How Fatal Is CCPVirus? Not Very

How fatal is CCPVirus?

Perversely, that is a question the legacy media has never properly answered, nor even attempted to answer. Of all the legacy media's many journalistic sins in covering the CCPVirus "pandemic", their complete ineptitude and even outright dishonesty in addressing the true dangers and risks from the disease unquestionably ranks at or near the top of the list.

We should not be overly surprised, therefore, that close scrutiny of the data reveals the virus to be significantly less lethal than has been claimed in the legacy media. The legacy media has gotten the CCPVirus story wrong from the very beginning, so it perhaps to be expected that they have bungled the most crucial element of the pandemic narrative--the degree to which the virus actually causes fatal disease.

George Floyd Mattered, Just Not To The Legacy Media

There is no question that George Floyd's death was murder. There is no doubt that Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin had no business kneeling on his neck. There is no doubt that George Floyd's death was an appalling example of police brutality.

Because George Floyd was black and Derek Chauvin is white, many argue that Floyd's death is also an example of inexecusable racism within the Minneapolis Police Department itself. Certainly there have been few facts to rebut that particular charge, although the extent to which racial animus played a role cannot be conclusively established with facts currently available to the public.

How many of those facts will ultimately be made public is a question still to be answered, for once again the legacy media has displayed its usual incompetence, indolence, and indifference to journalism, choosing instead to push narrative, with or without facts.

Tencent Proves Legacy Media "Journalism" Not Worth A Dime

Mark Twain pithily observed in his autobiography that "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." China's official reports on the 2019-nCoV coronavirus sweeping that country may very well be a combination of all three--and the legacy media is enabling Chinese mendacity at every turn.

As of this posting, the number of reported confirmed cases in China is 28,023, with 563 reported deaths. The vast majority of cases are in Wuhan, in Hubei Province, where the disease originated: 19,665 reported confirmed cases, and 549 deaths. There are nearly a thousand cases each in two of China's most economically important provinces, Zhejiang and Guangdong--and yet no reported deaths.

As disconcerting as these official numbers are, marking as they do the spread of the disease from just around 50 reported cases a little more than a month, there has been a persistent undercurrent of stories suggesting they are a fraud, and that the real numbers are far, far worse. This was made plain on February 5, when Taiwan News reported that Chinese social media giant Tencent's "Epidemic Situation Tracker" page had, on February 1, briefly showed statistics ten times the official reported numbers:

On late Saturday evening (Feb. 1), Tencent on its webpage titled "Epidemic Situation Tracker" which showed confirmed cases of novel coronavirus (2019nCoV) in China standing at 154,023, 10 times the official figure at the time. It listed the number of suspected cases as 79,808, four times the official figure. 

The number of cured cases was only 269, well below the official number that day of 300. Most ominously, the death toll listed was 24,589, vastly higher than the 300 officially listed that day.

Coronavirus: The Latest Legacy Media Epic Fail

Whoever said "better late than never" did not work in journalism. They certainly did not cover a fast-moving story such as the coronavirus epidemic sweeping China and threatening the rest of the world.

Yet the legacy media has been tardy if not downright derelict in covering several significant aspects of this ongoing event. It was alternative media and social media that first called attention to the existence of the virus, officially named 2019-nCoV (also referenced as nCoV2019). It has been the alternative media and social media that has highlighted serious shortcomings and outright deceptions by Chinese officials and the state-run media.

Getting The Trump Presidency All Wrong

Within the span of two days, President Donald Trump reminded the world yet again the extent to which the legacy media has completely failed to grasp the essence of the Trump Administration. We are barely into 2020, and already the prevailing narratives surrounding Donald Trump have been completely shredded. Trump accomplished with just two highly surgical air strikes against pro-Iranian Iraqi militias and their Iranian sponsors, the first one resulting in the death of Qassim Suleimani, leader of Iran's Quds Force, and the second targeting part of the leadership of the pro-Iranian Popular Mobilization Forces militia.

(Note: Subsequent reporting suggests the PMF leadership was not killed in this second strike, with the PMF disputing Pentagon claims in this regard. As of this writing much of the reporting is unconfirmed with many details subject to change)

Curtain Call: When Clown World Ends

By now it is virtually a given that the legacy media has abandoned serious journalism and objective reporting in favor of clickbait and propaganda. The evidences are too numerous to deny.

