What do you do with someone [#Trump] who does not distinguish between truth and untruth?

[riversedge]

It really is scary--this world we live in where the US President is not able to distinguish between truth and not truths.




?Verified account @nytimes
52m52 minutes ago

Michael Hayden: The End of Intelligence

Link to tweet

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-intelligence.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes



By Michael V. Hayden

Mr. Hayden is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.
April 28, 2018



..........................It was no accident that the Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year in 2016 was “post-truth,” a condition where facts are less influential in shaping opinion than emotion and personal belief. To adopt post-truth thinking is to depart from Enlightenment ideas, dominant in the West since the 17th century, that value experience and expertise, the centrality of fact, humility in the face of complexity, the need for study and a respect for ideas.


President Trump both reflects and exploits this kind of thinking. It is fair to say that the Trump campaign normalized lying to an unprecedented degree. There was the candidate’s claim that legions of Arabs celebrated wildly in New Jersey as the World Trade Center collapsed. He defended his calls for the intentional killing of the Sept. 11 terrorists’ families because “they knew what was happening” and had “watched their husband on television flying into the World Trade Center,” something for which there is zero evidence. He insinuated that Senator Ted Cruz’s father had a hand in John F. Kennedy’s assassination and that the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia had been murdered.


When pressed on specifics, the president has routinely denigrated those who questioned him, whether the “fake” media, “so called” judges, Washington insiders or the “deep state.” He has also condemned Obama-era intelligence officials as “political hacks.”


David Priess, an intelligence officer who once gave presidential daily briefings, asked me whether I thought Mr. Trump could distinguish between truth and untruth. He raised the controversial speech Mr. Trump gave at a Boy Scout Jamboree in West Virginia in July 2017, a speech that was overly political and occasionally tasteless. In the face of sharp criticism, the president said that the Scouts’ leader had called him to say it was “the greatest speech that was ever made to them.”

Of course, no such call ever occurred. But was Mr. Trump actually able to draw a distinction between the past that had really happened and the past that he needed at that moment? Mr. Priess’s point was that you could sometimes convince a liar that he was wrong. What do you do with someone who does not distinguish between truth and untruth?

We in the intelligence world have dealt with obstinate and argumentative presidents through the years. But we have never served a president for whom ground truth really doesn’t matter.

[beachbum bob]

1. 35% of Americans can't distinguish either

[elleng]

2. Divorce him.

If ONLY it were that simple!

[RainCaster]

3. Call him out! Every time. Call out the enablers as well.

State clearly what the truth really is so that people can see for themselves. If we do not educate ourselves then we are going to ignore the press as "fake news" which is just what Putin wants.