Almalieque wrote:
Gbaji wrote:
leaps to conclusions (often very wrong) before facts are in
I'm not denying this, but can you provide an example? I can't think of situation where this would apply.
With Obama? Well, right out of the gate (haha!), there's the whole "the police acted badly" statement made with regard to Harvard professor Gates. A statement made absent facts, and completely incorrect (they behaved exactly as they should have, and it was the professor who acted badly).
There's his labeling of Trevon Martin as someone who would be just like his son if he had one. Well, before the facts came out that this supposedly nice innocent kid wasn't nearly so nice after all.
He was at least a bit less blatant when it came to Ferguson, but he (and others in his administration) tended to use language that encouraged protest and violence rather than that which might have actually calmed things down. Um... But he's had an alarmingly regular trend of automatically picking a "side" based on the skin color of those involved, as illustrated by these first thee examples.
Um... Then there's the whole Benghazi thing, which while he may have gotten smart enough to stay out of directly, he still managed to have his surrogates make false statements about the attack, and the perpetuate them later, and he himself failed to clearly correct things until very very long after he should have.
His statements about the Egypt protests being "democracy in action", despite the fact that there's nothing democratic about what happened. Ok. Less "leaping to conclusions" and more "painting something as something it's not", but still. The point is that he was declaring the process to be a good thing before he knew what the outcome was going to be, or who would take control after the government was overthrown. And, as it turned out, the folks who gained control were not great people we wanted in place.
I could make a similar comment about his actions and statements with regard to Libya in general. This leads into the Benghazi issue, but was ultimately based on him declaring Libya to be a success (in contrast to Bush's supposed failure in Iraq), well before the facts were in. So, we could call this leaping to a conclusion (or maybe just wishful thinking) before having all the facts. And this one cost 4 lives.
Maybe not perfect examples, but he consistently uses language designed to downplay any terrorist association when it's some kind of violence associated with Islam, but has no problem perpetuating the idea that any violence associated with white Americans must be some form of domestic terrorism. And that's when he isn't jumping right to the gun control angle. See the recent shooting by the Muslim couple for an example of this. I watched his press release just a couple hours after the attack and was amazed at how willing he was to jump on the "mass shooting needs gun control" angle well before the facts were in. And, once again, it turned out that he was wrong. It was a planned act of terrorism, not a mass shooting by some crazy gun nuts.
The funny thing about Obama's statements like this is that once he makes them, when they turn out to be wrong, the media, rather than jumping on him for it (because they're mostly liberal and thus "on his side"), tends to provide cover. They downplay the reality and ignore the false statement's he made. He basically puts out these statements that are so bold and so impossible to re-interpret that the media either has to call him a liar, or just ignore it. And they repeatedly choose to just ignore it. Which speaks volumes about media bias itself.
A gross example of this was Candy Crowley incorrectly fact checking for Obama in the second debate in 2012. Romney was correct. Obama had not called Benghazi a planned terrorist attack and by his silence had tacitly allowed the incorrect statements made by his own state department to stand as the (completely false) "official record" in the eyes of most media consumers. But Crowley, in what was a bizarre breach of the role of a debate moderator, chose to step into the exchange, declare that Obama had done this and Romney was wrong. Thus providing Obama both cover for the issue itself *and* providing cover for the false cover. If Obama had countered Romney, he could be fact checked and shown to have made a false statement in the debate to the American people. But if Crowley does it, Obama gets the same benefit of the "win" in the debate itself, but doesn't suffer any followup, since he didn't actually say anything false in the debate.
I could probably find many more examples. Obama has a terrible habit of jumping onto events and applying a politically useful narrative to them, even when the facts don't fit that narrative. And he tends to do this well before those facts are known, presumably to set said narrative early and make it difficult for the truth to be revealed (because then the media would have to say that Obama was wrong), once the facts are known.
My point is that Trump has a similar failing. He tends to shoot off his mouth, making broad declarations about things before he knows the facts about them. Which leads to some hilarious backpedaling sometimes, or in others he takes the same "challenge the audience to call him a liar" take that Obama uses. I find this to be a bad habit regardless of which party affiliation the person has.