The more ominous part of the Trump Sharpie incident

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

The more ominous part of the Trump Sharpie incident

By Catherine Rampell
Columnist
September 9, 2019 at 6:54 p.m. EDT

-snip-

It was funny, telegenic, easy to grasp. So, understandably, Sharpiegate got news coverage up the wazoo. The more ominous developments in this saga, however, got significantly less attention. They happened the previous Sunday, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sent a secret agencywide directive warning its scientists not to contradict the president, and then the subsequent Friday, when NOAA released an unsigned statement backing Trump’s false forecast and disparaging its own scientists. It was reportedly sent after the commerce secretary threatened firings.

Sure, Trump’s attacks on objective statistics, scientists or really any independent source of accountability are nothing new. On the contrary, such attacks have become ubiquitous. Anyone who dares to produce or even accurately report on politically inconvenient metrics is allegedly participating in a vast anti-Trump conspiracy or is somehow rooting for America to fail.

And, at this point, media corrections of Trump’s false claims about stock performance, or air purity, or the strength of the manufacturing sector, can feel tedious, pedantic and exhausting. Trump’s just being Trump, pundits scold. We should all move on to “real” concerns rather than these distractions from whatever other horrible (or, depending on your viewpoint, wonderful) things the administration is doing.

But these are real concerns. Trump’s attempted manipulations of official metrics — and the aspersions he casts upon metrics he cannot manipulate — degrade our democracy, economy and public safety.

Distrust in official data is deadly to voters’ ability to evaluate public policies, as well as the records of the officials crafting or overseeing those policies.

-snip-

Read more: https://beta.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-administrations-war-on-statistics-is-now-threatening-lives/2019/09/09/48c461b6-d33f-11e9-9343-40db57cf6abd_story.html

[Midnightwalk]

1. Metrics he cannot manipulate?

Now that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is accused of threatening to fire NOAA staff if they contradicted Trump, how much faith should we have that other data, especially economic data, is not being manipulated through coercion?

These are dark days and getting darker.

[Pacifist Patriot]

2. Great piece and spot on.

[dalton99a]

3. Disinformation is Putin's specialty

The best way to destroy the U.S is to destroy the U.S. government itself