Obfuscation – FT#146

01 Apr Obfuscation – FT#146

Show Notes

Obfuscation occurs when someone provides deliberately vague or confusing information in an attempt to make a claim or present a point of view.

Trump

We started out by discussing this very confusing clip about whether Russia interfered in the election and whether Trump accepts it:

And then we looked at this clip of Trump’s doctor Sean Conley being very evasive about Trump having supplemental oxygen during his COVID treatment:

Finally, we talked about this clip of Kevin McCarthy being very clear:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Boris Johnson’s various confusing denials of his ambition to be PM.

He followed that up by talking about Boris explaining the mystery of the missing WhatsApp messages:

Then he talked about Mark Harper MP defending Lee Anderson’s racist comments about Sadiq Khan:

And he finished with this clip of Graham Stuart MP defending Frank Hester’s racist remarks about Diane Abbott:

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this wonderful sketch from The Mitchell and Webb Look:

Then we discussed this clip from Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home:

And we finished up with this clip from Shrek the Third:

 

Fake News

Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:

1. I don’t think there are two Donald Trumps. I think there’s one Donald Trump. But, certainly, you have – you know, look, all of this and you have somebody else that sits and reads and thinks. And I’m a thinker and I have been a thinker. And perhaps people don’t think of me that way because you don’t see me in that forum but I am a thinker.
2. I know what I’m talking about. I know what’s happening, OK? A lot of these people don’t know what they’re talking about, and yet they’ve got to this level, but I went to, you know, a very good school – several very good schools and they don’t let you in if you’re not big in the brain… area. I did very well because I’m smart and I have the ability to think.
3. This, by the way, one of the most successful people in the country – in the world. And he looked at this massive audience like this today, and like I had a little while ago in Fresno. And he looked at this massive audience, he said, how can you get up there and speak? Do you have notes? I say, no. Do you have something? I say, no. I have like a good head. I have a good memory. I have a very good memory.

Mark got it wrong this week, and is on 52%!

 

$175 Million is not a logical fallacy

We talked about the verdict in the civil fraud case against Trump.

 

The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about

• Early on Tuesday morning, a container ship lost power on Baltimore’s Patapsco River, and, unable to steer, crashed into a support column of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, causing it to collapse. Maryland officials have made it very clear that all evidence points to an accidental collision, but of course that hasn’t stopped MAGA folk from blaming all kinds of bêtes noires based on nothing whatsoever. Within just a few hours, Andrew Tate took time away from awaiting trial in Romania for human trafficking and rape to tweet his theory that the ship was cyber attacked and deliberately steered into the bridge. Alex Jones posted a video of the bridge collapse and commented “Looks deliberate to me. A cyber-attack is probable. WW3 has already started.” Marjorie Taylor Greene ‘just asked’ the question of whether it might be an intentional attack, and called for a serious investigation, at which point the National Transportation Safety Board presumably slapped their foreheads and said “Why didn’t we think of that?!” Nancy Mace went on Newsmax to blame Biden for only including $40 billion dollars for roads and bridges in the historic $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill she voted against and then tried to take the credit for. Matt Schlapp, Chairman of the American Conservative Union, said he wasn’t making any accusations, but pointed out that “if you talk to employers in America they’ll tell you that filling slots with employees who aren’t drug-addled is a very huge problem.” Just for context, this is the same Matt Schlapp who this week claimed he had been cleared of sexually assaulting a male staffer for Herschel Walker’s campaign after his accuser dropped the charges. It’s not quite true, since his accuser was paid $480,000 to go away, which isn’t what cleared means. Anyway, back to the mad bridge theories. Maria Bartiromo blamed Biden’s “wide open border”  Meanwhile, multiple right wing voices claimed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is to blame. Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott had the best answer to those assholes: “We know what they want to say, but they don’t have the courage to say the N-word.”
• There comes a time seemingly when politicians turn to religion to justify heinous acts – it has to be the right god of course not one of those troublesome non-christian deities; cf 30p Lee Anderson and Sadiq Khan – Blair had a word with the man upstairs about the validity of invading Iraq with Bush, King Arthur was visited by a animated supreme being in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and now of course Trump. But of course Donald is going into business with the Almighty – closing the gap between God and Mammon as it were and ignoring the constitutional division of church and state too of course. Trump is promoting a line of pricey Bibles in partnership with country music star Lee Greenwood, whose song “God Bless the U.S.A.” is omnipresent at the former president’s political rallies. Gideon’s been giving them away free in every hotel room since the birth of christianity but he was a schmuck who never did grasp the chance to make a buck selling opiate to the masses. The “God Bless the U.S.A. Bible” costs $59.99, not including shipping and other fees and is unlike any other edition as it includes a copy of a “handwritten chorus” to the eponymous Greenwood hit, according to the website. It is also in big font for the hard of seeing and each mention of Jesus is picked out in red! Not one to be accused of grifting indiscriminately, the Trump-Greenwood bible also includes the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Pledge of Allegiance but of course Trump is keeping a respectful distance from the word of Gaaad the website selling the Trump-backed Bibles specifies that none of its proceeds will go toward the Trump campaign. The site says it “is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign.” I for one will be wearing Trump gold sneakers, using those Trump AI generated trading cards as bookmarks and wearing Eau de Trump perfume in eager anticipation of the pop-up version with the word God replaced with Trump throughout which I expect will only be available in an upside-down edition to be held outside a church with the path cleared of pesky peaceful protestors by force. Who said money can’t buy you worshippers! 
• Annoyed that creepy Speaker of the House Mike Johnson didn’t shut the government down to own the libs, Dog the Bounty Hunter cosplayer Marjorie Taylor Greene filed a motion to vacate the Speaker last week, but says she doesn’t plan to call for a vote yet, and this is just a warning to him. Ironically, this might result in him having to work even more closely with Democrats, as they might be the only ones who can save him since the GOP House majority is hanging by a thread. Following Ken Buck of Colorado’s departure, Wisconsin Congressman Mike Gallagher has now announced he’ll be leaving on April 19th, which leaves his seat vacant for the rest of this Congress, and reduces the Republican majority to the point where they can only lose one vote on anything they plan to get done. Lucky they never actually do anything, hey? If the vote to vacate Mike Johnson’s position does get called, and one Republican gets a bad cold, the next Speaker could be Hakeem Jeffries, and MTG says she won’t take the blame if that happens, despite it being largely her fault. Not only is she the one who filed the motion, but her batshit antics are exactly what caused not quite so batshit Ken Buck to leave, and is likely part of the reason for Gallagher’s departure and another 18 GOP representatives announcing their retirement from Congress this year. I can’t blame them, I’ve had some pretty annoying colleagues in the past that I was relieved to get away from and none of them could hold a candle to the woman David Simon, creator of The Wire referred to this week as a “complete submoronic pratfall of a human being”.    
• SB 2691 passed in the Senate in Tennessee on Monday – yeah so, well many conspiracy theorists will be throwing their tinfoil hats into the air in jubilation cos the state’s bill is trying to ban chemtrails claiming the federal government “may conduct geoengineering experiments by intentionally dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere.” A 2017 study polled 1,000 Americans and found that 10% of them believe the conspiracy theory is “completely” true, and when you’re in need of all the votes you can get as a deeply inhumane right-wing party even crazies count at the polling booth! The bill says: “The intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus within the borders of this state into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight is prohibited.” So actually won’t ban chemtrails cos they don’t do that COS THERE’S NO SUCH CONSPIRACY unless you call the physics of hot water vapour coming out the back of jet engines condensing in the cold upper air through which airplanes fly a conspiracy by the Deep State a deliberate conspiracy then.. what am I saying?that’s exactly what the likes of basement dwelling keyboard warriors, and some actual friends of my actual acquaintance actually think – oh what’s the use!!!
• In Season 5 of Friends, Ross and Janice briefly dated, but Janice broke it off because she found Ross too whiny. Ross’s realisation that he had become so whiny he annoyed Janice was a wake up call that he may have hit rock bottom. In much the same way, it may be time for the Republican party to reflect on the fact that disgraced former Congressman George Santos announced last week that he was leaving the Republican Party because they were too embarrassing. For him! George Santos! The man who, apart from committing multiple federal crimes and being the sixth person ever to be expelled from the House of Representatives,  lied about where he went to school, where he went to college, basically his entire resumé, his criminal background, his salary, his mother’s death, his drag queen past, playing volleyball, being Jewish, owning multiple properties, being a Broadway producer, helping develop carbon capture technology,  being a model, being mugged, surviving an assassination attempt, running an animal charity, his grandparents fleeing the Holocaust, his employees dying in the Pulse nightclub shooting, his niece being kidnapped because of comments he made about the Chinese Communist Party, where his campaign money came from, where his campaign money went, and being one of the first people in the US to get COVID. That guy is embarrassed to call himself a Republican, so in his wildly optimistic attempt at regaining his old House seat, he will be standing as an independent. Or so he says.
• Republican Minnesota State Sen. Warren Limmer recently said that he could not in good conscience support a bill that would create statewide standards for the safe storage of firearms due to the impact it could have on farmers. “There’s another segment of our population that often requires guns in their occupation,” he said. “I’m talking about rural farm people that are living out in rural areas. They not only have to have concerns about predation, but they also have concerns about their own domestic farm animals.” Not that the cows are being rustled or might have agreed amongst themselves to take up arms in their collective bid for freedom from enslavement and the right to better pasture, no Warren’s concerned that “Farm animals can at times be very dangerous,” he said. “Take, for example, a cow who had just recently had a calf. You even walk too close to a cow, and it’ll take you down and trample you into dust. And many farmers have a readily available gun just for those emergencies.” They can’t be fiddling around with some sort of complicated locking device on their firearms cabinet, you gotta shoot first rather than simply hop over the fence it appears!  Whilst studies have indicated that cows kill less than two dozen Americans per year while firearm-related deaths annually total in the tens of thousands, who are we to make a mockery of Warren’s childhood trauma of being walked towards by curious bovines every time he had to cross that field on the way home from kindergarten – shame on you and especially for voting him into high office without stipulating some sort of therapeutic intervention! 
• There’s a long tradition of hated political figures trying to rehabilitate their reputation by appearing on humiliating TV shows, whether it’s Rudy Giuliani on The Masked Singer, Sean Spicer on Dancing with the Stars, or Matt Hancock, Nadine Dorries, Edwina Currie and Nigel Farage on I’m a Celebrity… I can only imagine it’s on that basis that fired RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel signed up for a two year stint as a political analyst on NBC and MSNBC. Well, that and the $600,000 they offered her. She must have assumed she would be continuously pelted with the verbal equivalent of rotten fruit by every journalist who remembers her active role in trying to pressure Michigan electors not to certify Biden’s 2020 win and her repeated and vociferous support and amplification of the Big Lie. Which is all the journalists on NBC and MSNBC, even fucking Chuck Todd. Well, it turns out she didn’t make it two years. She didn’t even make it half a Scaramucci. From the announcement of her hiring on Friday, she made it four days and one Meet the Press interview before NBC caved to pressure from multiple on-air hosts including Rachel Maddow, Jen Psaki, Mika Brzezinski, Joy Reid, Nicole Wallace, Lawrence O’Donnell and even fucking Chuck Todd, all of whom expressed their dismay that their own network was prepared to platform someone who tried to destroy democracy and pay her for the privilege. McDaniel is planning on suing NBC for breach of contract and says she is expecting to be paid in full for her two year contract, which would work out at about $500 per second for her Meet the Press interview. I don’t know nearly enough about contract law to figure out how realistic that is, but I’m hoping for some weird trick that ends up with her owing them money.
• Over here in shit-strewn Brexitstan three more Tory MPs are stepping down – Scott Benton even further down than having the whip removed after being filmed promising undercover journalists posing as gambling investors access to influential ministers for cash – never gamble with gamblers Scott! Benton had been suspended for 35 days and was due to be recalled by his constituents but fell on his sword before the humiliation of that – this will mean another headache/certain defeat and humiliation for Rishi instead in the form of a special by-election in Blackpool South – Benton’s seat which he won at the 2019 election by a slim 3,690 majority. It had previously been held by Labour since 1997! James Heapey, armed forces minister, had been on resignation watch following uplifts to the defence budget being unforthcoming and Robert Halfon unexpectedly quit as skills, apprenticeships and higher education minister for the same funding reasons no doubt. Whilst they won’t go immediately they’ll not be standing in the next election which Slimy Gove touted might be November on the same day Rishi Sunak said he wouldn’t be averse to the idea of standing down as leader. It all smells a bit of shits leaving a sinking rat. Speaking of which, the rowers in the upcoming Oxford Cambridge boat race on the Thames have been warned not to fall in or at least not to do so with their mouths open cos the river is officially full in a report stating that water companies dumped untreated sewage into UK waters ‘1,000 times every day for year’. And this on the same day as Thames Water’s shareholders have decided not to pump more money into the company so bill payers are facing an influx of more bullshit as it means prices will probably go up. Still thank god for Brexit and the removal of all that EU red tape about water cleanliness and fit to drink or swim in getting in the way of massive profits for shareholders. Yay the Tories delivering shitloads of money for everyone oh er… the very few!!