Yet even clickbait and propaganda must yield to the persistence of reality. Write one hundred news articles about the sun rising in the west and tomorrow the sun will still rise in the east. Write one hundred news articles ignoring empirical fact and all one hundred will still be discredited once the facts become clear.

The fatal flaw in the business model of clickbait and propaganda, is that reality always sets in. When it does, we must address the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.

Several events in the past forty-eight hours stand as grim reminders of the inevitability of reality:

1. The Federal Reserve Is Losing Control Of Financial Markets And The Money Supply

A story the legacy media has scrupulously kept off the front page of late has been the slightly panicked efforts of the Federal Reserve to keep liquidity in the inter-bank lending ("repo"--for "repurchase agreement") markets, even to the extent of restarting Quantitative Easing (money printing), without calling it Quantitative Easing.

The Fed is stuck between a rock and a hard place. The Fed's own data shows they have pursued a relentlessly loose money supply since 2008, and their money printing accounts for nearly all financial market gains since 2009. Inspection of the data shows unequivocally the degree to which the Federal Reserve has more or less willfully inflated asset prices, with neither obvious rhyme nor apparent reason. 

Nor is the Fed alone in their lunacy, as Mario Draghi of the European Central Bank has been flooding Europe with new currency while simultaneously pushing interest rates into the negative, an interest rate structure that is quite toxic to any bank operating on a fractional reserve basis.

These events underscore how little control the Federal Reserve has over financial markets, and hint at how little control the Federal Reserve has ever had. Far from the post-2009 narrative of central bankers "saving" the world economy from collapse and catastrophic deflation, we are seeing a very real possibility central bankers may be the cause of the next economic dislocation. Their heroic acts of salvation are being revealed as the doom they have always been hoping to avoid.

2. Lieutenant General Flynn Was Set Up By The FBI

Many commentators, myself included, have argued at length about the injustice attendant on Mueller's persecution-as-prosecution treatment of General Flynn. To that chorus we can now add Sydney Powell,  Flynn's new defense counsel and a longtime critic of prosecution tactics within the Department of Justice. In her latest court filings, she is making a case for a dismissal on all charges against General Flynn, based on outrageous (and arguably criminal) prosecutorial misconduct.

The core of Powell's argument is that former FBI lawyer and former Peter Strzok mistress Lisa Page had a hand in "editing" the form 302 Strzok by law was required to complete after meeting with General Flynn, and that the original notes of Strzok's interview differ dramatically from the narrative contained within the 302--so much so that Powell makes a clear inference the FBI lied to the court.

Without delving deeply into the merits of Sydney Powell's application to the court on behalf of General Flynn, the materials she references point to a disturbing truth: the FBI Form 302 is an edited document. It is not the notes of an interview, but is a report constructed from those notes--and, at least in General Flynn's case, revised to satisfy elements of the "Deep State". 

Nor is this the first time this criticism has been raised. In July of 2011, criminal defense and civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate raised substantially similar arguments about the propriety of the 302, and the power it has within Federal prosecutions. 

Do we know how many 302 forms have been substantially rewritten to satisfy a prosecutor's agenda, not just as regards President Trump's Administration but across the whole of the Federal criminal justice system? We do not, but it is hardly a leap of logic to postulate it is more than one--and to postulate that more than one Federal prosecution is potentially tainted by the FBI essentially manufacturing evidence against a defendant. If Sydney Powell prevails (as I am not an attorney, I do not have an opinion as to whether she will or will not), how many criminal cases might ultimately have to be overturned as a result of establishing FBI malfeasance in a case?

Far from a narrative of the Mueller Investigation proving the corruption of Donald Trump, the facts of the Mueller Investigation are proving the corruption of the FBI and the reality of the Deep State within the bureaucracy of the Federal government.

3. US Attorney John Durham Is Opening A Criminal Investigation Into The Russian Collusion Hoax

Narratives notwithstanding, the Mueller Investigation into what must now be acknowledged as the Russian Collusion Hoax was an unmitigated disaster for the legacy media and those deeply invested in that narrative. Robert Mueller drove a stake through the heart of any theory President Trump colluded, conspired, or cooperated with Russian government actors. He did not.

What Mueller did establish by demolishing the narrative of Russian Collusion was that there were those within and without the Federal government willing to deceive, dissemble, and outright lie in order to bring down the Trump Presidency. Even as Mueller failed to follow up with indictments of Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, the investigation did reveal the corruption and mendaciousness behind the efforts to unseat President Trump.

