Facts Matter... But Do They? Why Democrats Blew it with Robert Hur.

Are the scales of truth and political gamesmanship evenly balanced? Today's episode is a high-stakes dissection of Special Counsel Robert Hur's incendiary testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, a veritable battlefield of partisan agendas. We peel back layers of the report on President Joe Biden, probing implications on his fitness for office and navigating through the minefield of classified documents without criminal intent. Witness as we applaud Congresswoman Madeline Dean's savvy critique of the hearing's narrative and ponder the real efficacy of such political spectacles in an era where facts are factional and truth is tribal.

As the dialogue turns to the epidemic of misinformation, prepare to confront the uncomfortable truth that passivity is no longer an option. This chapter cuts deep into the heart of our national conversation, dissecting the roles media, opponents, and personal biases play in fueling the disinformation firestorm. We break down the strategic missteps that have given rise to a relentless tide of manipulated facts and question our collective ability to quash the spread of falsehoods. Join us for a critical conversation that offers no easy answers but illuminates the urgent call for clarity in the murky waters of political discourse.

Learn more about the Keystone Reckoning Project at www.keystonereckoning.com

Chapters

• 0:30 Political Analysis of Special Counsel Hearing
• 15:04 Addressing Misinformation in Political Discourse

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:30

Good morning and welcome to the Keystone Reckoning podcast. It is Wednesday, march 13th 2024. I'm your host, jesse White, so let's jump right into it Again. For those of you that are just tuning in to the podcast or coming back, we're going to play with the format a little bit and see what works, but I have a couple of things that I want to talk about today that I think are relevant, and the first one is a national news story that I'm sure most of you saw Yesterday.

Speaker 1: 1:00

A special prosecutor I'm sorry, special counsel, we don't call them special prosecutors anymore Robert Hehr testified before the House Judiciary Committee, which was just as much of a circus as one would expect it to be, but it was interesting in that both sides Democrat and Republican took the opportunity to try to lay out their points and make their case as to whether, either on obviously the Republican side Joe Biden is a doddering old man who's got split pea soup running out of the side of his mouth at all times or, on the Democratic side, whether the report by the special counsel was overly partisan and factually incorrect. I think if you're listening to this podcast, you have a pretty good idea as to what side we come down on, and I think the interesting thing is the testimony bore that out. The latter obviously, of course, and I'll spare all the specifics of it, but it was kind of exactly what you thought If you read the report, if you read the takeaways, and obviously we're talking about the part where her referred to President Biden as an elderly man with poor memory. It almost implied that the reason he didn't charge him in the classified documents case was that he was kind of taking pity on him or that he was kind of doing him a favor by not going after this doddering old man, when in reality that wasn't the case at all. It really was because they were unable to prove, or he to be fair to her. He did not find any intent or action that rose to the level of criminality to justify a prosecution. So for that, in that very limited scope, her did his job.

Speaker 1: 2:57

I would argue that anybody that took a fair and honest approach to that case would have come up with the same conclusion. So let's not start a parade down Main Street for Robert Her, because he met the very bare minimum of his job, which was to come up with a fair conclusion based on the facts and where the facts took him. However, what he did above and beyond that is what would made it much worse, which is he used his special counsel report as a platform to provide political commentary in a way that would be by far the most quoted, the most cited portion of the story and obviously give ammunition to Republicans to push their narrative that Joe Biden is too old to run for or serve as president of the United States, which has become the argument. Like that's the argument, that's all they've got really, and because, god knows, the last thing they want to do is start talking about policy accomplishments, things of that nature I mean, obviously, the border crime, those classic Republican chestnuts aren't going anywhere, but this is kind of the cheap and easy narrative for people that are going to vote but just don't either don't care enough to get into the facts of issues or are kind of on the fence because they don't have a negative view of Biden, but they do have a negative view of Trump, and this is the way of kind of leveling the playing field and giving people an opportunity to walk away from Biden. I mean, it's obviously what they're doing, right, that's a no-brainer.

Speaker 1: 5:01

So in this hearing, the Democrats, as expected, took a very tactical approach to debunk a lot of what was in the report kind of the editorializing of what was in the report because, honestly, let's look at ourselves how many people actually read the report and they did it in a very effective way, most notably Pennsylvania Congresswoman Madeline Dean, who I absolutely adore. I served with her in the State House on the Judiciary Committee. She's as sharp as it gets and obviously anybody that has watched her for the last couple of years knows she just gets it and she's fantastic. So she really did a great job of kind of taking him apart on some things, and so we've got our dueling narratives coming out of it. Jim Jordan was doing Jim Jordan things and then ran to Fox News and tried to double-triple down and it's all the things you would assume. But here's my question Does any of it matter? Does anything that happened yesterday mean anything? And guess what? The answer is no, it doesn't mean a damn thing. Because and this is where, as Democrats, we get ourselves in trouble One of the big talking points that we have pushed and I think that we believe right is facts matter, the truth matters.

Speaker 1: 6:40

We hear that all the time, we say that all the time, and I believe that. We do truly believe it. I fundamentally believe it. Of course, facts matter, the truth matters, and never more so than during this era of Trump. But but I think we need to understand that there's a second part to that, that you know that philosophy which, by the way, one of the things I've often criticized Democrats for is the inability to bring our messaging into something that could fit on a bumper sticker. Not that that should be the sole extent of our messaging, but Republicans are super good at this and Democrats are super bad at it. And again, when we're looking for those low hanging fruit, low information voters, sometimes you just need a bumper sticker slogan, but we feel the need to over explain and put more words into it. This coming from a guy who's sitting here being verbose in a podcast, but you get what I'm saying Truth matters, facts matter, great, great little slogan. And then it also has the virtue of being true, but there's an end.