 

That’s almost all for this week, but here’s our AI-aided and minimally hand-edited transcript which is at least quite accurate, but not totally:

Obfuscation – FT#146 Transcript

Jim: Hello, and welcome to Fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of a bad egg to explain logical fallacies. I’m your host, Jim.

Mark: And I’m your other host, Mark. A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that results in bad or invalid arguments. And the logical fallacy we’re looking at this week is obfuscation. I meant to ring you up in the week and say we’ve got to have the insane ramblings of Don Poorleone.

Jim: Well, you ruined next episode for me now, because, I did put that in. I did put that. I did have that in. But it’s Easter. It’s Maundy Thursday. As we’re recording Good Friday in about seven minutes, I had to have an egg one. Really? And I did see if I could find some Easter baste insults, and there were some interesting swedish ones.

Mark: Oh, really?

Jim: They have different insults for, like, ash Wednesday, maundy Thursday, Good Friday.

Mark: Oh, my God. Really?

Jim: But I couldn’t pronounce any of them, so.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And a bad egg is kind of. It’s pretty british bad egg. It’s like, not. Not a great person, but also egg, it turns out, is just a good insult if you’re australian, particularly.

Mark: Right.

Jim: It just means you’re a dick if someone calls you an egg, basically. So.

Mark: Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Jim: But Americans won’t know what we’re talking about.

Mark: No, it’s out of appealing to the rest of the world and vicariously, Sweden.

Jim: But, yeah, Don Poorleone is fantastic and was trending for a few days on Twitter.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: So good. Why? Yeah, why didn’t we think of that before? And the thing about the egg, I can remember my mum quoting a joke from. From the forties, something. I’m like, yes, it’s a bit like the curate’s egg. Good in parts, which comes from this idea that there’s a. The curate, a church thing, was. Was eating a bad egg. And he said, well, how’s the egg? Oh, yeah. Well, it’s good in parts. But Trump, unlike the curate’s egg, is not good in any part.

Jim: No, no. He’s just about that.

Mark: He’s just a bad egg from, you know, from sulfurous interior to crumbly exterior. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: So obfuscation.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: This is the deliberate introduction of kind of vague or confusing information in an attempt to make a claim or present a point of view. And obviously, it becomes a fallacy when you’re using it in any way to persuade people of things or dissuade them of other things.

Mark: Yeah. And it does seem to be the overarching, mind you, we say that every time does seem to be the overarching fallacy that’s employed in political circles.

Jim: Well, yeah, I mean, certainly for Trump, a lot of what he says is extremely confusing, and it’s not always necessarily deliberate. It might just be the way he talks and thinks, if you can call it, ah, to the point at, which CNN journalist Zachary Wolf said this about him.

Mark: This is what makes covering Donald Trump so very difficult. What does he mean when he says words? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wittgenstein would be turning in his grave.

Jim: Yeah, yeah. First of all, you’ve got to understand what he’s saying.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: He’s out there sometimes when. When he is actually trying to make a point, he says it in such a fucking weird and confusing way that he makes it harder to understand. But sometimes, that, I think, is. Is part of trying to get some kind of plausible deniability. And I didn’t quite say that. I said something else. And one instance when he said that basically he believed Putin over the us intelligence services about whether Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, he then had to walk that back. And his walk back of it was also extremely confusing.

Donald Trump: I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place. Could be other people also. there’s a lot of people out there. There, was no collusion at all. And people have seen that and they’ve seen that strongly. The house has already come out very strongly on that. A lot of people have come out strongly on that. I thought that I made myself very clear by having just reviewed the transcript. Now I have to say, I came back and I said, what is going on? What’s the big deal? So I got a transcript, I reviewed it. I actually went out and, reviewed a clip of, an answer that I gave, and I realized that there is a need for some clarification. It should have been obvious. I thought it would be obvious, but I would like to clarify just in case it wasn’t in a key sentence in my remarks, I said the word would instead of wouldn’t. The sentence should have been, I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t. Or why it wouldn’t be Russian. So just to repeat it, I said the word would instead of wouldn’t and, the sentence should have been, and I thought it would be maybe a little bit unclear on the transcript or unclear on the actual video. The sentence should have been, I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia. Sort of a double negative.

Jim: So that was him clarifying.

Mark: Yeah, that’s a lot clearer. Clear. As clear as mud. Yeah, that’s. Yeah. I love that baby. Said it should have been obvious.

Jim: Yeah. Yeah.

Mark: You know, the fact that he has said, I don’t see any reason why it would be Russia. Yeah, that was obvious. It was obvious. He was saying, I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia. Yeah, yeah. And if it is a double negative, I don’t. What would be the less clear version?

Jim: I do see a reason why it would. If I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia, then I do see a reason why it would be.

Mark: Reason why it would be Russia.

Jim: Yeah. The reason being that’s what literally all of the us intelligence services said. But, yeah, it could be other people. There’s a lot of people.

Mark: Could be a lot of people. They all come out strongly.

Jim: So, yeah. So the advantage that he gets from being so confusing all of the time is that it is hard to pin him down on stuff, and then later on to say, well, you said this. And he’s often in the same sentence, will say things two different ways. There was another example I didn’t use where he was talking to Chris Matthews about nukes. Chris Matthews trying to pin him down and say, will you take nukes off the table? Will you say, I will not use nuclear weapons? And he was like, I won’t, but, you know, I might, but I wouldn’t do it. But I don’t want to take them off the table. And that’s like, what do. Okay, well, which is the answer, because.

Mark: He tried to cover all. But, yeah. In order to fail to not appeal to. Yeah, yeah. He wants to cover all the bases so that everyone could say, oh, yeah, no, that’s perfectly reasonable.

Jim: Yeah. If you pick and choose the bits that you like out of what he said, everyone can find something to agree with, theoretically good in parts.

Mark: Curious. There you go. Yeah, exactly.

Jim: Yeah. So it doesn’t stop with Trump. It extends to people in his orbit as well. When he was in Walter Reed undergoing treatment for Covid. His doctors gave a press conference, and one was asked repeatedly about whether he had been given supplemental oxygen.

Reporter: He has not received any supplemental oxygen.

Dr. Sean Conley: He’s not on oxygen right now. That’s right.

Reporter: He’s not received any at all. He’s.

Dr. Sean Conley: He’s not needed anybody. Any, This morning, today at all. That’s right.

Reporter: Has he ever been on supplemental oxygen? He.

Dr. Sean Conley: Right now he is not on.

Reporter: I understand. I know you keep saying right now, but I. Should we read into the fact that. He had been yesterday and today, he was not on oxygen. So he has not been on it during this, his Covid treatment. He’s.

Dr. Sean Conley: He’s not on oxygen right now.

