Trump, Comforting Lies, And Totalitarianism

The news is all so terrible now that I can't stand to look at it. Ditto, Facebook. I enjoy YouTube, like most people, and there was a time when I might watch the new “Trump fans say the damnedest things” video. Through it all, the common thread is the constant stream of bald-faced lies from Trump, and the constant chorus of “hell, yeah!” from his fans and enablers. It has grown tiresome, at least for me it has. There are mysterious aspects to this phenomenon.

I don't know the people in the YouTube videos, so it's easy to dismiss them as uneducated Rubes and borderline cretins. They believe everything that Trump or Fox News tells them, even if they have seen the truth with their own eyes (things that are contrary to statements that Trump has made that were rebroadcast on TV thousands of times). They believe lies that are chronologically impossible (President Obama was in office and totally responsible for 9/11). They appear to be in some kind of fugue state, where all of the lines of reality have lost their power to bind. These people appear to be stupid.

It's harder to accept that they are being stupid when you see it on Facebook and it's people that you have known for many decades. You know that these people are not stupid, not at all, not even close. Not crazy, either. It's people that went through some kind of education and on to successful family lives. Many of them are very prosperous, as a result of either some kind of business ownership or a cleverly managed career in a lucrative field. And yet they, like the actual Rubes and ignoramuses, blithely repeat impossible lies or repost horrible calumnies against Democratic politicians, or anyone else that their echo chamber has focused their hatred on. They praise Trump to the high heaven and talk about the imaginary great job that he has done on the economy, diplomacy, jobs, the military, and immigration, among many other things. Why they do this is a mystery, or it was until the miracle of reading books provided a partial/ possible answer this week.

I read, no, it's too much to say that I “read” the New York Times every day. I do subscribe, and I do scan the entire portal every morning, but I only read half a dozen or eight of the articles on average. You can get some good information from that. I also scan things like the Raw Story; the Daily Beast; Slate; Salon; Truthdig; and Think Progress. I also subscribe to the Atlantic Magazine and Harper's Magazine. I don't read every word of those, either, but I read a lot. My experience of life, however, has taught me that to become really informed one must take up actual books and read them. This point was driven home in the last week or so.

I've been reading references to Hannah Arendt in serious articles for decades now, and she is a remarkably lucid and quotable woman. Was, if you consider that she died many years ago. I finally took the plunge and put a famous book of hers on my Kindle. A piece of one, actually. I was afraid that the entirety of “Origins of Totalitarianism” would be too much for me, so I ordered a copy of “Totalitarianism,” which is the last of the three parts of that larger work. The fact that the three sections of the book are available individually reassures me that I am not the only lazy person around here. I've been filing up a notebook with quotes, but my purpose today is simple and straightforward. The book provides a valuable clue as to why otherwise intelligent and moral people would believe such impossible lies and support such unacceptable behavior. I'm here to share it. 

Ms. Arendt talks at length about the mob, and mass man (people being handled in bulk, having lost their individuality), and the conditions under which totalitarian ideologies thrive. The key seems to be periods of rapid change, changes in people's social status and financial security, changes in society, in societal mores and norms, changes in borders and identities and politics, changes of all kinds that are so fast and furious that people look for relief. They can't take the uncertainty of it all. This could explain why so many of our family and friends have jumped on the crazy train, since America and the world have been adding new technologies, new people, and new ideas at a previously unheard of rate. The combination of chaos, uncertainty, and loss of status has made them look for solutions to their psychological and emotional suffering. An ideology, or a demagogue, appears with a way out. It is, of course, a house of cards built of lies, but people are in such a dismal condition that they prefer the certainty of the lies to the uncertainty of the facts around them. The lies are consistent, which is comforting, as opposed to the facts, which are chaotic. This dynamic was played out in the episodes of Nazism in Germany, and Soviet Communism in Russia. Communism in China too, I suppose. If one were prone to worry, one might suspect that it is playing out in the United States today.

