, but that they are deliberate provocations with the potential to cause real conflict.

Consider Trump’s tweets after China seized a U.S. underwater drone: (see them at the article)

Yes, they are upset that Trump would be tough on China. This has Heer soiling his panties. He further skidmarked said panties over Trump noting the violence from Islamists in Europe. And more doom and gloom and stuff, because the State Department weenies need clear guidance to be weenies, ending with

Trump isn’t even president yet, and already his tweets are causing diplomatic turmoil. Fact-checking tools are helpful, but Trump’s political opposition—not just Democrats, but Republicans dismayed by his foreign policy, like senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham—they need to make the case to the American public that his tweets are a threat to U.S. foreign policy, and even to its national security. Otherwise a President Trump could start a flame war on Twitter that turns into a bloody war in real life.

Do you know what the real problem here is? It’s not about the minuscule potential for conflict (it ain’t gonna happen, folks. Nations might get Offended, but, they won’t be starting conflicts), it’s, as I wrote when Politico tried this “Trump brings his message directly to The people, rather than going through the media, who filter and spin his message. The MSM does not like this in the least. And, really, no matter what Trump does, the media will find a way to say “this is horrible!” And they’ll go looking for things, just like with Bush.”

Crossed at Right Wing News.