Reason #5442 Trump Was Elected

"Meanwhile the Washington Post fact checker tweets a fake Fred Trump political ad. We can trust them!"

Here's WaPo's Philip Bump writing in an updated column that is now titled "No, Donald Trump’s father didn’t create racist ads for a mayoral bid":

A pair of ads allegedly created by President Trump’s father, Fred, for a 1970s mayoral bid circulated widely on the Internet this week. They were ads, one titled “Dope Man” and the other “Real New Yorkers,” presenting two depictions of the city during that decade. The first showed a black drug dealer wandering the streets of New York, culminating in a shot of two frightened-looking women with a “Paid for by the Committee to Elect Frederick C. Trump” banner at the bottom of the screen. The second was more optimistic — though the “real New Yorkers” depicted were only white New Yorkers.

If the ads were real, they would certainly be among the more racist ads in American political history, even by the standards of the 1970s. But they weren’t real.... The footage of the black drug dealer, which is available on at least one stock-footage site, is from a short film called “A Day in the Death of Donny B.” from 1969....

The idea that Trump’s father would have created starkly racist ads fits neatly into existing narratives about Trump and his family.

Here's the tweet WaPo's Fact Checker Glenn Kessler scrambled to delete:

And here's the Sidney Blumenthal piece that launched the fake news that took in the Fact Checker. It's now cleaned up and ends with the note:

A paragraph referring to Fred Trump’s campaign for mayor of New York, although it accurately reflected Trump’s racial attitudes and his hostility towards Mayor John Lindsay, has been removed because the campaign ads referred to appear to be clever fakes.

My bold. Assumes facts not in evidence, Glenn. Trump's father may well have been a bigot by tody's standards. A lot of people were. But since when do the sins of the father convey to the son?

There's the old "fake but accurate" bullshit. The evidence is bad, and we tried to palm it off, but trust us, we were still correct about the facts were were trying to prove with fake facts.

This "fake news" event has a lot to hate. There's the link to Sid "The Shiv" Blumenthal, Hillary's personal political hit man, someone too slimy for even the Obama administration. There's the head fact checker of a leading national newspaper falling for a constructed video merely because it was anti-Trum, and then the paper justifying it as "accurately reflecting Trump's racial attitudes", without any evidence and without clearly spelling out which Trump.

Remember, when you evaluate any "fact check" by Glenn Kessler or other WaPo staff, always use the "Fritz" adjustment. Subtract two Pinnicchios if the subject is an alleged lie by a Republican, and add two if it concerns lie from a Democrat. Although, I'm considering raising the differential to three for the Trump era.