03 May Accent Fallacy – FT#74
Show Notes
The Accent Fallacy is committed when the meaning of a sentence or phrase is changed by placing the emphasis on a different part, or leaving emphasis ambiguous in writing.
Trump
We started out by talking about Trump’s misrepresentation of what Ilhan Omar said about Muslims losing civil rights after 9/11:
Then we looked at Trump (who called fallen soldiers losers and suckers) claiming Biden called the military stupid bastards:
And finally, we talked about Mitt Romney misrepresenting Obama’s views on business and infrastructure:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about Boris Johnson’s ambiguous claim about Labour wanting to ‘kill the bill’ and Speaker of the House Lindsay Hoyle’s subsequent clarification that Labour probably didn’t want to kill policemen:
Fallacy in the Wild
We talked about these clips from My Cousin Vinny:
We followed that up with this clip from Book of Mormon:
Then we looked at this clip from Superstore:
And we finished with this creepy end of a Persil tabs advert:
Competition!
If you’d like to win some Fallacious Trump Merch all you have to do now is leave us a review on any platform by May 16th and send a screenshot to jim@fallacioustrump.com
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game, which featured statements Trump has released since losing access to Twitter:
- Happy Easter to ALL, including the Radical Left CRAZIES who rigged our Presidential Election, and want to destroy our Country!
- Change the name back to THE ACADEMY AWARDS, don’t be so politically correct and boring, and do it right. ALSO, BRING BACK A GREAT HOST.
- Failed Writer and untalented HACK Glenn Kessler never writes fairly about me. The Washington Post should stop hiring GARBAGE people!
Click below for the answer
Mark got it wrong this week, and is currently on 47%
Tucker Carlson is not a logical fallacy
We covered Tucker’s descent into madness.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- I’d love to be able to tell you about all the fun I’ve been having on Frank Speech, the new social network launched two weeks ago by pillow tycoon and slightly more tanned version of the Undertaker’s manager, Mike Lindell. Unfortunately, I can’t, because the site crashed almost as soon as it opened, and nobody can actually sign up to it yet. For the first few days they claimed the site was undergoing scheduled maintenance, which as every tech company knows, should always be scheduled for just after you launch, and then Lindell claimed the site had been the victim of “a massive attack”. Really, it would have been Sly of him to get some Protection set up to keep the site Safe From Harm. OK, I know Massive Attack weren’t big in the US, but there’s one Massive Attack fan listening who loved that. Anyway, if Mike ever creates a working website we’ll let you know how that goes.
- Beautifully observed by the Daily Kos as “the strangely-coiffed con man”; Trump’s interminable campaigning whilst in office ran up enormous security costs which of course landed on those towns hosting his rallies. Trump’s never been one to make sure he pays his way, or takes care to ensure people are inconvenienced on his account. And in a fitting tribute to the satsuma sleaze-ball the mayor of Albuquerque has called the Repo Man on the Trumpster to get back the $200,000 he’s in hock to the town for, and has been for 19 months! I’ve a delicious image of Harry Dean Stanton drawling up to Trump whilst Emilio Estevez vaporises him with the Chevy trunkload of alien radiation in a way that’d make his dad Jed Bartlett proud. Of course whilst the likes of Minnesota and El Paso also get in line for the 100s of 1000s of dollars they’re owed, Trump’s snake-oiled machine does what it’s done for 40 years and moves money around so they can plead poverty just where the demands are coming into. The only solace we can find is that Trump is old and unhealthy and medical bills are large and Beelzebub doesn’t actually accept dollars! Oh and hot dog, jumping frog.
- Joe Biden addressed the Joint Session of Congress for the first time, in what would be the State of the Union if this wasn’t Joe’s first year in office. And he managed to do it without awarding the Medal of Freedom to a hateful racist, and hardly told any lies at all! In front of a socially distanced crowd of only 200 Members of Congress, Biden started by acknowledging, for the first time, “Madam Speaker and Madam Vice President”. He talked about the jobs that will come from his Infrastructure Plan, the general benefits that will come from his Families Plan, and the fact that deer don’t wear Kevlar vests, so hunters don’t need 100 round magazines and armor piercing bullets. Trump watched, presumably from his bed, surrounded by Big Mac wrappers and empty Diet Coke cans, and was upset that the speech wasn’t about him, so the next morning he called his friends at Fox News to complain, saying “Obviously they’re very ungracious people. I did the vaccine. They like to take the vaccine. But even the fake news isn’t giving them credit for that”. It’s not true to say that Biden ignored all of Trump’s accomplishments. After all, he called the January 6th Insurrection “The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”
- Okay you can all relax Hilary isn’t going to abolish the second amendment after all, but no wait what’ll we do to fuel our fury batteries like making kids scream in Monsters Inc? Never fear the GOP is here. Details of what is to all intents and purposes is Biden’s new green deal are not even published but the outrage vacuum can safely be filled with his upcoming outright ban on steaks and burgers. Just when we thought the simplification of messages, and let’s face it just about everything else in politics, on the right was down to Toddler-Trump management, the Republicans dumb down their own stupid bastards, sorry, voters, some more by reducing the whole climate issue to things you can stuff in your face whilst whistling Dixie dressed as an Eagle ‘neath the Stars and Stripes! But not so fast this was a British idea – the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper, not content with spreading lies here, by using the 2+2=5 algorithm, helpfully connected a University of Michigan report conducted over a year ago under Trump which concluded “if people reduce meat eating by a lot, emissions would fall a lot” to “Biden wants to cut emissions by a lot. Therefore, he’ll force people to reduce meat eating by the same amount this random study looked at.” Based on absolutely nothing at all except perhaps eyeing money-based opportunities in the US media and the exploitation of another bunch of English-speaking unthinking right-wing fuckwits. As the University states their report is “reliant on a number of simplifying assumptions,” as is GOPs vote-winning strategy it appears!
- Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, who looks like the bastard child of Roscoe P. Coltrane and his dog, Flash, made a bit of a mistake in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on voting rights last week. He asked voting rights activist and all around badass Stacy Abrams for a list of the actual provisions the objects to in Georgia voter suppression bill. So she started listing them. Because she actually knows what the fuck she’s talking about. Kennedy tried to interrupt a couple of times with brilliantly thought out burns like “What else?” and “Is that everything?” Spoiler: It wasn’t. A full two minutes later, while Abrams was still talking, Foghorn Kennedy realised this wasn’t going the way he thought it would, and said “Ok, I get the idea, I get the idea”. Since she wasn’t allowed to finish, Stacy Abrams later released a video on her Twitter feed in which she continued for a further five minutes. John Kennedy used to be a lawyer! Isn’t the first thing they teach lawyers “Don’t ask a witness a question you don’t know the answer to”?
- Now Trump’s out of office of course there more fallout involving hitherto protected acolytes. Black drippy fallout is smearing one Rudy Giuliani, who, full disclosure; it delights me to say, has had cellphones and computers seized by the Feds as part of an investigation into potential shady dealings with Ukraine. Naturally the inky-headed one is outraged – yeah like we care – accusing federal authorities of a “corrupt double standard,” and that the Justice Department was “running roughshod over the constitutional rights of anyone involved in, or legally defending, former President Donald J. Trump.” Well seeing that you were one of the leading reasons as to why those legal defences all failed Rudy I’m not sure you have any constitutional rights to claim, especially whilst as a legal representative of a POTUS you made dodgy promises with a decidedly non-American entity in exchange for dirt on the Democratic nominee. The worst thing about this AP news item for me was discovering Giuliani has a son, who agrees with his dad, oh hell no it could all happen again – aaagh come back Dynasty all is forgiven!
- The GOP led Arizona State Senate has subpoenaed all 2.1 million ballots submitted in Maricopa County in the 2020 election, along with the voting machines that counted them, because they’re still not sure who won, despite the fact that Biden definitely won the county by more than 45,000 votes. Keen to make sure it’s all above board and beyond reproach, the State Senate have paid $150,000 for a new audit of the ballots to a Florida company called Cyber Ninjas, who nobody has ever heard of, who have no history of election work, and whose CEO, Doug Logan, is a ‘Stop the Steal’ conspiracy theorist who wrote articles for Sidney Powell’s website about how the voting machines were flipping votes from Trump to Biden. Cyber Ninjas then went to court to try to keep the method of their recount secret. But they lost. Fortunately, when the company inevitably claims they have uncovered massive voter fraud but are unable to provide actual evidence, it will have exactly zero effect on anything.
- Here in the diminished, divided, diseased island we currently can’t escape from, a Duke who didn’t do a day’s work in his life, before or after marrying the Queen, failed to make it to the age of immense-lockdown-NHS-fundraising Captain Sir Tom Moore, despite living in abject luxury. The Prime Minister was named Major Sleaze after his bellowed replies to Sir Keir Starmer’s questions about whether Lord Brownlow paid the initial invoice for parliamentary rule-breaking sums of money to refurb his apartment, and his being described as a “vacuum of integrity” by the ex-Attorney General when it came to bunging backhanders to alternative hoover manufacturer Sir James Dyson. You see it’s the common touch that makes British national decision-making so accessible to ordinary people. Piling their bodies by the thousand into the breach once more, wasting their votes in the upcoming local elections, opting for comedy candidates like Lord BinFace instead of uniting behind an effective majority opposition cos “No I won’t vote for Boris but ooh I don’t like that Keir’s a lawyer and a Sir, and with no personality”. Oh get real you self-righteous serf’s tugging your fucking forelocks and flying your fucking flags at half mast for our own dear Queen and country as we disappear from global view beneath your waves of apathy and ignorance; Small Britannia, Britannia blubble blubble blubble……!
That’s all for this week, and thanks for listening!
