Gish Gallop

I'm sorry to be posting so much, but there is so much going on that needs to be recorded.

In relation to that, I want to familiarize people with a concept that will be increasingly relevant between now and November, called the "Gish Gallop."

This is a tactic alleged to have been perfected by one Duane Gish, a hard core creationist loon, although obviously it has existed since the dawn of civilization.  It consists in telling so many lies in rapid succession that your opponents cannot possibly discredit all of them in the time allowed.  It requires only one sentence to tell a lie, but providing the facts to disprove it normally takes much longer, so in any kind of debate or news situation, people who care about the truth are acting with a massive handicap.

We have certainly seen the lying pouring out of the Republicans for decades.  The last Republican candidate set a new record for lying that many people thought would be hard to beat, but what we are seeing now makes that look like child's play.  The combination of lies, smears, hatred and incitement of violence coming from the Trump camp is so gargantuan that there may well be no way to combat it.  So many of his lies are just falling by the wayside, muscled aside almost immediately by new abominations.  Virtually ignored just in the last couple of days, for example, are Trump's lie claiming that the NFL wrote a letter to him protesting the scheduling of a couple of Presidential debates on nights of football games, which the NFL denies, and his lies about a fire Marshall in Colorado restricting the size of his audience because he was a tool of Hillary, rather than the fact that he was merely enforcing fire codes.  It should be noted, by the way, that not only was this a lie, but it shows how extreme Republican attitudes toward regulation would become under a Trump administration, where even the most incontrovertibly necessary regulations, like fire codes, would be eliminated if they stood in the Republicans' way.  Trump's dishonesty about this incident did not stop there.  He claimed that the fire Marshall kept a thousand people out of the hall.  In fact, independent news sources reported that there were no more than fifty people outside.

So, as I say, it is more than a full time job to keep up with this malignant maniac, and many things worthy of publicity are going to get lost in the tsunami of dishonesty we are going to see between now and November.  I'm trying to keep up, but it's a pretty hopeless task, particularly when, apparently, forty percent of the adult population of this country has decided that human decency and even sanity mean nothing, if they stand in the way of the apocalyptic disaster they seem to want to engulf the world, above all else in life.