It is more likely, however, that we will experience only some kind of dictatorship, rather than the full-blown totalitarian experience. My guess is a dictatorship not of one individual, but rather of a small class of people, or families. An oligarchy, with the extremely wealthy installed as the decision makers behind some kind of Potemkin Village of optical-illusion democracy.

Is it time to start worrying about that result? No, not at all. It's way past time. That's what we have already.

Old Fox News

This is an excerpt from a post on January 11, 2011. It’s still true that I only see Fox in hotels, but I’m traveling less than I used to. I still find the absence of any information or news on Fox a bit shocking, and the over-coifed and overcaffeinated news readers are still pushing the same evil agenda in their opinion pieces. That agenda would be that conservatives are good, peaceful people who only want what is best for America, and anyone left of about the seventy-yard line is an evil socialist who wishes to do terrible, violent harm to America and Americans. You’d think people would be tired of it by now, but you’d be wrong.

Okay, here’s the old blog quote:

“Fox News is always entertaining, especially if you enjoy getting very angry. This weekend the big news was the shooting in Arizona of a congresswoman and lots of other people. Boy, that was one talented shooter right there, what a score he ran up! If he had practiced reloading more diligently, he could have set some kind of record.

“He’d been complaining about the whole “Big Government” thing on the Internet, bitching about immigrants and “ignorance,” Jews, and “them.” He belonged to some kind of organization, “American Renaissance” or something. Where have I been hearing stuff like this for years?

“Fox News immediately went into heavy damage-control rotation. The kid, they said, was obviously a lone nut job who could not have been influenced by political rhetoric because of his insanity. Geraldo called the shooter a “drug-addled lunatic,” based on the fact that he had failed a drug screening when he tried to join the Army. It was reported that he had attended a rally for the congresswoman in 2007, offered as proof that he could not have been influenced by the last two election cycles. With their best straight faces on, the Fox news readers reported that “the Left” was trying to make political capital of the incident by claiming that “Conservatives” were somehow to blame.

“This painfully obvious deluge of exculpation only drew attention to the connection between this shooting and things like, “lock and load,” targets superimposed on politician’s faces (including that of this congresswoman when Sarah Palin targeted her for defeat by a Tea Party candidate), “don’t retreat, re-load,” and the nonsense about Second Amendment remedies. Not to mention the lurid conspiracy festival that is Glen Beck, et al.

“I’m glad that I don’t have daily access to Fox News, but it’s okay sometimes to be angered by them. The faces they make! So earnest, so heartfelt, so desperate to appear intelligent. If it weren’t all so dangerous, it would be funny.”

Back here in 2019, I’m glad to see that Gabby Giffords is still getting around okay, reassuring to see that her husband is still at her side, and interesting to note that her husband, Mark Kelly, is running for John McCain’s old senate seat. I wish them both well.  

Stupidity v. Ignorance

This idea was part of my notes for a post that appeared on April 5, 2018, called, “The Dangers of Relativism and Subjective Reality.” There’s a lot to be said for objective truth, but it goes in and out of style.

What are we to believe? Our very senses are no longer reliable. This is the digital age, and it has become easy to make us see or hear any damn thing. Our intellects seem to be the easiest thing of all to fool.

That previous article was about people embracing subjective interpretations of reality. I mean the folks that prefer to believe in their particular vision of the world, the world as seen through their eyes, as described, usually, by evil preachers and politicians. That idea seems so foolish that it leads us to some interesting questions:

Have humans suddenly lost a portion of their ability to reason?

Are people getting stupider?

Are they just easier to influence?

Is it like hypnosis or something. “Yes,” says the subject, “black thing is white. I see it clearly.”

It’s a real possibility that we are all getting stupider, but the real culprit could be a separate phenomenon that mimics stupidity.

Stupidity v. Ignorance

Stupidity, let’s face it, is a natural condition of the mind that renders it weak in the processing of information. My big Oxford Concise defines “stupid” as: lacking intelligence or common sense. The word is derived from the similarly used Latin word, “stupidus,” which is derived from the older Latin verb, “stupere,” which meant to be amazed or stunned.

