this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
511 points (98.3% liked)

politics

19104 readers
3808 users here now

Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!

Rules:

  1. Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.

Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.

Example:

  1. Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
  2. Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
  3. No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
  4. Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
  5. No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

That's all the rules!

Civic Links

Register To Vote

Citizenship Resource Center

Congressional Awards Program

Federal Government Agencies

Library of Congress Legislative Resources

The White House

U.S. House of Representatives

U.S. Senate

Partnered Communities:

News

World News

Business News

Political Discussion

Ask Politics

Military News

Global Politics

Moderate Politics

Progressive Politics

UK Politics

Canadian Politics

Australian Politics

New Zealand Politics

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

The former President's plan to bring water to the California desert is, like a lot of his promises, a goofy pipe-dream.

In an apparent effort to address the pressing issue of California water shortages, Trump said the following: “You have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps and Canada, and all pouring down and they have essentially a very large faucet. You turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it, and it’s massive, it’s as big as the wall of that building right there behind you. You turn that, and all of that water aimlessly goes into the Pacific (Ocean), and if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles,” he said.

Amidst his weird, almost poetic rambling, the “very large faucet” Trump seems to have been referring to is the Columbia River. The Columbia runs from a lake in British Columbia, down through Oregon and eventually ends up in the Pacific Ocean. Trump’s apparent plan is to somehow divert water from the Columbia and get it all the way down to Los Angeles. However, scientific experts who have spoken to the press have noted that not only is there currently no way to divert the water from the Oregon River to southern California, but creating such a system would likely be prohibitively expensive and inefficient.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Boddhisatva@lemmy.world 44 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I get what you're saying but they really should just be pointing out that he's not making any sense. Trump's speeches are being treated like Nostradamus' prophesies now. He spews a bunch of nonsense and people make up what they think it means. The guy should be in a home, not on the campaign trail and the media should make that clear to voters.

[–] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 25 points 1 month ago

The worst part is they nitpick any piberal or progressive candidate on their exact phrasing while translating conservative hate speech into something less horrible.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world -4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

It's not totally incoherent though, its vague and almost poetic.

This is kind of Trump's talent. He makes these grand statements that aren't quite lies. The crowd gets exactly what he's trying to say: all this water pouring out of snowy mountains into the ocean is a "waste" when it could just be diverted to LA, so let's fix that. It's worded almost like a dream. It's an attractive fantasy. But it's also vague, not quite enough to be a lie even if the implied facts are straight up wrong.

What can the news do? If they dig into it, he didn't really make any hard claims to roast. They can veer into opinion talk and say that sounds unpresedential and that his speech should be more clear, but making fun of his speech style at a rally is not supposed to be their job. So they do what they can, guess what he's saying and refute that.

Again, this was his talent before he got into politics. The Motley Fool did this great podcast on Trump (before Trump was big and political) where he sold massively overvalued real-estate from his private company to his public one, effectively "duping" the market, and it worked because he sold it as a vague fantasy just like this. He got plenty of criticism and it didn't matter, because he threaded the needle and what he's claiming is not hard enough to stick. This is what he does.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

What can the news do? If they dig into it, he didn’t really make any hard claims to roast.

They can quote him as saying there's "a large faucet as big as perhaps this building and it takes a day to turn" and say there is no such faucet and move on with their day. That would be a much better thing than what they've been doing since 2015 which is this bullshit: trying to find a real life thing to attach his utterances to and then asking him if that was what he was referring to when he clearly wasn't.

His talent is getting other people to fill in the blanks with his absolutely moronic speeches. For a time, people were arguing that "injecting disinfectant" was a great idea, actually, and trying to find science to back that up. Then he walked it back as a joke because he realized everyone except the brain washed lunatics in the country thought he was an absolute idiot for saying that shit.

(Detailed with a large amount of humor here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkO4QAP5wPo)

It's not the news media's job to make a blathering imbecile make sense, and they are doing great harm to the country by treating him this way.