Reporter: I’m gonna try to pin you down one more time. I know you said there was no oxygen.

Dr. Sean Conley: Yeah, yeah. He’s not on oxygen.

Reporter: But did he today receive any on Thursday? And he’s.

Dr. Sean Conley: What’s today? Saturday? no. No Thursday. No. Thursday. No. Friday. No. Saturday.

Reporter: That’s fine. That was why we were confused

Dr. Sean Conley: No oxygen. None at this moment. Yeah. And yesterday with the team, while we were all here, he was not on oxygen.

Jim: So it’s been very specifically clear that he didn’t. He’s not on oxygen at the moment. he didn’t have any on Thursday. He’s not on any right now. And on Friday, when all the team were here, he was not on oxygen. As it turned out. He had been on oxygen on the Friday morning before the rest of the team.

Mark: Team around, and they. They took the mask off.

Jim: So I said he was basically lying, but being very careful not to actually lie. He was just answering, it in.

Mark: A vague way, but also in a very specific way. He was answering very specifically. It is true that right now he isn’t on oxygen. Yes. That’s not what they’re asking.

Jim: Absolutely. But they. He was trying to give the impression that he had not had any oxygen. He had not had any supplemental oxygen. Yeah, obviously he’d had some oxygen.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Don’t restrict your oxygen intake. That’s what I say. They hadn’t given him extra, except for, the time. The specific time he hadn’t mentioned, which was Friday before the team.

Mark: He’s not on it right now. He wasn’t on it a week ago. Last Tuesday. Well, yeah. Well, he didn’t have Covid, then I.

Jim: Should say that those were some clips from the same press conference, but were edited together because they kept coming back. The journalists kept, like, every few minutes would go, okay, but you didn’t really answer the oxygen question. Can we just go back to that?

Mark: Yeah, but it’s. And it’s not until you put them all together that you realize how ridiculous it is. And. And also how there’s an assumption on the part of the speaker that all you’ve got to do is give something that contains some of the words from the question.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And very forcefully confirm that he wasn’t on oxygen. Isn’t on oxygen right this minute. And you think, oh, that’ll be enough that people will be convinced. Wait a minute. What? No, hang on.

Jim: Yeah. So, in a similar way, Kevin McCarthy was quite specifically vague in answering a question about when there was a book that came out, this was leading up to his impeachment, when they were going to be voting on whether he should be impeached, McCarthy told other Republicans that he was going to advise Trump to resign rather than kind of go through the whole impeachment trial process. So that’s what this book claimed.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And when he was asked about it, he said this.

Kevin McCarthy: Let me be very clear. You, miss, I have never asked the president to resign. So what the book, said was not true. I never asked the president to resign.

Jim: So the book didn’t claim that he asked the president to resign. The book claimed that he told other Republicans he was.

Mark: He was going to tell. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: So he’s not denying the thing that he’s being asked about what the book is saying.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: He’s denying a thing the book doesn’t claim.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I love that, almost oxymoron, isn’t it? Specifically vague.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: The outbursts who provide the music for the show. Our first album was called deeply superficial.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And, I think specifically, they could be a good title. Yeah. For the difficult third album. Yeah. Yes. So the logical fantasy we’re looking at this week is almost confuscation, also known as being specifically vague.

Mark: And now is the time, I think, for Marx, british politics corner, of course.

Mark: The equivalent in british politics, the overlord of obfuscation. The prince of plausible deniability is, of course, Boris Johnson. Practically everything that comes out of his mouth is an attempt to rephrase or avoid phrasing any kind of answer to mean, fundamentally, that he’s nothing guilty of anything that he’s done or anything that he’s caused to happen. So let’s go back to those halcyon days of, 2012 and when he was London mayor and he goes out of his way to employ strangulations of the english language to deny that after being the mayor, he is now going to stand to be an mp and then get into cabinet and then go for leadership of the Tory party. And although we’ve since been granted the hindsight that that’s exactly what happened, many journalists saw that writing on the wall, as did Boris.

Boris Johnson: Of course, I’m always grateful to Andy Coulson for his impeccable career advice, but I’m backing David Cameron, who I absolutely, increasingly confident is going to win.

Reporter: You’ve done a deal. They’re going to give you a seat. And they’ll probably give you a seat in the cabinet afterwards. And then up to that, it’s up to you.

Boris Johnson: The deal is between me and the electorate of London.

Reporter: Are you going to stand?

Boris Johnson: I am going to stand up for conservative, values and for, and for our campaign here in London. I’m going to keep working in London as mayor. That’s what I’m going to do. Thank you.

Reporter: So you’re not going to be an mp?

Boris Johnson: I’m going to. I’m going to support the prime minister and support my party as mayor. Blonde be standing as an MP. I’m going to be helping the prime minister. This is probably the only big job, the last big job anyway I’ll do in british politics. It’s a fantastic job.

Reporter: You won’t seek to go back into parliament?

Boris Johnson: I won’t.

Reporter: You will never seek the leadership of your party.

Boris Johnson: I cannot believe that anybody would offer me the leadership of my party, but I certainly won’t be seeking it.

Reporter: Very well placed now for the Tory leadership.

Boris Johnson: No, because I’ve got four years, of happy, and I hope, rewarding.

Reporter: So you’re not. You’re not going to go for the Tory leadership, whatsoever.

Boris Johnson: David Cameron is doing a wonderful job. He’s doing in tough circumstances.

Reporter: You’re never going to go for that.

Boris Johnson: Toy leadership in the immortal phrase of, Michael Heseltine, you know, I cannot foresee the circumstances.

Mark: Yes. That whole. Yes, well, I wouldn’t, you know, far be it from me to wish that, you know, I can’t see that anyone would want me.

Jim: I can’t believe anyone would offer him the party leadership, either person.

Mark: No. Yeah, quite. And there’s a bit in there when she says, are you going to stand as an MP? And he says, I know I’m going to stand up for conservative values. And in the middle of that, he just laughs at the pretense of it all, that he’s swapping stand for, stand up for. And that’s the thing about obfuscation, is that, ah, everybody knows you’re doing it. You know you’re doing it. The people asking you the questions know you’re doing it because that’s why they keep asking you the question. And they know that you’re. When we’ve often talked about that, that the politicians think that, well, I, will just provide some words that will fill up the gap where an answer should be.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: And that will suffice. And then we will move on.

Jim: We can all pretend I’ve answered the question.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. Which is fine if you’re Tucker Carlson or. Yeah, you know, that’s exactly what happens. Or if you’re the royal correspondent in the UK, that’s exactly what happens. Yes. Okay, so in, here’s a second example. Here’s Boris again, the, other end of his career in 2023 during the COVID inquiry, talking about the non existence of WhatsApps between January 2020 and June 2020. That would surely have revealed his cavalier approach to the raws during COVID

Hugo Keith: Do you know why your phone was missing those 5000 odd Whatsapps?

Boris Johnson: I don’t know the exact reason, but it looks, as though it’s something to do with the app going down and then, coming up again, but somehow, not automatically erasing all the things, between that date when it went down and the moment when it was last backed up. So I can’t give you the technical explanation, but that’s the best I’m able to get.

Hugo Keith: The technical report that your solicitor’s kindly provided demonstrates that there may have been a factory reset of the phone at the end of January 2020 and then an attempt to reinstall the contents later. In June 2020,

Mark: because the attempt to reinstall the contents in June 2020 was the date at which they were announcing the inquiry into the COVID response. So. Yeah, and it’s just that. Ah. man. Yeah. And that’s a good example of the noises that he makes. But he is. He is one for obfuscatory noises, that kind of. And wharf and then chucking in some latin and some faux greek. His entire axe is obfuscation. He’s kind of. He’s a miasma of a person. If you try to grip him by the throat, which I would very much like to. He would just. He would be. It’s just a cloud. He’s like a projection nailing jelly to a wall. Exactly. Yeah. Yes. You know, strangling steam is that kind of. Yeah. And the thing is that even during that bit when he’s doing this patently transparently bollocks explanation of him saying, ah, well, you know me, I’m a 450 year old man. I can’t possibly understand technology. And you go, you fucker, you’ve done, you know exactly what you’re doing.

Jim: It’s quite ambitious to try an explanation of how the app works or how the app failed to work.

Mark: Yeah. And.

Jim: Yeah, from the. Obviously a standpoint of absolutely no information of how things like that work at all. Yeah. To start, I don’t know much about these things. I imagine is some kind of.

Mark: Also in the face of, the solicitor’s submission that there had been a factory reset in January and in fact, later on he does that. There’s that. Not the 09:00 news sketch where somebody’s talking about, yes, the evidence of the, of the crime was captured on a video recorder and was played back. And then the judge, judge, who is 462, goes a video recorder. And then they have to explain the video. Yes. Video, of course, is a device for, recording movie, pictures onto tape and instant playback, whatever they think come next.

Jim: I mean, all real life where when Paul Gascoigne Gazzo was called a footballer in court, the judge said, would that be association football or rugby football?

Mark: Yeah, yeah. And Boris channels that. And he says, a factory. We said, I don’t understand you. You do. You know exactly what you’re on. And that entire speech he delivers with the, the smirk of a smug escapologist. Okay, so number three. So post Johnson, you would think that they will be transparent and accountable and, you know, a different kind of politics as announced by Rishi Sunak. But no. So the prime examples of this fallacy in use in the recent Tory obfuscating about racism in their ranks. And here’s transport Minister Mark Harper on Sky News talking about, well, not so much about us around whether 30 p. Lee Anderson saying about London Mayor Sadiq Khan that these Islamists have got control of Khan and they’ve got control of London. He’s actually given our, capital city away to his mates. And whether that’s racist.

Kay Burley: You say it was wrong. Was it racist?

Mark Harper: Well, it was wrong. And, I’m not going to get into arguing about the rights and wrongs of what he said. It was wrong. In my book, wrong is a strong word.

Kay Burley: a different word to racist.