Politicians attempting to sabotage and upstage their opponents is nothing new.  What is at the very least "different", however, is the extent to which people were willing to go in that sabotage, all dutifully written up by a compliant legacy media. US Attorney John Durham is accumulating evidence of that extent, and has reached a tentative conclusion that there was a bit of criminality involved. As the Russian Collusion narrative collapses, people find themselves running afoul of the very laws they casually dismissed.

The media pursued and peddled the myth of Russian Collusion from well before the start of the Mueller investigation until Mueller's sad denouement before the House Judiciary Committee. Mueller's ultimate debunking of that hoax shredded the legacy media's credibility, even as it cost them dearly in terms of ratings and viewers.

Those who pursued the narrative of Russian Collusion relentlessly are now at risk of seeing that narrative boomerang directly back at them.

Narrative is fiction. Consequences are reality. 

This is the eternal danger of narrative: regardless of the fictions spun in pursuit of the narrative, the consequences are firmly bound to reality.

Narrative is fiction. Consequences are reality. 

This has always been so. As Matt Taibibi notes in his deconstruction of the media hysteria surrounding the Russian Collusion Hoax, the narrative of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction was fed by government bureaucrats wanting an excuse to invade Iraq. The consequence was an invasion of Iraq, with thousands of American soldiers dead, thousands more horribly injured, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and injured, and a country that is barely governed, and has given succor to the likes of ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorists.

Nor is this a recent phenomenon: The 1898 sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor helped propel the United States into war with Spain, driven in large part by salacious and sloppy reporting by the "Yellow Press" of the day. The narrative of Spanish sabotage and sloganeering resulted in real war, with thousands of real deaths.

Narrative is fiction. Consequences are reality.

This is the constant caution we must heed as we read and watch either the legacy media or the alternative media bidding to replace it. News stories are, first and foremost, stories. At best they are a restatement of reality, one journalist's reinterpretation of facts as he or she observes them to be. At worst, they are a departure from reality. Most lie somewhere in between.

What no story in the media, legacy or alternative, can ever be is reality itself. A news report quoting an individual is not the reality of either that individual or that quote, but merely a citation of the fact that said individual made said quote. Whether the story contains sufficient nuance, sufficient context, to frame such quote properly is inherently problematic. All media reporting operates within that limitation.

Every story, be it objective reporting or Clown World propaganda, must come to an end. After that final paragraph, after that closing statement, reality invariably sets in. The real world returns in full force, every time. It is in the real world that we must live, and it is in the real world that we must choose, decide, and act. It is in the real world that consequences will apply.

Narrative is fiction. Consequences are reality.

We are well advised to be mindful of the consequences, not only to ourselves but to the central characters of any narrative. If a government official becomes a "whistleblower", what will become of him? If a Congressman or Senator becomes embroiled in controversy, what outcomes are just and proper? If American troops are dispatched into an overseas conflict, how many of them will not come back alive?

The news events of the past week have been a stark reminder that narratives end, that Clown World must end. What remains is the equally stark reality--the reality of the parlous nature of our economy, the reality of prosecutorial abuse of General Flynn, the reality of the crimes committed in advancing the Russian Collusion Hoax. That the legacy media is shamelessly starting new narratives, new arcs for their propaganda, will not change the reality by so much as a punctuation mark.

The curtain call comes for every drama. The denouement awaits every narrative. Clown World must end. Reality will prevail--every time. Be prepared for reality, not for Clown World.

Narrative is fiction. Consequences are reality.

All The World's A Stage. All The Media Are Very Bad Actors

What are people to do when the legacy media DELIBERATELY LIE?

Are any of them capable of telling the truth about #Syria? Or anything else?

Never trust the media. Verify instead.

This was the question I posed on social media earlier, after reading Paul Joseph Watson's Summit News article about journalist Kurt Eichenwald using a phony image to promote a false narrative regarding President Trump's recent decisions to pull back in Syria.

Sadly, this was not the only outright lie told by the legacy media on this story. ABC News spread a video of a live-fire display at a Kentucky military show as footage of actual combat in Syria. They were quickly forced to retract the video and tweet out an apology of sorts.

Additionally, while it is difficult to confirm, the media's reports of massacred Christians and Kurds in Syria by the invading Turkish army are at least somewhat contradicted by other reports claiming no such massacres have occurred.

Nor is Syria the only recent example of deliberate Fake News. A recent Fox News poll purportedly showing a significant upsurge in support for the impeachment and removal of President Trump was so obviously and ham-handedly skewed that even Fox News commntators felt obliged to call it out.