Disclaimer: I am not giving myself any extra credit here; I’m not claiming any particular intellectual status for myself. I never do! You can look it up! I’m no great shakes. I have had a great deal of schooling, but I have always avoided math and science like one avoids violence and disease. There have been a lot of people who have thought me pretty smart, and many others who have judged me to be anything but. I have no official opinion on the subject, although I have formed the beginnings of a hunch.

Stupidity should not carry any blame, nor should there be any shame in it. It occurs of its own volition in something approaching fifty percent of human beings. That’s not me making a judgment; that’s the way scientists look at it. It’s a bell-curve with the median for IQ placed at one hundred. Fifty percent go up from there; fifty percent go down from there. It would be rude to say that anyone having an IQ that was under one hundred was stupid, but I’m pretty sure that most of those bottom fifty percenters qualify.

Ignorance

This is something else altogether. Ignorance can be either the absence of useful information on a given subject or the willful exclusion of certain facts from one’s thoughts and memories. That’s my definition, and I am somewhat at variance with the dictionaries.

My Oxford defines ignorant as: lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uninformed about or unaware of a specific subject or fact. From the Latin, ignorare.

See the difference? In the Oxford’s definition, all ignorance is innocent. In many countries there are schools where many of the students are very smart, but all of the students are ignorant. They are ignorant because no one has ever taught them anything. It’s not the fault of the students. I am ignorant of the workings of calculus, as are most people. I am blameless in this, because the subject never came up in any part of my considerable education. I only know one person who took calculus just because he wanted to. He passed it, too, and he had the nerve to say that it was fun. I wonder if taking calculus when it is not part of your curriculum is an ignorant thing to do. Is it a stupid thing to do? One or the other.

In my definition, ignorance can be culpable. It can be a choice. I would call that “willful ignorance.” Here are three types of willful ignorance, with examples:

1.   Avoiding new information. You see a fact coming and you shut down all new information on the subject and stop all consideration of the subject. Example: a wife becomes suspicious that her husband is cheating on her so she blocks out the entire subject and any new information that may be related to it. She doesn’t want to know. Many people today are doing something similar about Trump.

2.   Eliminate inconvenient memories. You have seen something or realized something, but it would be better for you if that thing had never happened. You close off all access to that idea and to all memories that may be connected with it. Example: you saw someone important to you do something illegal, so you choose to “forget” all about it. You don’t want to think about it. Trump benefits from this kind of thing too.

3.   Refusing to accept the truth of something. You decide that you will not accept a certain set of facts which are obviously, objectively true. You know all about it, and the facts are irrefutable, but you refuse to believe it. Example: global climate change.

This “willful ignorance” sounds similar to delusion, and I guess that I have heard the term “self-delusion” bandied about. The Oxford defines delusion as: an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is not in accordance with generally accepted reality.

I am not convinced that any of the above three examples represent “delusional” behavior. In each case, a fully functional adult has made a conscious decision to use their own mental functions in an ineffective way, or not at all. For me, there should be something pathological about behavior that is truly delusional. Like the Son of Sam killer long ago, who believed that his neighbor’s dog was instructing him to shoot people.

The Takeaway

Our current crop of pirates masquerading as elected officials has obviously figured out that stupidity makes people easier to lead around by the nose. They have also become adept at encouraging willful ignorance in the electorate.

Thankfully, I live overseas, beyond the reach of the preachers, politicians, and pundits who constantly bombard Americans with outright lies and alternative facts and snarky wise-crackery that is all carefully crafted to simultaneously flatter them and enrage them, to sooth them and to lead them astray.

There is a lot of willful ignorance involved. Almost no one actually reads anymore. Nothing of substance, anyway. People read comments on the Daily Caller or something, often responding with ungrammatical ad hominem attacks of their own. People shouting from the other side of the chasm read the Huffington Post or one of the other lefty news aggregators. That’s all an exercise in confirmation-bias. People get a blast out of having their prejudices reinforced.

