Spicer said a press briefing Monday, “The Trump doctrine is something that he articulated throughout the campaign, which is that America’s first. We are going to make sure that our national interests our protected, that we do what we can to make sure our interests both economically and national security are at the forefront.”
“We aren’t going to just become the world’s policemen running around the world,” Spicer added. “We have to have a clear and defined interest wherever we act, and it’s our national security first and foremost that has to deal with how we act.”
After Trump administration Press Secretary Sean Spicer rebuked the media for accurately reporting the relatively small crowds at President Donald Trump’s inauguration, senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Spicer wasn’t lying; he was simply using “alternative facts.”"Alternative facts" = bullshit.
A report in the The Washington Post (January 23, 2017) – The Trump administration just told a whopper about the size of the federal workforce – caught my attention earlier this week because it cut across some work I had been doing on public employment. The headline is self-explanatory – the accusation was that Sean Spicer lied in his first press briefing following the inauguration of the new President. The reporter in question (Christopher Ingraham) promoted his article with a Tweet and accompanying image which was then circulated widely on the Internet. The graph is what attracted my attention given that I rarely read the Washington Post, since it sold pages to the likes of Peter Peterson and allowed propaganda to parade as news. In this case, the problem was that the graph provided was highly misleading and didn’t refute anything that Sean Spicer had said about US federal government employment. Spicer had lied. But the Washington Post tweet didn’t prove that. This failing highlights an often-made confusion in the public – the difference between proportions and levels and the way graphs can lure us into wrongful conclusions. The sort of puzzle that young students in statistics are taught to work through. The other point is that employment freezes degrade public services and end up not saving cash anyway....Bill Mitchell – billy blog