Mark Harper: As I said, Sadiq Khan’s got a terrible record on his, track record as mayor of London.

Kay Burley: That’s not my question, Mister Harper. You’ve already dealt with that matter. My question is racist. What he said well, I’m not going.

Mark Harper: To get into a detailed analysis of what he said. What he said was wrong and it wasn’t true. He shouldn’t have said it. He failed to take the opportunity to retract those comments and apologize. That’s why there was firmly, lots of people are wrong.

Kay Burley: I’m wrong on a daily basis. I’m not a racist.

Mark Harper: No. But what he said about Sadiq Khan was, profoundly wrong

Kay Burley: Racist?

Mark Harper: Those things were not true. They’re not true. and what he said was wrong and, he shouldn’t have said them. As I said, there’s a range of things we can criticize Sadiq kalm for. He’s got a terrible track record on transport and that’s what I’m going to say.

Kay Burley: Yeah, you’ve told me that already, Mister M. Harper. I’ve allowed you to say that three times now. he was previously deputy chairman Lee Anderson. Was he the wrong person to be deputy chairman in the first place?

Mark Harper: Well, he’s, he said what he said as a backbencher and he was wrong, to do so. And the whip’s been removed. he’s contributed a lot in the past. I’d like to see him be able to contribute to the conservative party in the future. But what he said was wrong and he’ll need to reflect on that, going forward.

Jim: So I’m not clear on whether he thinks it was right or wrong. It’s not, no.

Mark: Well, it’s a very strong word. It’s very strong. Yeah.

Jim: Well, I like, he’s not very far into it. He says, I’m not going to get into the details of whether it was right or wrong, but it was wrong.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. And it was only wrong. It was wrong and he used the wrong words and he was, and he’s apologized for the wrongness of it. He didn’t. But that’s neither here nor there. But, and then, and then to further obscure the, the wrongness of it or the racism, he says, oh, yeah, there’s lots of things that we can, if we can’t level racism, to add Sadiq Khan, if we can’t level racist things at him, we can also level things about transport, which none of which are true either. you know, that’s wrong and not true. Yeah. So anyway, similarly, here’s Energy Minister Graham Stuart talking about Tory donor, 15 million pound Frank Hester, as opposed to 30 pl, his racist remarks about Diane Abbott. And so note how Graham Stewart’s obfuscation disappears entirely when he gives up. You can hear him giving up because he knows the presenter is going to read out the actual comments. For the one brief moment the guard is dropped and he doesn’t deliver the party lines and you almost get a truthful answer from the politician. Then of course, with the follow up question, the obfuscation immediately returns.

Wilfred Frost: the conservative party spokesperson said, that Mister Hester has made clear that while he was rude, his criticism had nothing to do with the color of her skin. is that right?

Graham Stuart: it’s. He has been absolutely clear that he, although he spoke in an intemperate and.

Wilfred Frost: I know, read what he said. He said it’s like trying not to be racist, but you see Diane Abbott on the television and you just want to hate all black women because she’s there. I don’t hate all black women, but I think she should be shot. Diane Abbott needs to be shot. That is based on the colour of her skin.

Graham Stuart: And they’re truly awful remarks, aren’t they? So, there’s nothing I can say apart from to condemn them and say that he’s absolutely right to apologize. I’m not remotely tempted to try and defend it. he shouldn’t have said it. it was half a decade ago in a private meeting. But that doesn’t really excuse it. And that’s why he’s quite right to apologise profoundly, profusely and completely because those words are not defensible and I’m not here today in any way to seek to defend them.

Wilfred Frost: So you know what my follow up is? Should the Tory party return the money?

Graham Stuart: we can’t cancel anybody from participation in public life or indeed donating to parties because they said something intemperate and wrong, in their past. And, it’s not my decision.

Wilfred Frost: So somebody else that might have said things like this in the past, you welcome their money.

Graham Stuart: I’m saying that I welcome those who contribute. And I’m not here to sit in judgment on one remark, which, however deeply inappropriate.

Wilfred Frost: You’ve said that after we’ve been discussing the specific point. It’s so interesting that we all point fingers, between different parties and sort of scream from the rooftop when somebody else does it and then seemingly try and find ways out, from something that’s wrong here.

Mark: Yeah, and that’s him. The presenter sums up entirely the whole practice of this kind of obfuscation. Graham Stuart said, well, yeah, he is awful and I can’t defend it and I’m not going to sit here and defend it. And he even trots out the bit that he says, oh, well, it was made half a decade ago, because if you say five years is half a decade, it sounds a lot bigger.

Jim: Yeah, five years isn’t very long ago at all.

Mark: Yeah, half a decade. And it was in a private meeting, wasn’t in a public forum, so that’s perfectly fine. And then he actually says, but dad doesn’t excuse it.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And. But then after that, he says, I’m not going to sit in judgment on a particular single comment. What you just did. And you just. So the obfuscation, you know, opaque screen descends again. And he just goes to. There was this moment where we got actual truth. The switch was thrown and the opaque window went to transparent and you’d see the video of it. He just gives up because the guy is going to. I’m going to read the comments out. And he just kind of. Ok. And his face falls and then he’s got nowhere to go other than say no. Absolutely. Because he hasn’t got. You’ve got to be a completely shallow individual like Trump or Boris to be able to maintain the facade and not have it gnaw away at your integrity as a human being. And there was a moment where he just. He just went, I can’t sustain this bollocks any longer. I just can’t do it. And then it kind of cues him back in.

Jim: He gets a second wind.

Mark: Yeah, we’re waiting for the Michael Spicer edit of the man in the room next door and saying, no, no, snap out of it. And then he just kind of comes back in and he’s back in again. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, we can’t cancel people just because of something they said. Was it? You just said they can? And then the percentage. Great. We talk about this and you point the blame everywhere else. And that includes the guy saying, we need to take Sadiq Khan to task for other things that he’s failing. Yeah, we’re all. We’re all very good. We’re all really good at that. But when it comes to, you can’t do, you’re just doing it to get out of facing the truth. Just answer the bloody question.

Jim: Yeah, that. That is how you count obfuscation. yes. Just answer the bloody question.

Mark: Stop with your party lines and just answer the question. Yeah, and fair enough. Kay Burley, who is a, journalist shaped person, actually quite a good job of saying to me, well, yeah, I’ve let you say that three times. Is it racist? Well, wrong for me is a very strong word. Not as strong as racist. That’s right.

Mark: Oasis there with Wonderwall with the obfuscating line I don’t believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now, which Noel Gallagher’s wife, Meg Matthews at the time, said, why don’t you just put in I love you? No. Enough syllables.

Jim: Yeah, my kids asked me to stop singing Wonderwall. I said maybe.

Mark: Yeah, I do.

Jim: So, in the fantasy of the world, we like to talk about the fallacy of the week from a non political perspective. And our first example is from that Mitchell and Web look. And speaking of countering this fallacy, Robert Webb in this sketch does, I think, quite a good job of it. Because this is an example of plausible deniability and being deliberately vague because David Mitchell here is playing a stereotypical evil genius talking to his henchmen.

Keith: I’m afraid, sir, we still have a problem with Detective Harrison.

Leslie: Yes, mister Harrison has an irritating talent. For disrupting my arrangements.

Keith: Would you like me to have him removed?

Leslie: Yes, perhaps. perhaps it would be better if Mister Harrison were taken out of the picture.

Alan: Sorry, guys, you’re doing it again.

Leslie: What Alan?

Alan: have him removed. Take him out of the picture. I thought we agreed at the meeting that these terms are needlessly ambiguous. I suppose we all agree that from now on, when we want someone murdered, ie, deliberately killed to death, then that’s what we’re gonna say.

Keith: Look, everyone knows what we mean.

Alan: Well, on this occasion, perhaps. I mean, that was an order to murder Detective Harrison. Right?

Leslie: He has become a nuisance.

Alan: Right, but a nuisance we should murder. is that it? I mean, my nephew’s a nuisance, but you see what I mean.

Leslie: Yes. Yeah, all right,

Alan: well, can you say it then, please?

Leslie: Okay. Please deal with the Harrison situation.

Alan: You see, that’s no good.

Keith: That was perfectly clear.

Alan: Oh, what are you talking about? Keith, this is gonna be. Let’s hope, Professor Ritson meets with a little accident all over again. We spent nine months hoping that Professor Ritson would meet with an accident before Leslie made it clear it was an accident we were supposed to make happen.

Leslie: All right, you’ve made your point.

Jim: It’s so good.

Mark: I love that they got such ordinary names as well.

Jim: So our second example is from, objectively, the best Star Trek film. Star Trek for the voyage home.

Mark: Not search for Spock.

Jim: No, the voyage home is much better. Okay? All the even numbered ones are better than the odd numbered ones. Obviously, everyone knows that four is the best. It’s got whales in it and everything. Anyway, in this one, Bones and Kirk are trying to get into the operating room in a hospital where Chekhov is about to be operated on because they want to save him from the 20th century doctors. And they need to get past the guards who are posted on the door. And so bones comes up with some things that he doesn’t think the guards will understand. Damn it.

Bones: Do you want an acute case on your hands? This woman has a mediaev postprandial upper abdominal distention. Out of the way. Get out of the way.

Kirk: What did you say she’s got?

Bones: Cramps.

Jim: So, yeah, basically, he said she had gas after a big meal. Yeah, but in such a way as the police officers on the door wouldn’t understand and would let them through. I mean, he is a doctor. He could have said something properly medical. That would also have meant they let them through. But it’s a funny moment, so.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s a kind of, you know, I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer kind of thing.

Jim: Yeah. And our, final example in this section is Pinocchio in Shrek the third.

Charming: You can’t lie. So tell me, puppet, where is Shrek?

Pinocchio: Well, I don’t know where he’s. Nothing.

Charming: You’re telling me you don’t know where Shrek is?

Pinocchio: It wouldn’t be inaccurate to assume that I couldn’t exactly not say that is or isn’t almost partially incorrect.

