Quote:
Originally Posted by Trolly McTrollson
I don't want the left to get into a war of unsupported claims, because there's no way we win on that front. OTOH, I have a ton of confidence that if we dig in and investigate, we'll find that Trump genuinely screwed the pooch.
Ugh. You are approaching the game wrong. It's not about a "war of unsupported" claims, it's about pushing your narrative.
The right doesn't simply succeed by throwing unsupported claims around in a vacuum and hoping they will overwhelm the listener. They push claims that feed into pre-existing narratives that the base agrees with. It takes advantage of confirmation bias and makes the need for fact-checking less relevant -- if one story turns out to be untrue or less true than it initially appeared, the base
does not care because they still believe the overarching narrative. Maybe the most significant political lesson from Trump's campaign was just how powerful this concept is.
You can see this on the liberal side, too. The dominant narrative on the left right now is that Trump has authoritarian tendencies. If someone points out that Trump action X has a parallel in Obama action Y, does the narrative fall apart? Of course not - Obama was not an authoritarian and Trump is. I am not trying to point out liberal hypocrisy here, although of course it exists to a degree. I am just pointing out how these individual incidents get batched together into a broader political message whether or not they fit neatly into that message.
The narrative we're talking about re: this botched raid is "Trump is incompetent." There's tons of debate to be had about the extent to which that applies to this particular incident, but missing the opportunity to push that narrative because we can't 100% verify it is a political error, through and through.