The New York Times hits a new low in false equivalencies

there’s nothing the Grey Lady can’t both-sides

do you believe that Democrats are adrenochrome-harvesting lizard-people? do you insist that Italian military satellites altered vote counts in Arizona’s voting machines?

do you believe that the email lady was trafficking children out of the basement of a pizza parlor that has no basement? that Barack Obama spied on the Trump White House with his magical microwave oven? that Dr. Fauci created covid? that Michelle Obama is a man?

if you believe any of that patently-false fucknuttery, congratulations — you’re a member of the American right wing. because that’s where these fever-swamp hallucinations are born — and flourish.

the GOP eagerly traffics in this garbage. Senators and Representatives hold hearings based on the looniest batshit conspiracies. Fox News and Newsmax amplify such twaddle, conferring legitimacy onto it.

so, faced with this non-stop deluge of mass lunacy on the right, how do you respond?

if you’re The New York Times, you both-sides the shit out of it.

here we go:

Several elected officials, along with a top political aide for the billionaire Reid Hoffman, recently suggested, without proof, that former President Donald J. Trump may have staged an attempt to assassinate him in July.

ok, we can’t deny that this is accurate — there are those who believe that Donny Convict staged his own assassination attempt.

most folks on the left, however, do not buy into the staged-assassination theory — but they do have a thousand legitimate questions about what actually happened. because so little of it makes sense — and we’re not getting any answers.

Joy Reid, a host on MSNBC with more than 340,000 followers on Threads, raised questions about Mr. Trump’s injury from the shooting, doubts that some of her followers interpreted, when his medical details were not released, as implying a cover-up.

for fuck’s sake, New York Times, there is, shall we say, an “information deficit.”

let’s talk about Donny’s magically-regenerated ear. the official story is that a bullet took off a two-centimeter chunk of it. the only source for this quote-unquote “fact” is Donny’s disgraced, day-drunk pill-mill doctor, Ronny Jackson.

we never saw a medical report. we never heard from any of the emergency-room doctors who personally treated Donny. we’re just expected to take the word of the gin-soaked train-wreck who claimed Donny could live to be 200 years old.

and then, three days after prancing around the Republican National Convention with a comically-oversized maxi-pad glued to the side of his head, Donny starts appearing in public sans bandage — and lo and behold, his ear is perfectly healed.

seriously? a two-centimeter wound grew back in less than a week, with no scarring? on a 78-year-old man? I’m 67. if I nick my finger while slicing vegetables, it takes a month to heal. but a bullet traveling around 3,000 feet per second took off a piece of Donny’s ear — and four days later, there’s no sign of a wound?

is it any wonder that people are questioning the official story?

but let’s go back to the Times’ reporting, and see what happened to the conspiracy-spreading dude who worked for the billionaire.

Mr. Hoffman’s aide apologized for questioning whether the assassination attempt against Mr. Trump had been staged. He parted ways with the billionaire soon after.

oh look, consequences. something that rarely, if ever, happens on the right.

has anyone on the right ever apologized for spreading the evil lie that Paul Pelosi and the shithead who beat him with a hammer were lovers? did anyone lose their job?

to this day, Donny Convict still makes sick jokes about it.

ok, Times, what else ya got?

Mark Hamill, an actor and advocate for Democratic causes with more than five million followers on X, criticized a conservative policy proposal by railing against ideas that were not part of the document.

nice bit of obfuscation here on the part of the Times. the “conservative policy proposal” is in fact Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s plan for ending democracy in America. the very plan that Donny now has to pretend he knows nothing about, because it’s so fucking toxic.

an entire cottage industry has sprung up for the purpose of nitpicking the shit out of any criticism of Project 2025.

look, P2025 is a 900-page document. it’s an authoritarian’s wet dream, with about seventeen skillionty extreme-far-right policy proposals in it. (full-disclosure: I just made that number up.) with that much to talk about, inadvertent errors are going to occur.

here’s Mark Hamill’s tweet.

what Mark got wrong, according to the site the Times article links to, is that Project 2025 does not overtly call for the end of Social Security, nor for a Muslim ban.

fair enough. for the record, I too have stated that Project 2025 would end Social Security. when the error was pointed out, I stopped making the claim.

but all that other shit in Mark’s tweet is 100% accurate.

here, the Times reporting just turns silly.

These conditions have paved the way for even bizarre claims to catch national attention. A vulgar, untrue joke about Senator JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, spread rapidly after he was added to the ticket, with nearly 400,000 mentions and 4.6 million interactions from July 15 to July 31, according to online and social media data analyzed by Hootsuite. The joke became fodder for late-night television hosts and even for the Harris campaign, which alluded to it on social media and during a rally.

holy shit, Times — it’s not a bizarre claim, it’s a fucking joke. the percentage of people who actually believe that JD Vance used his freakishly tiny trouser trout to violate a sofa is a rounding error away from zero.

it’s not our fault that Couchfuck McGee seems exactly like the kind of freak who would engage in a little late-night cushion pushin’.

as is the Times’ wont, you have to read all the way to the end of the article to get to the important part.

Research has shown that Mr. Trump plays an important role in spreading falsehoods on the right, acting as a megaphone that prompts influencers and politicians to spread falsehoods in lock step with one another. Left-wing misinformation, in contrast, tends to spread more loosely and organically among a varied collection of users and organizations, researchers have found.

conspiracies on the right are countless, and spread from the top — and filter down down to Donny Convict’s gullible worshipers. and the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled media are doing fuck-all to bat any of it down. has anyone in the press bothered to debunk Donny’s latest overheated fantasy about public schools abducting children and forcing them into having sex-change operations?

I guess they’re too preoccupied with doing line-by-line forensic analyses of Mark Hamill’s tweets to bother.

---

here’s a cool thing that happened yesterday:

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee plan to transfer nearly $25 million to support down-ballot Democratic candidates in state and federal races this year, a significant boost to those efforts following record fundraising for her campaign this summer.

the Harris/Walz campaign is flush right now — they’ve raised so much cash that they can now share the wealth, and spread it around where it will do the most good.

let’s contrast that to how the criminal organization known as the GOP functions.

the Republican National Committee has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trump Organization. money doesn’t flow down, it flows up — straight into dear Leader’s Pockets.

if there’s cash left over after Donny wastes it on emotional-support paintings of himself wearing tennis togs, it doesn’t go to down-ballot candidates — they can go fuck themselves raw, because that money is going straight to Donny’s ace team of parking garage lawyers.

after all, Alina Habba’s brand new kidneys aren’t going to pay for themselves.