The Internet is full of great stuff to read, but hardly anyone takes the time. There are articles that would actually give people a basis on which to form an opinion about things that are important. I’m talking about the Atlantic Magazine; the New York Review of Books; Vanity Fair; and other sites that give away more material that you’d have time to read anyway. If you really want to be informed, spend a couple of hundred bucks a year on subscriptions. At that point you could have the rest of the New York Review, and all of Harper’s Magazine, and the New Yorker Magazine. You could subscribe to the New York Times and read as much real news as you could stand. Or, God forbid, people could read a book every now and then, something besides the crap that the phony pundits write, things like “Killing Common Sense and Human Decency.” (Who wrote that one? I forget.)

Why take the time to read 10,000 words of the truth about the Steele Dossier in the New Yorker Magazine when you can turn on your TV and listen to someone with an empty head, a stupid expression, and a bad attitude condemn it as Clinton hack work in seven seconds? Which is a more efficient use of your time? That’s up to you, I suppose.

No, it’s much easier, and for many people more emotionally satisfying, to just watch that familiar old news channel. You know the one I mean. Do you think that I’m being condescending? Would you like to know what that news channel thinks of its viewers IQs? Watch their commercials. That entire TV channel, and all of the talking heads on it, treats its viewers like total Rubes, like a bunch of illiterate Hillbillies. Their condescension is breathtaking. If you ain’t stupid yet, you’ll be stupid after you watch a couple of hundred hours of Faux News. Either that, or they will enlist you in the ranks of the willfully ignorant, so that you too can get your snark on when the weather turns cold. You may be in on the joke, and you may be in it for the money, or you may believe that it’s all a Chinese Hoax, but the result will be the same.

The end of the world as we know it.

Unless that has happened already.

Puerto Rico Is America

During the early 1970s I had a short-sleeved sweatshirt that I really liked. I had a few, actually. I am five feet, nine inches tall, with excellent posture, and at the time I weighed about 140 pounds. Close fitting shirts with jeans flattered me. One of the sweatshirts was yellow and white, and on the front in big letters it said, “Puerto Rico Me Encanta.”

Mostly I just liked the look of it, the colors and the fit, and the way multiple repeated washings made it more comfortable and attractive. I was not political about any issue at all at the time. My only response to the politics of the day was to condemn every aspect of politics as quickly as possible. It was true, though, that I was favorably disposed to Puerto Rico, and Puerto Ricans. This was not long after I had found my first friends from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and Cuba for that matter. It took a little time, but very little effort, for me to learn to like Salsa music. As for the young Hispanic men and women themselves, you could never hope to find companions more friendly, hospitable, loyal, and helpful than those Caribbean Latins, and no people on the earth offered livelier companionship. Even the guys were great cooks, and they always had the best (redacted). Your New York Latin friends would just plum wear you out. As in, “no, no thanks, I need to get a couple of hours of sleep before work.” 

The shirt was political, I suppose, at least to some extent. Maybe I was advertising the subject so that other white folk could see that it was possible to get along with Puerto Ricans. More likely I was clumsily letting Puerto Ricans who saw me know that I was okay with that whole thing. I’m white, the story goes, but I’m not like those other guys. Whatever. The main thing to note is that of the one hundred plus times that I wore that sweatshirt, first in New York City and later in Los Angeles, no one ever mentioned it. Not one word, from friend, foe, or stranger. It was a non-event.

It was also a non-event to my friends, who were not all of one mind on such subjects. I had a lot of friends, many long-term and intimate friends, and I had no political litmus test for friendship purposes. Most of them were open-minded, many very much so, but some were subject to prejudices that were becoming old fashioned by the late 1960s. The subject came up, often in connection with music or sports, and there were arguments, but we were friends and those were just details. My shirt was beneath notice.

Things have changed, and not for the better.

I was reminded of this a couple of months ago when I saw a TV news article about a woman who was sorely harassed in public for wearing a Puerto Rico t-shirt. She happened to be Puerto Rican, which of course means that she is an American citizen. She was getting the business somewhere, I’m not exactly sure where, somewhere around southern Illinois, I believe, maybe near Chicago.