The legacy media is also the mendacious media. The legacy media is the lying media.

Why do they lie?

Certainly ratings is one reason. Some media organizations, such as McClatchy, have latched on to Fake News as a means of financial survival. They've made the conscious decision that tabloid trash is more reliable revenue than objective journalism.

Personal biases and hatreds is another. As Project Veritas documents in their "Expose CNN" piece, Jeff Zucker, the head of CNN, hates President Trump with a passion, and so all CNN news is targeted against Donald Trump, facts and journalism be damned.

If malice is not enough motive, there is also stupidity--witness the New York Times trundling out yet again the ludicrous and discredited notion the 25 Amendment is a substitute for actual impeachment.

The legacy media is not merely getting stories wrong. These are not accidents. These are deliberate efforts to misinform and misguide the public. These are deliberate efforts to ignore important stories and essential contexts to promote demonstrably false narratives. 

While the legacy media is pushing their propaganda, they are also ignoring central banks openly discussing the possibility of a financial system collapse and a return to the gold standard.

While the legacy media is pushing their propaganda, they are ignoring a growing body of real, verifiable evidence contradicting every aspect of the Democrats latest machination to impeach Donald Trump.

While the legacy media is pushing their propaganda, they remain committed to ignoring the dangers and potentials for harm their narratives can bring, as one young woman improperly given transgender hormonal therapies discovered to the permanent detriment of her health.

While the legacy media is pushing their propaganda, they shamelessly ignore other aspects of complex stories such as Brexit, only to be caught flat-footed when the EU blinks and admits that it needs a Brexit deal perhaps even more than the UK.

What the legacy media is showing is that it is not enough to merely have a free press. A free society must have a free press that is committed to freedom. A free society must have a free press that seeks to inform even as it seeks to increase its revenue streams. People cannot make wise and informed decisions if they are prevented from having all relevant and available information, and what we are witnessing is the intentional efforts by the legacy media to withhold or corrupt that information.

Without a commitment to a full presentation of the facts, and honest coverage of all stories, not just the preferred narratives. we do not have a truly free press. By promoting propaganda, the legacy media are chained to propaganda.

What can the ordinary reader do about this? That was the question posed initially, and that is the question that must be answered.

Of course there is the obvious response: "Never trust. Verify instead."  No reader should blithely trust any media source. As i have stated, and as alt media journalist Tim Pool states repeatedly, "fact check me." Challenge what journalists, analysts, and commentators say, whether they are legacy media or alt media.

Accept that every media source is biased. CNN obviously is, and so is the New York Times. So is Tim Pool. So am I. Anyone presenting information will always present it through the lens of his own perceptions and perspectives. Anyone saying they are completely "objective" is lying, including to themselves.

Recognize there is a difference between "infotainment" and actual news. The first seeks only to entertain, while the second seeks to educate and inform. The bulk of the legacy media, particularly the online cable television shows, falls under the catgory of infotainment. Approach it with caution.

Recognize also that what matters most are the facts. It does not matter if a quote appears in the New York Times, or CNN, or in WND, or in the Epoch Times. It does not matter where a bit of commentary or analysis resides, be it this blog or the Washington Post or even Infowars. The facts are what they are, and opinions are as they are.  Take all of them with a grain of salt, and formulate your own opinions, your own understanding of things.

Understand that narratives frame the news. Narratives are never the news, and should not be taken as news. It might be entertaining to watch Hannity air his opinions for an hour every night, but his opinions about the evils of the Democrats or the virtues of Donald Trump are simply that--his opinions. The same holds true for Rachel Maddow, Laura Ingraham, and even the alt media personalities such as Wayne Dupree and Tim Pool.

Note that observation is not criticism. I follow both Wayne Dupree and Tim Pool on social media, and I pay attention to what they have to say. I take note of Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham as well. I do not disparage them by saying their content is primarily opinion, I merely acknowledge the limitations inherent in such content. My own material suffers from the same limitations. These are my thought, my ideas, my opinions; they are never more nor less than this.

As a side note, please recognize that I am deliberately not linking to any of the media personalities I mention here. All are readily found online, and I encourage one and all to look them up, along with the many others a simple search engine query will reveal. Their mention is not an endorsement of either their content or their views, merely an acknowledgement they exist.

