RUTHFULLY YOURS

Have you heard of “Sharpiegate?”

Hurricane Dorian recently pulverized portions of the Bahamas. The loss in property and human life has not yet been tabulated but is sure to be historic. On September 1, President Trump tweeted: “In addition to Florida – South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated. Looking like one of the largest hurricanes ever. Already category 5. BE CAREFUL! GOD BLESS EVERYONE!” You know, like the racist monster he is. 

Then the National Weather Service in Birmingham tweeted a correction, “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east.” 

If President Obama had made the same mistake, nobody would have thought a thing about it. For whatever reason, the president found it necessary to explain why he made the mistake by holding up a weather map he says he saw before making the warning about Alabama. Somebody added a line extending the projected path of the hurricane to demonstrate why he thought, at one point, that Alabama might be in the path of Dorian. 

Given that it was President Trump who made the mistake, the legacy media decided to abandon its coverage of the deadly storm threatening Americans to focus on something far more important: How can this mistake be used to get rid of Donald Trump?

The Washington Post supplied a ready answer reminiscent of so many efforts to criminalize anything the president says or does: Trump committed a crime by drawing on a weather map. 

Say what now? 

Yes, it’s an absolutely deranged interpretation of the law, but let’s follow the derangement for the purpose of plumbing the depths to which the Washington Post has sunk. The post cited a provision of federal law: “Whoever knowingly issues or publishes any counterfeit weather forecast or warning of weather conditions falsely representing such forecast or warning to have been issued or published by the Weather Bureau, United States Signal Service, or other branch of the Government service, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ninety days, or both.”

Fortunately, this “crime” was caught on video and you can watch for yourself as the federal offense unfolds. “We got lucky in Florida,” Trump said. “Very very lucky indeed. We had actually, our original chart was that it was going to hitting Florida directly . . . .” He then motions for the “Sharpied” weather map. “And would have affected a lot of other states. But that was the original chart and you see it was going to hit not only Florida but Georgia. It could have . . . it was going toward the Gulf [of Mexico] and that was what was originally projected.”

The chart says exactly what he says it says. It shows the projected path of a hurricane crossing Florida. Presuming the hurricane continued on the same trajectory, the chart implied that the storm would indeed strike the Gulf Coast. Somebody filled in this implied path with an additional loop drawn by a sharpie that simply extended the path implied by the original chart.

Since then, the really smart anti-Trumpers have delighted in extending the joke. The Lithuanian clickbait site Bored Panda put together a collection of Sharpiegate memes to mock the president. In one, a Sharpie is used to fill in more attendees at the inauguration. In another, a Sharpie is used to make Trump appear taller when standing next to Obama. There’s another in which Trump’s promised border wall is drawn into a picture of a desert.

The Washington Post clucked that the president, “undermined” trust and, “while his stunt might be written off as fodder for late-night comics, it’s no joking matter: Falsified forecasts can put lives at risk, something the National Weather Service has been protecting us from for more than a century.”

Allow me to straighten this upside-down picture: President Trump expressed concern for Americans in the path of the hurricane. He mistakenly relied on an outdated map that was soon overcome by more recent information. When he tried to explain that the mistake resulted from good intentions but slightly outdated information, the press savagely mocked him because, for those soulless jackals, getting Trump is far more important than pulling together as a country to support victims of hurricanes. 

Sharpiegate is a perfect reflection of the missing morality on the in the souls of the elite get-Trump forces.  They have no fear of condemnation for their callous indulgence of their get-Trump opiate in the face of an unfolding natural disaster that threatens their fellow Americans. In the get-Trump era, mocking the president works as a substitute for talent and accuracy. That’s why comedians are no longer funny and journalists don’t bother fact-checking stories. They don’t need to because if it’s done to get-Trump, there are no standards with which they must comply.