Charming: So you do know where he is?

Pinocchio: On the contrary, I’m possibly more or less not definitely rejecting the idea that. In no way, with any amount of. Uncertainty, that I undeniably do or do not know where he shouldn’t probably be, if that indeed wasn’t where he was. Isn’t.

Mark: It’S like a, an Alex Horne task, isn’t it? You have to kind of. You have do the instructions on thing. Didn’t they do that one of the series where they had to.

Jim: They did.

Mark: And then it kind of got something. And then they realized it’s almost like a, chemical formula or a mathematical formula or indeed a logical formula to.

Jim: Cancel out the double negatives. Absolutely.

Mark: Yes, exactly. Yeah. And then there’s a sort of second set of brackets, which you need to do first. And then outside of that, actually, there’s an affirmation of the, opposite of the double negative.

Jim: In fact, in that task, they had to get Susie Dent, the linguist, who we and the scathing atheist guys frequently reference, to check the, sentence to figure out how many negatives there were and what it actually meant. Just. Wow. So it wasn’t just Alex going, yeah, this is what I meant when I wrote it.

Mark: Well, and can you imagine writing the script for Pinocchio there? Because at no point does his nose go, and, yet it still maintains the jeopardy that his nose might go at any minute. So it’s really cleverly written. Yeah.

Donald Trump: So we’re gonna, we’re gonna play fake news, folks. I love the game. It’s a great game. I understand the game as well as anybody. As well as anybody.

Jim: Yes. It’s time for fake news. The game where I read out three Trump quotes, serve, which are real, and one I made up, and Mark has to figure out which one is fake.

Mark: News insofar as the scoring is concerned, something might need to be expedited to bring about, shall we say, a more equitable distribution. I mean, it’s a nice game. It will be a shame for anything to happen to it, if you know what I mean.

Jim: So, our theme m this week, these are not recent examples. These, ah, are times when he has talked about basically how very, very clever he is.

Mark: Oh, okay. Yeah.

Jim: And so they’re all from different speeches or interviews when he remembers when he felt the need to explain, express his supreme intelligence. Absolutely.

Mark: Yep. Yep.

Jim: So statement number one. I don’t think there are two Donald Trump’s. I think there’s one Donald Trump. But certainly you have, you know, look all of this and you have somebody else that sits and reads and thinks. And I’m a thinker, and I have been a thinker. And perhaps people don’t think of me that way because you don’t see me in that forum, but I am a thinker.

Mark: Okay? Sits and reads and thinks. Right. You’ve got that. Got this, this, and then somebody else is sitting. Nobody’s thought of that. No, people don’t think of you that way because you don’t see me that.

Jim: Way you don’t seem thinking ever.

Mark: It’s true. And, reading. Don’t see him reading. We’ve seen him look at pictures and identify man woman. Yeah. So, ghost. Yeah.

Jim: Statement number two, paper. I know what I’m talking about. I know what’s happening. Okay. A lot of these people don’t know what they’re talking about, and yet they’ve got to this level. But I went to, you know, a very good school, several very good schools. And they don’t let you in if you’re not big in the brain area. I did very well because I’m smart and I have the ability to think.

Mark: Yeah, we know which schools. He went big in the brain area. Yeah. You see, it’s obviously had to think there. There’s him demonstrating.

Jim: M thinking that.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: At that point. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. I.

Jim: Statement number three.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: This, by the way, one of the most successful people in the country, in the world. And he looked at this massive audience like this today. And like I had a little while ago in Fresno, and he looked at this massive audience. He said, how can you get up there and speak? Do you have notes? I say no. Do you have something? I say, no. I have, like, a good head. I have a good memory. I have a very good memory.

Mark: Have, like, a good head. Like, something like a good head, except for the terrible hair. Okay. But he said, yeah, because that’s the thing about there are two Donald Trump says him, and the one he talks about in the third person. Mm I quite like that. Don’t think there are two Donald Trump. I don’t think there are two Donald Trump’s because you don’t see the one that sinks people. Don’t think of me sinking, and I don’t think that there are. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that might be too much. I know I’m talking about. I was happening. What’s happening? Okay, I’ve just realized what you said, that these people don’t know what they’re talking about. These people. Okay. Mm Begin the brain. Quite taken with that. All right. Do you have notes? See, I think that needs a sir in there. That. But then. All right, so on that basis, none whatsoever. I, ah, think number three is the one that you made up.

Jim: Okay. So if the other two, which are you more convinced by?

Mark: I’m, less unconvinced. Five in the observatory kind of way. I more convinced by two because I just wanted to hear him say big brain area. Yeah.

Jim: And number two.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Is.

Mark: Yeah?

Jim: Fake news.

Mark: Oh. What? Oh, that’s good. Oh, my God, I could hear him say in my head, I could hear him saying if that pause between our. Bloody hell, that’s brilliant. You’re not big in the brain area. That’s excellent.

Jim: No, that’s not the thing he said.

Mark: I was definitely convinced by three that it was, you know, blah, blah, blah, It’s bit, bit sort of bland. But that. Oh, that’s very good. Should have not. Should have spotted that. Because the very good school. Several very good schools, because we know that he didn’t. Which allowed you the license to write it. Yeah.

Jim: So, very good.

Mark: Oh, Man, that was the convince. That was the. That was the selling point. Big in the brain area. Mainly. Mainly. Actually, I’m doing it entirely wrong.

Jim: I just.

Mark: Want to hear him say it. Yeah, we’ve got to get an AI voice generator thing and just type it in. Make him do it.

Jim: Yeah, well, we can hear number one, because he did say that.

Donald Trump: I don’t think there are two Donald Trumps. I think there’s one Donald Trump. But certainly you have, you know, look, all of this and you have somebody else that sits and reads and thinks. And I’m a thinker and I have been a thinker and perhaps people don’t think of me that way because you don’t see me in that forum, but.

Mark: I am a thinker thinking right now. He has been a thinker. Yes, but is he thinking right now? No, no. Yeah, well, I got. Yes, he has been a thing. I can confirm he has done some thinking. He has sunk. Yeah.

Jim: So the thing about two Donald Trump’s.

Mark: This was part of, ah, cloning experiment that went wrong.

Jim: He was answering questions from reporters after a talk that he’d given, and Ben Carson had been there earlier on and he claimed Ben Carson said, there’s two Donald Trump’s, there’s the one you see, like, you know, bombastically talking to people and there’s the much more kind of cerebral wow type who, behind the scenes you never get to see, who’s like really, really smart and switched on. Earlier on in this bit, the journalists asked him, do you think he’s right? Do you think there are two Donald Trump? And he said, donald said, yes, I think there are. I think he’s right, I think there are two Donald Trump’s. And then like three questions later they said, can you explain why you think there are two Donald Trump’s? And he went, I don’t think there are two Donald Trumps.

Mark: It’s a bit like the wizards of Oz, bombastic thing on the front, you know, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, because when you fall back, there isn’t anyone.

Jim: Nothing.

Mark: No, nothing.

Jim: So he also, as we now know, said number three, this is, by the.

Donald Trump: Way, one of the most successful people in the country. In the world. And he looked at this massive audience like this today, and like I had a little while ago in Fresno, and he looked at this massive audience. He said, how can you get up there and speak? Do you have notes? I say, no. Do you have something? I say, no. I have, like, a good head. I have a good memory. I have a very good memory.

Jim: Of course.

Mark: What?

Jim: He does have something. He has a teleprompter. That’s something he has, which he ignores.

Mark: And he also has, a set of stock beef.

Jim: Yeah, he says almost exactly. He’s been saying almost exactly the same stuff for the last eight years now.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. Complaining about the same surreal things and. And convincing his audience. He just. He knows how to be. He just plays the greatest hits, plays to the audience.

Jim: but this was one of those stories of this, you know, very successful. One of the most successful people in the world was saying to him, how can you do. How can you stand up in front of people and talk?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: How is that possible?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: You’re amazing.

Mark: Was this successful person, the whole successful person in the world? Obviously not in public.

Jim: No. No, it’s not. Not a good public speaker. No.

Mark: No.

Jim: So we do have some social answers on m Facebook. Richard Thunder Hopkins says, I want brain area to be true. That would be lovely.

Mark: I know. I’m with you, Richard. I feel your pain. Yeah.

Jim: And I like to think that he thinks he’s the only Donald Trump. But I worked with two at British Energy about 15 years ago. Also, there’s Donald Trump junior. So he’s another Donald anyway.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But he says, oh, damn, I’m going with number two. You made up number two. Oh, you boss of obligatory insult Trump is a soiled nappy on top of a discarded orange bean bag found behind the local dive pub after four months.

Mark: Oh, after brain area. Yes. I should have of. Should have set aside like Richard.

Jim: Yes.

Mark: Suggests you know how to get me, you know, my trigger points. Yeah. So brain dot, dot, dot area.

Jim: Andrew says, I think I’ve heard him say the big brain thing and the two trumps. So I’m going with number three. And Fennec says, I know he’s big in the brain area and has a very good memory. So I think number one is fake news. That said, one Trump is more than enough. and on, on Patreon.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Scott says, I think one is fake, although Trumpish. I think the others are trumpier. He also, he loves to ramble about is great schools and brain also, I live in Fresno.

Mark: Ah, okay.

Jim: Yeah, that’s good reason why not? Anders says number three. Can’t remember why I didn’t take notes. Colleen says, I think two is fake. I think Jim is riffing on very, very large brain, which. Yeah, that was in my mind. Yeah, that, yeah. China is very impressed with Donald Trump’s very, very large brain.

Mark: Brain.

Jim: Yeah, a brain. Yeah. And one eyed Nick says, jesus, everything he says sounds like a second gen AI fed. Solilo Matt Walsh tweets in a classroom full of four year olds. They’re all bad and he should feel bad. I’m going number one because I think I heard the others before somewhere. Jesus fucking Christ. He’s so bad at thinking with his brain area.