Which is the final recommendation I have for confronting a mendacious and duplicitous legacy media. Recognize that alternative outlets and sources do exist. Do not shy away from Breitbart, or the Epoch Times, or CNS, or One America News Network, merely because they fall outside that pool of media sources collectively termed "legacy media". If they present good arguments built on good information using good logic their material is as worthy of consideration as any celebrity talking head on Fox, CNN, or MSNBC. The one thing the Internet has brought all of us is a proliferation of choices--seek out and embrace all of it.

Read broadly. Read critically. Read for quality, and reward quality. Set high expectations for those who would call themselves "journalists". Critique, criticize, and challenge everything and everyone.

All the world is indeed a stage. Sadly, all the media are indeed very bad actors upon that stage. All the media is susceptible to the perils of shoddy presentation, inadequate research, and incomplete analysis. All the media is susceptible to the corruption of coin--clickbait is often more lucrative and easier to produce than solid fact-based news.

If we are to once again have a truly free press, the one thing we must absolutely stop doing is trusting the press. Doubt and skepticism must become our cardinal virtues whenever we read anything that would presume to present "the news".

Do not trust anything. Verify everything.

Does The Media Know Why The Yuan Triggered A Euro Drop?

The major news story of this last Monday in August, 2019, was the seeming collapse of the Chinese yuan against the dollar, and the resulting newfound willingness of China to resume trade negotiations with the United States. Depending on the particular bias of the news channel, this was either an a) uncontrolled drop in the yuan by currency investors fearful of Trumpian economic Armageddon, b) China playing hardball by deliberately dropping the yuan, or c) a sign of the "inevitable" Trump victory in the US trade "war" with China.

For the record, I think all three views are basically fertilizer, put designed to gratify the biases of a particular audience, with little regard to reality.

One problem with these simplistic monochromatic views of currency events is that they ignore other events that happen concurrent to the main narrative--events that indicate a different, larger, and more complex narrative applies. A news story that has been almost a footnote to the yuan collapse bears far more scrutiny than it has received: at the same time the yuan dived against the dollar, the euro dropped as well, and continued to trend down the rest of the day.

First, consider the yuan vs the dollar during the day's trading (26 August 2019):

The yuan dropped as much as 0.7% in overnight trading, before stabilizing--according to the financial chattering class, this was a collapse. However, the Euro began dropping as well a few hours after the yuan, and then continued to trend down the rest of the day.

The drop in the yuan itself is not hard to fathom: as the exporter in US-China trade talks, its currency is far more sensitive to tariff and other pressures, and the recent ratcheting up of trade rhetoric by Presidents Xi and Trump only serve to magnify those pressures. But how does a ramping up of trade tensions between the US and China weaken the Euro against the dollar? One would expect the flight-to-safety response to flow the other direction, from the dollar towards the Euro, as that is the direction presumably away from the trade conflict.

However, there is another data point that is perhaps relevant to this discussion: Germany's recent slide into recession is being blamed in part on weakening demand from China. The currency movements of the past day do seem to confirm that hypothesis--that any sort of economic downturn in China reverberates around the world to Europe. To be sure, there have been a number of warning signals coming from China of late, not the least of which is a slow-motion banking crisis, with China having bailed/nationalized three banks in as many months, with 19 banks that are either insolvent or about to be.

A full exploration of the interlocking relationships between the economies of Europe and that of China is beyond the scope of a single blog essay, and it is not my intention to explore that here. However, the little regarded drop in the Euro, coming as it does on the heels of a steep drop in th yuan, does confirm the influence the Chinese economy has over Europe. As goes China, it seems, so goes Europe.

That Europe is headed into recession is by now no longer news, but established fact. Yet if China is a leading indicator for Europe, and Europe is in a recession, does that not indicate significant economic weakness in China? While the legacy financial media is largely silent on this point, other than to note the linkage between Europe and China in passing, that linkage coupled with Europe's growing economic woes suggests that China's economic situation is rather more dire than the Chinese media will admit. With a raft of secondary indicators indicating significant economic weakness in China already, perhaps Europe provides a curious if counterintuitive confirmation of the depth of China's woes.

While the legacy media does acknowledge the levels of integration in the global economy, when discussing headline events such as the latest developments in the trade war between the United States and China, the reporting invariably reduces the story arc to simple linear causal relationship. Trump ratcheting up trade rhetoric along with President Xi is deemed the trigger for the drop in the yuan, and the decline in the euro is blandly written off as a flight-to-safety reaction. This despite the fact that a flight to safety would be in the opposite direction than what was observed. 