Speaker 1: 7:55

But there's a next part to that. Truth matters to some of us, facts matter to some of us, and guess what the people that those things matter to we don't need to convince, we did not need a congressional hearing to convince them of what we already knew to be true. So sure it was damage control and it was furthering the argument and it needed to be done at that point. Sure, but how did we let it get to that point? And I think that if you're looking at kind of the aftermath of this kind of all roads are leading back to Attorney General Merrick Garland. Right, he's the one who appointed Robert Her a special counsel and this has followed this tradition. It drives me crazy to hear about these like unwritten rules of the Justice Department. It's either a rule or it's not a rule. And if it was an unwritten rule for a different time and it has not been codified and the courts have not waited on it, and the Justice Department is designed to be an independent entity because by nature it needs to be, then why the hell are we adhering to unwritten rules? The rules, and it's not even a rule.

Speaker 1: 9:24

The policies of the office should dictate the circumstances that we are in and in this case, in the age of Trump, who is taking advantage and he's the best ever at gaming the system, every system we have to be agile and adapt to what he's doing. You've got to. You know he's making a move. You've got to make a counter move. You've got to. You know he's playing God knows. The last thing I'm gonna do is imply that Trump is intelligent. But he's playing chess and we're playing like I don't even know what we're playing. It's not checkers, it's like checkers with like one checker right and we're like just moving that one checker around the board. It's not even remotely the same and with the stakes being as high as they are, it needs to be so. But we've got it in our mind somehow that if there needs to be a special counsel to investigate a Democrat, we have to make it a Republican. Why? Again, maybe that made sense, you know, 30 years ago. But you know the Clinton, you know special prosecutor, if Ken Starr taught us nothing, it was that it wasn't about the ultimate outcome of that. It was not about finding the truth or any evidence of criminality. It was about finding political weaponry or things that could be weaponized.

Speaker 1: 10:48

Quick note I actually I met Ken Starr once he was speaking at Duquesne Law when I was a student there, and this was like 2000 and sometime between 2000 and 2003. So it was right in the heat of all you know, right after everything had gone down and I was at a pay phone up on the second floor of Duquesne Law with a couple of my friends. Yeah, there were pay phones and inside the law school and I was standing by a pay phone and we were talking about him and about his talk or whatever it was, and I was like, yeah, that guy, that Ken Starr, he's such an asshole and he was standing literally four inches behind me. So that was cool, you know, as a first or second year law student, you know to, you know, to basically call him that right in front of him, that was a good time. So, yeah, so anyway, that was my, that was my experience with the special council.

Speaker 1: 11:50

But anyway, this guy, her think about it. There is no, there is no incentive for him to play this straight or to not find a way to, to try to spin it Right. If he, if he came back and said, found any criminality, then he's a hero to the right. And you know he, quite frankly, he's like you know, let's not kid ourselves he's an ex attorney general. I mean, yeah, they're going to love this guy If he came back and found nothing or did what he did, which is, you know, come back and find, gave the Republicans something out of nothing. He's still, you know, even if he's no longer with the Justice Department. He's you know now, and got his, his pick of places to go private sector, whatever because of Republican darling like. They gave him the easiest political stage ever and he and he took care of it, got the job done.

Speaker 1: 12:49

So we have to get in, to get out of this mindset, of this bizarre sense of bipartisan justice. When we know, when we know what they're trying to do, if you really want it to be fair and above board, a point, somebody you can trust to be fair, to be fair and above board, that's what you do. Because guess what? The Republicans are going to scream, no matter what. They are going to flip a table and go on Fox News and Jim Jordan is going to do Jim Jordan things and all the things that we know, you see.

Speaker 1: 13:37

But you don't give them easy ammunition that's not factually accurate or correct. You just don't do it. And that's what we do every single time, because we have to be appear, we have to put out the appearance of being fair. Well, where have you heard fair and balanced before? Right, like that's? The stakes are too high in this instance and we know what we're dealing with on the other side, which cannot be overstated. That is what makes this, what makes this Necessitates rising up and doing what's right. Criticism be damned, that's the point. And obviously, merrick Garland, we know what. We know what his deal is, going all the way back.

Speaker 1: 14:29

And this idea that we have to be Bend over backwards and give them special treatment, knowing what they're going to do, is the problem. And unfortunately, you know what happened afterwards the second day story, third day story, whatever. It doesn't matter, because the quotes about the president you know as well as I do. We're going to see them forever between now and November. That was handed to them on a platter.

Speaker 1: 15:05

So we've got to be smarter and we can't just rely on this, this Pollyanna's I don't even know if that's a word belief that facts, that just because we know and believe that facts matter, that that, at the end of the day, allows our opponents to do whatever they want.

Speaker 1: 15:25

Because we're right, because it just isn't how it works across the board. If we're talking to our own flank, if we're talking to our own party, that's one thing, but when you're talking to a nation that is so overwhelmed by misinformation, disinformation and it's being put out there and perpetuated by opponents that are so brazen and their willingness to embrace it, and a media that is so willing to repeat it and amplify it for, quite frankly, a lot of the same reasons. Depending over backwards, in the name of fairness, we allow the narrative to be set and we just can't do that. This was an unforced error that is, quite frankly, unacceptable given the stakes, given the circumstances. We have to do better. Do I think we will? I'm not holding my breath. Thank you for tuning in. This has been the Keystone Recording Podcast. We will do this again tomorrow and have a great day.