Mark: I think that that AI prompt that he just kind of quotes. We should put that into an AI chat. DP probably see what comes out. Yeah, or picture. Yeah. Or put it into. Saw the video generator. Yeah.

Jim: So, yeah, sadly.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: For you at least you didn’t get a point this time. Well, for me.

Mark: So I think, you know, it would be a shame for an accident to befall this game. So you might want to maybe consider changing certain aspects of the scoring.

Jim: I’m sure. I don’t know what you mean.

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Jim: And it’s time for the part of the show that this week, at least, is called $175 million is not a logical fallacy. Yeah, because it’s gone down from the 355 million.

Mark: I was very disappointed.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Just think it was because it would just be too much of a faff to actually try and seize the assets, given that they’re not worth the reason.

Jim: Because, Leticia James was gearing up for it. She put in some paperwork that would have enabled her to start proceedings to take control of his seven Springs golf course and possibly one of his other properties. I mean, it was Monday. This was the 30 day deadline. It was on the day of the deadline that this ruling came down that the appeals court decided that he could post a bond in the amount of 175 million. This is in his New York civil fraud case, where he was originally required to post a bond for $454 million because it was the 355 million plus interest.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: He can appeal anyway. He can appeal even if he doesn’t pay a bond. But that would have stayed New York’s ability to start seizing his assets, essentially.

Mark: Right.

Jim: I still haven’t quite figured out the reason why they decided to give him an extra bit of leeway. I mean, basically, the reason is because it’s a two tiered system of justice. There’s rich people and there’s everyone else.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s no way of arguing legally, but ironically, this is where the Dom, Don Pauly, only came from. It’s ironically that, you know, if this system of justice is for the rich people, what he said was, I haven’t got sufficient funds. Well, to pay that bond.

Jim: His lawyers said that.

Mark: Right.

Jim: They made statements under. Under oath, essentially saying he didn’t have the money and that he would have. He would be forced to sell properties in exigent circumstances, which would be unfair, because if he were to win an appeal, then he wouldn’t be able to be made whole. He wouldn’t be able to get those properties back for the same amount of money.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: That was the argument.

Mark: Okay.

Jim: He undercut that argument by making public statements saying, I have over $500 million in cash.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And Athenae. And then fucking shut up. We’ve just been telling the court, you don’t have it. There’s no way you could possibly pay it. And it’s unacceptable for them to ask you to. And you’re going, I’ve got that money just in my pants.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. He’s got to counter any possible statement that makes him less than utterly supreme.

Jim: Yes.

Mark: He can’t be seen to be slightly flawed at all, even if it’s like, yes, yes.

Jim: Has it written into his contract that he’s not allowed to lose a fight?

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: So he claimed that he has plenty of money and for some reason, the court didn’t go, well, fucking use your money. Yeah, use the money that you claim you have. Yeah, but no, he says he doesn’t want to use his $500 million in cash for paying the bond because he wants to use it for his campaign.

Mark: But he’s never spent any of his own money on his campaign.

Jim: He spent. To be fair, he put in around $60 million in 2016 into his campaign.

Mark: Of his own, when nobody would believe that he was even with a chance and he was just doing it for ego reasons. Yeah, yeah. But he must have got that back a thousand fold.

Jim: Oh, of course he did. He’s grifted way more than that since. Yeah, since. I mean, just. But fucking Kushner made, like, 2 billion off the Saudis. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark: Just put that.

Jim: He’s, That was a drop in the bucket for the amount of money he’s made out of being president. Yeah, but he’s claimed to have the money. His lawyers claimed he didn’t have the money. And the court went, all right, you can pay 175 million, and you’ve got ten days. That was Monday, so we are five days now. He has not yet paid the bonds.

Mark: Of course he hasn’t.

Jim: I’m not sure he’s got 175.

Mark: Yeah. Plus he’s going up 100 something thousand a day just in interest alone.

Jim: I’m curious about whether he’s actually going to be able to pay it within the ten days, or if he is still gonna have to sell something. Obviously, 175 million is a lot easier, theoretically, to get a bond company to pay.

Mark: Well, yeah, but only on the basis that. On paper. Because even I was thinking, oh, yeah, easy, you know, 175 million. If you try to, count to a million, it’s quite. Takes a long time. And then you have to do that 175 times.

Jim: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the thing is big. The insurance company, chubb, put up his 91 million. Was it for the Eugene Carroll case?

Mark: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: They put that up. And he said. His lawyers said that he went to 30 different bond companies to try and get the 454 million and none of them, none of them would give him.

Mark: The money because that’s the thing, isn’t it? He says, you know, mar a Lago is worth 2 billion valued at something or other. And he said it’s worth 50 or 100 times that.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And said, well, there’s, that’s the very thing you’re being, you’re being tried for. It’s a fraud you’re committing right there out of your mouth is the reason you are $454 million in debt.

Jim: Yeah. He’s already presumably put up some property or properties in collateral for the 91 million. So he would have to find others that he can put up for the 175 million if he were able to convince either Chubb again or another bond company to put up that money. So far not happened.

Mark: And is there a restriction on where he can go to get those bonds?

Jim: No, theyve staged the restriction on the New York bank, New York based banks, doing business with him because originally that was part of judge engransitive ruling.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: He not only couldn’t do business in New York, but he couldn’t do business with any New York Wow. Based organizations, which is a lot of banks.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: So the appeals court ruling stayed that part of the ruling as well. So they said that he could apply to New York based organizations for bonds or loans.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: To pay this. Whether it will make much difference.

Mark: Yeah. Given that the loss of the fraud is committed in New York. Yeah. They’re going to go, we trust it. Yeah. So meanwhile, in other news, in other fraud companies, Sam Bankman Fried, which on paper looks like Bankman Fried, which is a brilliantly nominal, nominally determinate name. He was sentenced to 300 months in jail for defrauding people with the crypto exchange FTX, which at its height was worth on paper, 32 billion and had a million users, and is also done for deliberately bankrupting the holding company that owned FTX. And Damien Williams, an attorney for the US Southern District of New York, praised Judge Kaplan’s sentencing, saying today’s sentence will prevent the defendant from ever again committing fraud and is an important message to others who might be tempted to engage in financial crimes, that justice will be swift and the consequences will be severe. And so you go in that two tier system of justice that you talked about, this Uber rich kid who was Uber rich on paper, and that was part of the fraud, is now serving 300 months in jail and swiftly done, too. They didn’t hang about, they just got said, well, yeah, you’ve done this and off you go to jail. Whereas fucking Trump has countless decades of, he’s been defrauding people longer than Sam Bankman Freed has been on the planet, and yet he just obfuscates and people kind of buy it and just give him another chance. Or they say, okay, all right, you’re not going to get 451 million, let’s talk. Let’s do 175 million. Of course, he spins that as backpedaling on the part of the politically motivated, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, it’s 25 years of defrauding the New York. You know, and if you’re not a political candidate like Sam Bankman fried isn’t, then you will just get dumb for fraud. He’s. Trump’s been fronting a fraudulent company after Fred fronted a fraudulent company for decades. They’d be doing it for most of the 20th century and all of the 21st century. And yet because he’s, you know, he gets the kind of get out of jail free card because he just calls it all, it just says, all politically motivated. And then all of these people who are thinking, oh, yeah, well, if we stay in his good books, then he will do as great service. Have you not seen all of the staff he fired? What are you blind? What’s the matter with you, you idiots?

Jim: Well, first of all, that judge that sentenced Sam Bankman freed is Judge Lewis Kaplan in southern district of New York. He is the one who presided over Trump’s Eugene Carroll.

Mark: Ah, right, case. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Defamation case.

Mark: Yeah. He’s got some skin in the game.

Jim: Most federal judges on the east coast basically are kind of pretty much involved with Trump cases this year.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But so far, Trump has stayed out of jail, partly because he hasn’t yet faced any criminal cases.

Mark: Right? Yeah, yeah.

Jim: But his first criminal case, which was originally slated for the 25 March, was delayed, but not significantly. Judge Merchant in New York set a new start date for that trial, which is April 15.

Mark: Yep.

Jim: So it’ll be pretty much just as our next episode is being released.

Mark: Lovely.

Jim: And that will be the start of jury selection on that trial. And that is Trump’s first, in fact, the first criminal trial involving a president or former president ever.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: So that’s fun.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And in that trial, pretrial motions still going on at the moment. And Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan Daevdev, requested a gag order in that case because of Trump’s propensity for intimidating witnesses. The judge granted that, and there’s been a partial gag order put on, on Trump in that case, saying that he is to refrain from making or directing others to make public statements about known or reasonably foreseeable witnesses concerning their potential participation in this case, in the falsifying business records case. He’s also not allowed to make such statements about individual prosecutors, court staff members, jurors, and potential jurors. It specifically doesn’t apply to the judge or to the DA, Alvin Bragg, which Trump immediately took advantage of by attacking the judge and the judge’s daughter.

Mark: Oh, Jesus. Yeah.

Jim: On truth social.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Because the judge’s daughter, I think she’s also a lawyer and she’s represented some Democrats.

Mark: Right. Yeah.

Jim: And, and she is. I don’t. I wouldn’t say vocally anti Trump, necessarily, but she doesn’t hide it.

Mark: Right.

Jim: She’s.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Put some, like, things on her Instagram or whatever, of Trump in jail and things like that.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But the thing is, judges are allowed to have family members who are allowed to have opinions. That’s kind of first amendment.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Stuff. But intimidating people or attacking people who, are witnesses in a court case against you.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: That’s not first amendment stuff. That’s stuff you’re not allowed to.

Mark: Just. Despite the fact that his spokesman said, yeah, this kind of gag order is unconstitutional because it prevents him from engaging in core political speech.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And you think, well, yeah. Shouting at people, calling them liars and felons and dirtbag, lawyers. Where’s the political, core political speech there?