The one thing that seems certain about the legacy media's prognostications about the state of the world is that they have the narrative all wrong. With respect to China and Europe, they have it provably wrong, which only begs the question what else do the chattering class "experts" have completely wrong?

---

Note: the currency graphs are courtesy of xe.com and were obtained using the following search parameters at the time of writing:

• Yuan to US Dollar: https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=CNY&to=USD&view=1D
• Euro to US Dollar: https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=EUR&to=USD&view=1D

Unreasonable Voices (aka Liberal Liars)

Matt Yglesias

I originally titled my contribution to the blogosphere "A Reasoned Voice" both as a reminder to myself and a suggestion to others--that while discussion and debate should be passionate, even heated, it accomplishes little if it is not firmly grounded in facts, in reality, and in (above all) reason. How reasoned my voice is I leave for others to judge, but I do believe I have largely held to that standard in my occasional offerings herein, even as I restyled this blog "A Voice Of Liberty".

I am therefore reasonably frustrated when I come across commentaries such as that from blogger Matt Yglesias from Think Progress, who takes issue with a Rick Perry comment about Federal Reserve Chairman Benjamin Bernanke.

Governor Perry, speaking in Iowa yesterday (Monday, 15 August 2011), offered up the following opinion of Ben Bernanke and his policies of "quantitative easing"--printing money to stimulate the economy:

If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion.

Yglesias' opprobrium towards Perry comes from the rather banal observation that treason is a capital offense (and--not mentioned by Yglesias--is the only crime specifically defined in the Constitution). Yglesias is correct on that point, and he is well within his rights to be irritated or even outraged at Governor Perry's comment. Where Yglesias departs from fact and his rights is how he promoted that particular blog entry on Twitter:

Rick Perry proposes lynching Ben Bernanke

Merriam-Webster defines the verb "lynch" thusly:

to put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal sanction

The Constitution of the United States defines "treason" thusly (Article 3 Section 3):

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. 

The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

Federal statute--18 USC §2381--declares treason punishable by death:

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

Such, then, are the facts surrounding Governor Perry's comment.

Could quantitative easing be considered "treason" per the Constitution? One could argue--albeit facetiously--that printing money, thus debasing the US Dollar, strengthens adversarial nations such as China and Russia, and would therefore fall under the heading of giving them "aid and comfort." It is a flimsy argument at best, laughable at worst, but it is an argument that can be made. 

It is also an argument Governor Perry conspicuously did not make; his condemnation was clear--more quantitative easing was "almost treasonous". Governor Perry's meaning is quite obvious: printing money is not helpful to the United States or the US economy. There is no second plausible interpretation of his words. Those words are a rhetorically forceful but cogent and valid statement of his view of proper fiscal and monetary policy. Those words are not an accusation of any crime, not even treason.

Further, an accusation of a crime, even if that were the import of Governor Perry's words, is not in and of itself a call to vigilante justice. Saying that "...we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas" is colorful, even perhaps provincial, but it does not suggest vigilantism. 

Matt Yglesias is quite within his rights to disagree with Governor Perry's opinions. That disagreement deserves to be heard, for it is necessary if there is to be vigorous debate on the issues pressing this country hard. To broadcast via twitter that Governor Perry suggested lynching Ben Bernanke is quite simply libelous, and arguably libel per se--which is defined as follows:

broadcast or written publication of a false statement about another which accuses him/her of a crime, immoral acts, inability to perform his/her profession, having a loathsome disease (like syphilis) or dishonesty in business. Such claims are considered so obviously harmful that malice need not be proved to obtain a judgment for "general damages," and not just specific losses.

I can understand that liberals do not like Governor Perry--I can quite easily fathom why liberal commentators such as Matt Yglesias are intimidated by Governor Perry's uncompromising rhetoric. Governor Perry uses language that is clear and unmistakable to stake out political and even moral/ethical stands that are equally clear and unmistakable; to respond effectively to such language would require an equally clear stance of opposition--something many would prefer to avoid. Yet when one's rhetorical arsenal is nothing but outright lies, surely that only strengthens one's opponent. It surely does not advance or improve the debate at hand.

Matt Yglesias lied about Governor Perry. He lied, and he libeled by lying. Thus does he cede credibility and correctness to Governor Perry.

Matt Yglesias lied about Governor Perry, and the blogosphere is diminished for his lie. The political process is diminished for his lie. Think Progress is diminished for his lie. 

Matt Yglesias should stop lying or stop blogging. There is no ethically sound third alternative.