Jim: He is, absolutely allowed to defend himself in public, to say, I didn’t do any of the things that I’m m accused of. To say that, you know, he can call it a witch hunt if he likes, but he can’t attack members of the court or witnesses or things like that. That’s not required in order to say these things aren’t true that are being said about me. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. And that’s certainly not required as part of core political speech.

Jim: Absolutely not. No, no. And the other main case that is currently ongoing, in fact, they had. There were some pretrial motions that I watched earlier on today.

Mark: yeah.

Jim: Is the Fulton county case.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: I predicted last time that DA Willis would stay on the case.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: The judge would rule that she got to stay, and she did. I was wrong. Right. but the wrinkle in that, that I didn’t predict is that she got to stay. If the prosecutor, Nathan Wade, got fired, essentially, if she got rid of him or if he resigned, then she could stay. Or in a weird option, he could say that she could leave, but if she left, that would basically send the case back to person, who decided which prosecutor took it over and it would delay things. So, obviously, Nathan Wade pretty much immediately resigned.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And funny. Well, it stayed on the case, and that, is moving forward. Still no trial date for that. She’s requested, an August trial, but.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Judge McAfee is. Is taking his time in deciding whether that’s going to go. But the moment. The motions today were largely Trump’s lawyers requesting a dismissal. Motion to dismiss.

Mark: Didn’t they. Didn’t they say she was racist making. Oh, no. They’ve commented.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, obviously they’ve done that, but I don’t think that was what, they are appealing his ruling that she gets to stay on the case. I don’t think that’ll go anywhere.

Mark: Didn’t part of his ruling, acknowledged that? Actually, there was no. It was just about the look and feel and smell of it.

Jim: The appearance of impropriety.

Mark: Yeah. Rather than that. They found an actual conflict of interest. They didn’t manage to prove that there was one found. But he said, yeah, but the optics are a bit bad.

Jim: Yes. And he kind of, in a way, invented a bit of new law for that, because in Atlanta, where this case is happening, there isn’t, as I understand it, something in the statute books about people being removed based on appearance of impropriety.

Mark: Right.

Jim: They can be removed for actual conflict of interest grounds, but things that look a bit dodgy. There isn’t actually anything in the books about. And so he kind of created that, essentially saying, you know, some. Some jurisdictions talk about this stuff. And based on that, my judgment is that Nathaniel Wade would have to. Have to go to resign in order for. Funny Willis to stay on the case because of the appearance of him. Significant, appearance of impropriety.

Mark: Right.

Jim: So if anything, the appeal. I mean, it’s not going to go the other way. They’re not going to say, yeah, Wade can come back on the case. Now, that’ll be a weird ruling.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But they. They could say, well, yeah, there was no real basis for him to have to resign on this because it’s not a rule.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: In this state.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: You can appear to be improp I us or whatever, but, yeah, you can appear it as much as you like, so long as you.

Mark: You. If you’re not, then, yeah.

Jim: Kosher.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you continue to be kosher, then that’s fine. Yeah, that’s fine.

Jim: That’s fine.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So, yeah, I think the motions they were pretty much making today was about first amendment and him having a right to claim that the election was stolen and then take steps to do stuff about that. And that’s where it fell down and where the prosecutors were saying, he can say what he likes, he can make all the claims he wants about it being rigged, but when he. When those statements become him trying to get people to overturn the election in his favor, that is against the law, and we still get to prosecute him about that.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, those bits. Yeah. You can say where you like, but if what you say is illegal. Yeah. The action to incite people to do illegal things.

Jim: Yeah. I think one of the. One of the prosecutors said at one point, we’re not. He’s not being prosecuted for lying. He’s being prosecuted for lying to the government.

Mark: Yeah. Yes, yes. We’re not dissimilar, to borrow, to Boris and his, you know, misleading parliament, that kind of stuff. Yet more obfuscation. I did go back and revisit all of that stuff briefly, and it was just too depressing to continue. They didn’t say he was lying. They said he was misleading parliament. And then he kind of said, ah, yes, but no, you can’t. Cause, ah, When. When I went without saying, when I miss less parliament, you know, well, when I said those things, I was just referring to this one spit. Like, today, he’s not on oxygen. It was that one thing I said. Yeah, but anybody. And Harriet Harman, I was reacquainted with her brilliant analogy, which says, when they were talking about the, party gate stuff, and also the advice to, yes, you’re perfectly fine. So if I’m in a car driving 100 miles an hour, I know I’m driving a hundred miles an hour, because I look at the speedometer, if I then turn to my passenger and say, is it okay to be driving 100 miles an hour? And they say, you’re not driving 100 miles an hour. It’s perfectly fine, you’re fine. I mean, do you take the advice of the passenger, or do you look at the speedo when the police sirens go in your rear view mirror? And in the end, I think Boris sort of blew it when he sided with the conspiracy theorists and the Trump like response that it’s a witch hunt. Yeah, it’s a kangaroo court. And you think, you haven’t done yourself any favors there, because they were not doing that. They weren’t prosecuting you for lying. They were prosecuting you for misleading parliament. You deliberately misled people. Not that you were lying. We all know you were lying. But you deliberately. But here’s the rules of. Here’s where we got you.

Jim: Yeah. There was another example when I was looking for fallacy in the wild, examples that, I didn’t end up using, but it was from Armando Yannucci’s brilliant, the thick of it political sitcom. And it was the. The MP in that was, at a hearing where he was being told off for misleading the committee before, and he said something along the lines of, I categorically did not intentionally say not the truth, although I may unintentionally not have done so.

Mark: Wow. Yeah. That’s excellent. But that’s kind of. Yes, minister sized stuff, isn’t it? Yeah. Wow. And finally, some things we really don’t have time to talk about.

Jim: Early on Tuesday morning, a container ship lost power on Baltimore’s Patapsco river and, unable to steer, crashed into a support column of the Francis Scott key bridge, causing it to collapse. Maryland officials. Officials have made it very clear that all evidence points to an accidental collision. But of course, that hasn’t stopped Magafolk from blaming all kinds of bete noir based on nothing whatsoever. Within just a few hours, Andrew Tate took time away from a waiting trial in Romania for human trafficking and rape to tweet his theory that the ship was cyberattacked and deliberately steered into the bridge. Alex Jones posted a video of the bridge collapse and commented, looks deliberate to me. A cyber attack is probably world war three has already started.

Mark: Yep.

Jim: Marjorie Taylor Greene just asked, ah, the question of whether it might be an intentional attack, and called for a serious investigation. At which point the National Transportation Safety Board presumably slapped their foreheads and said, why didn’t we think of that? Nancy Mace went on Newsmax to blame Biden for only including $40 billion for roads and bridges in the historic $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill she voted against and then tried to take credit for. Lapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said he wasn’t making any accusations, but pointed out that if you talk to employers in America, they’ll tell you that filling slots with employees who aren’t drug addled is a very huge problem. Just for context, this is the same match Lapp, who this week claimed he’d been cleared of sexually assaulting a male staffer for Herschel Walker’s campaign after his accuser dropped the charges. It’s not quite true, since his accuser was paid $480,000 to go away, which isn’t what cleared means. Anyway, back to the Mad Bridge theories. Maria Bartiromo blamed Biden’s wide open border. Meanwhile, multiple right wing voices claimed diversity, equity and inclusion is to blame. Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott had the best answer to those assholes. We know what they want to say, but they don’t have the courage to say the n word.

Mark: Whoa, that’s a bit like Putin saying that the attack in the theater in Moscow was Ukraine. And then George Galloway, recently elected to reform, said it was to do with the british government. There was british government involvement. What the what? Well, there comes a time, seemingly, when politicians turn to religion to justify heinous acts. It has to be the right God, of course, not one of those troublesome non christian deities. CFD F 30 p. Lee Anderson and Sadiq Khan Blair had a word with the man upstairs about the validity of invading Iraq with Bush. King Arthur was visited by an animated supreme being in Monty Python, the Holy Grail. And now, of course, Trump. But of course Donald is going into business with the Almighty, closing the gap between God and mammon, as it were, and ignoring the constitutional division of church and state, too. Of course, Trump is promoting a line of pricey Bibles in partnership with country music star Lee Greenwood, whose song song God Bless the USA is omnipresent at the former president’s political rallies. Gideon’s been giving them away free in every hotel room since the birth of Christianity, but he was a schmuck who never did grasp the chance to make a buck selling opiate to the masses. The God bless the USA Bible costs $59.99, not including shipping and other fees, and is unlike any other edition, as it includes a copy of a handwritten chorus to the eponymous Greenwood hit. According to the website, it’s also in big font for the hard of seeing, and each mention of Jesus is picked out in red. Not one to be accused of grifting indiscriminately. The Trump Greenwood Bible also includes the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the pledge of Allegiance. But of course, Trump is keeping a respectful distance from the word of God. The website selling the Trump backed Bible specifies that none of its proceeds will go to the Trump campaign. Yeah, right. The site says it’s not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign. Well, I for one will be wearing Trump gold sneakers, using those trump AI generated trading cards as bookmarks, and wearing odor Trump perfume in eager anticipation of the pop up version with the word God replaced with Trump throughout, which I expect will only be available in an upside down edition, to be held outside a church with the path cleared of pesky peaceful protesters by force who said money can’t buy your worshipers.

Jim: Thing is, maybe none of the proceeds will go to the Trump campaign, but that’s because they’ll be going directly into Trump’s pocket.

Mark: Yeah, because he never spent money on his own campaigns.

Jim: Annoyed that creepy speaker of the House Mike Johnson didn’t shut the government down to own the Libs doctor bounty hunter cosplayer Marjorie Taylor Greene filed a motion to vacate the speaker last week, but says she doesn’t plan to call for a vote yet, and this is just a warning to him. Ironically, this might result in him having to work even more closely with Democrats, as they might be the only ones who can save him since the GOP House majority is hanging by a read following Ken Buck of Colorado’s departure, Wisconsin Congressman Mike Gallagher has now announced that he’ll be leaving on April 19, which leaves his seat vacant for the rest of this Congress and reduces the republican majority to the point where they can only lose one vote on anything they plan to get done.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: Lucky they never actually do anything, eh? If the vote to vacate Mike Johnson’s position does get called and one Republican gets a bad cold, the next speaker could be Hakeem Jeffries. An MTG says she won’t take the blame if that happens, despite it being largely her fault. Not only is she the one who filed the motion, but her batshit antics are exactly what caused not quite so batshit Ken Buck to leave, and is likely part of the reason for Gallagher’s departure and another 18 GOP representatives announcing their retirement from Congress this year. I can’t blame them. I’ve had some pretty annoying colleagues in the past that I was relieved to get away from, and none of them could hold a candle to the woman. David Simon, creator of the Wire, referred to this week as a complete submarine pratfall of a human being.

Mark: Excellent. That’s. Yeah, that’s a very like Monsieur Hulot, as you like. Walks across the floor of Congress, puts a hand up to answer it, falls flat on her face. Yeah, brilliant. SB 26 91 passed in the Senate in Tennessee on Monday. Yeah, so? Well, many conspiracy theorists will be throwing their tinfoil hats in the air in jubilation because the state’s bill is trying to ban chemtrails, claiming the federal government may conduct geoengineering experiments by intentionally dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere. A, ah, 2017 study polled a thousand Americans and found that 10% of them believe the conspiracy theory is completely true. And when you’re in need of all the votes you can get as a deeply inhumane right wing party. Even crazies count at the polling booth. The bill says the intentional injection, release or dispersion by any means of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances or apparatus within the borders of this state into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight is prohibited. So actually won’t ban chemtrails because they don’t do that. Because there’s no such conspiracy. Unless you call the physics of hot water vapor coming out of the back of jet engines condensing in the cold upper air through which airplanes fly a, conspiracy by the deep state, then, well, what am I saying? That’s exactly what the likes of basement dwelling keyboard warriors and some actual friends of my actual acquaintance actually think, oh, what’s the use?

Jim: In season five of friends Ross and Janice briefly dated, but Janice broke it off because she found Ross too whiny. Ross’s realization that he’d become so whiny he annoyed Janice, was a wake up call that he may m have hit rock bottom in much the same way. It may be time for the republican party to reflect on the fact that disgraced former congressman George Santos announced last week that he was leaving the republican party because they were too embarrassing for him. George Santos, the man who, apart from committing multiple federal crimes and being the 6th person ever to be expelled from the House of Representatives, lied about where he went to school, wherever, went to college, basically his entire resume, his criminal background, his salary, his mother’s death, his drag queen past playing volleyball, being jewish, owning multiple properties, being a Broadway producer, helping develop carbon capture technology, being a model, being mugged, surviving an assassination attempt, running an animal charity, his grandparents fleeing the Holocaust, his employees dying in the Pulse nightclub shooting, his niece being kidnapped because of comments he made about the Chinese Communist Party, where his campaign money came from, where his campaign money went, and being one of the first people in the US to get Covid, that guy is embarrassed to call himself a Republican. So in his wildly optimistic attempt at regaining his old house seat, he will be standing as an independent. Or so he says.

Mark: Oh, my God. Republican, Minnesota state senator Warren Limmer recently said he could not in good conscience support a bill that would create statewide standards for the safe storage of firearms due to the impact it could have on farmers. There’s another segment of our population that often requires guns in their occupation, he said. I’m talking about rural farm people that are living out in rural areas. They not only have to have concerns about predation, but they also have concerns about their own domestic farm animals. Not that the cows are being rustled or might have agreed amongst themselves to take up arms in their collective bid for freedom from his slavemen and the rights of bread of pasture. No.

Jim: Four legs good, two legs bad.

Mark: Yes, exactly. No. Warren’s concern that farm animals can, at times, be very dangerous. Take, for example, a cow who just recently had a calf. You even walk too close to a cow and it’ll take you down and trample you into dust. And many farmers have a readily available gun just for those emergencies. They can’t be fiddling around with some sort of complicated locking device on their firearms cabinet. You’ve got to shoot first rather than simply hop over the fence, it appears. Whilst studies have indicated that cows kill less than two dozen Americans per year, whilst firearm related deaths annually total in the tens of thousands. Who are we to make a mockery of Warren’s childhood trauma, being walked towards by curious bovines every time we had to cross that field on the way home from kindergarten? Shame on you. And especially for voting him into high office without stipulating some sort of therapeutic intervention.

Jim: Thing is, the report says that less than two dozen Americans per year, are killed by cows. But that doesn’t take into account all the farmers who shoot the cows before they get a chance to track. Trample them to dust.

Mark: Exactly.

Jim: I mean, just be fair.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: british farmers who don’t have access to guns must be being trampled to dust.

Mark: A, lot over. Yes. Yeah. Comparative.

Jim: Very dangerous profession.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. There’s got to be somewhere in the region of, you know, two and a half dozen. easily, maybe. Easily. Because british farmers don’t have the wherewithal to just stand in the field and go, come by, come. Just leave it, girls. Leave it. Or they just kind of run at the cows.

Jim: I’ve been in fields with cows.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: They’re not especially aggressive animals.

Mark: They’re just large.

Jim: Also, they’re very bad at cornering.

Mark: Oh, God, so bad at cornering.

Jim: Yeah. Just.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Just run in a circle.

Mark: Yeah. They lose their footage. and away they go.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they’re very easy to tip.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Anyway.

Mark: No wonder they’re taking up arms in the british countryside. I’m gonna view them with a bit more trepidation next time.

Jim: There’s a long tradition of hated political figures trying to rehabilitate their reputation by appearing on humiliating tv shows, whether it’s Rudy Giuliani on the masked singer, Sean Spicer on Dancing with the Stars, or Matt Hancock, Nadine Dorries, Edwina Curry and Nigel Farage on I’m a Celebrity. I can only imagine it’s on that basis that fired RNC chair Ronna McDaniel signed up for a two year stint as a political analyst on NBC and MSNBC. Well that and the $600,000 they offered her. She must have assumed she would be continuously pelted with the verbal equivalent of rotten fruit by every journalist who remembers her active role in trying to pressure Michigan electors not to certify Bidens 2020 win, and her repeated and vociferous support and amplification of the big lie, which is all the journalists on NBC and MSNBC, even fucking Chuck Todd. Well it turns out she didnt make it two years. She didnt even make it half a Scaramucci from the announcement of her hiring on Friday. She made it four days and one meet the press interview before NBC caved to pressure from multiple on air hosts in the including Rachel Maddow, Jen Psaki, Mika Brzezinski, Joy Reid, Nicole Wallace, Lawrence O’Donnell and even fucking Chuck Todd, all of whom expressed their dismay that their own network was prepared to platform someone who tried to destroy democracy and pay her for the privilege. McDaniel is planning on suing NBC for breach of contract and says she’s expecting to be paid in full for her two year contract, which would work out at about $500 per second for her Meet the Press interview. I don’t know nearly enough about contract law to figure out how realistic that is, but I’m hoping for some weird trick that ends up with her owing them money.

Mark: Over here in shitstroom Brexit Stan, three more Tory MP’s are stepping down Scott Benton even further down than having the whip removed after being filmed promising undercover journalists posing a gambling investors access to influential ministers for cash. Never gamble with Gambler Scott Benton has been suspended for 35 days and was due to be recalled by his constituents, but fell on his sword before the humiliation of that. This will mean another headache slash certain, defeat and humiliation for Rishi instead in the form of a special by election in Blackpool South Benton seat, which he won at the 2019 election by a slim 3690 majority. It had previously been held by Labour since 1997. James Heapy, armed forces minister, had been on resignation watch following uplifts to the defence budget being unforthcoming, and Robert Halfen unexpectedly quit as skills, apprenticeships and higher education minister for the same funding reasons. No doubt. Whilst they won’t go immediately, they’ll not be standing in the next election, which slimy cove touted might be November on the same day Rishi said he wouldn’t be averse to the idea of standing down as leader. It all smells a bit of shits. Leaving a sinking rat. Speaking of which, the rowers in the upcoming Oxford Cambridge boat race on the Thames have been warned not to fall in, or at least not to do so with their mouths open because the river is officially full. In a report stating that water companies dumped untreated sewage into the UK a thousand times every day for a year, and this on the same day as Thames Waters, shareholders have decided not to pump more money into the company, so bill payers are facing an influx of more bullshit as it means prices will probably go up. Still, thank God for Brexit and the removal of all that EU red tape about water, cleanliness and fit to drink swimming getting in the way of massive profits for shareholders. Yay. The tour is delivering shitloads of money for everyone. Oh, yeah, the very few.

Jim: So that’s all the bad arguments and faulty reasoning we have time for this week. You’ll find the show notes@feliciastrump.com and if you hear Trump say something stupid and want to ask if it’s a fallacy, our contact details are on the contact page.

Mark: If you think we’ve used the fallacy ourselves, let us know. If you had a good time, please give us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast, or simply tell one other person in person about how much they’d like our podcast and you can support the show@patreon.com. ftrump just like our newest patron, big and brigelligator, our, ah, straw man level patrons, Richard Thunder Hopkins, Will M. Scott Ozzy on bank, Laura Tomsick, Schmootz, Mark Reichie, and Abba arb Buchanan, who told us when we met her at QED, we just call her Amber. Another listener recognized her at QED last year because we keep using her full name all the time. And our true Scotsman level patrons, Renee Zed, Melissa Saitek, Stephen Bickle, Janet Yueta, Andrew Halk, and our top patron, kaz tui. Thank you so much for your support, everybody, and welcome. Megan, your support is really very much appreciated. Thank you.

Jim: You can connect with those awesome people as well as us and other listeners in the Facebook group. At Facebook.

Mark: All music is by the outbursts and was used with permission. So until next time on felacious Trump, we’ll leave the last word to the bad egg, Donald.

Donald Trump: That’s right, go home to mommy.

Speaker J: Bye.