Things have just gone so wrong in this country that it’s hard to keep score of the decline in American manners. It’s embarrassingly ignorant in the first place that Americans know so little about their own country that they could imagine that a Puerto Rican should “go back to her own country.” She’s here, bro’, look it up. Passport; taxes; limited voting privileges; the draft. American.

These are the same America Firsters who hassle Sikhs imagining that they are Muslims, and therefore terrorists. That’s a stupid mistake, but it has driven a few of those America Firsters to kill some Sikh convenience store clerks, or burn down a Sikh place of worship.

Americans harassing Muslims in general is way out of hand. Calling anyone who happens to be Muslim a “terrorist” is stupid. Roulette is famously the biggest “fool’s game” in Las Vegas, but your odds of hitting thirty-two red on a Vegas roulette wheel are astronomically better than the odds that any particular Muslim is a terrorist. (Roulette: 37 to 1; that Muslim over there is a terrorist: hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to one. I’m no mathematician.)

And the poor Indians! Hindu, pal, Hindu, take notes, big difference! Man, they don’t even like Muslims! Wars have been fought! Get a clue! Buy a vowel!

This is all new behavior, and it is very disturbing.

The worst part is that the list of hated “others” keeps getting longer. The news media are in for harassment and death threats as we speak, unless they work for Fox News (Fascist Propaganda Central). Federal employees can be safely denied their promised COL raise this year, because they are on the hate list. Asians are getting the treatment for speaking anything but English in a coffee shop! Hell, go and find me a donut shop in L.A. where ALL of the employees aren’t speaking Korean! They’re all here legally, too, and by the way, most of them have American passports by now. If they feel like talking to other Korean-Americans in Korean, that’s their God given right.

Many more of us will be on the hate list before long, and the whole thing should frighten us and bother us very much.

But the poor Hispanics, the poor Latin Americans, they’re getting the worst of it. Them and the Muslims I suppose. The Hispanics, though, they’ve been here in America as long as anybody except the Indians. (I mean the American Indians. “Native American” has gone out of fashion, in case you didn’t get the memo). The entire states of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Oklahoma were flat-out stolen from Mexico as recently as 1848. (Texas had been stolen previously by the Texicans, who included a lot of white New Yorkers and a lot of genuine Mexicans. GTT, MF! Look it up!)

I often wish that I could just shake people like some parents shake abused infants and yell in their faces, “look that shit up! Read! Don’t just watch Fascist Propaganda Central on TV!” But you can’t tell anyone anything anymore. They know it all already. The certainty alone is frightening. That combination of certainty and total ignorance will be the doom of us all.

“Puerto Rico, me encanta.” It’s a sin and a crime how terribly we treat our Puerto Rican brothers and sisters, all fellow Americans. The death toll from that Hurricane Maria is now up to way over two thousand people, and we’re still short-changing them on the relief aid. It’s a scandal, is what it is. And then the Puerto Ricans who were relocated to the mainland are treated like beggars from fucking Bolivia or something. When are people going to wake up?

Oh, I forgot, the answer to that question is: NEVER. Because they already know it all, and they don’t read, and most of them only watch Fascist Propaganda Central. May I please ask my fellow Americans under the age of forty-five or so for a personal favor? Don’t blame this shit on Baby-Boomers. You’re old enough to be part of the problem too, and anyone younger than you might as well blame you. It’s not your fault either. It’s partly the fault of our selfish, lazy-minded politicians, and partly the fault of the people with too much money, and partly due to the fact that human beings are just not that smart.

To my fellow Baby-Boomers, congratulations! At least we’ll be gone before the end.

CNN Is Complicit, While America Burns

It was my dubious pleasure to watch CNN for six days in mid-July at a nice hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia. It was a shocking display of pure cooperation with the cabal that is now in the final stages of taking complete control of all of the levers of power in what we call the “American Experiment.” It was sickening to see.

In that one week, the Justice Department indicted twelve Russian government officials in connection with efforts to hack into and influence the 2016 elections. Trump torpedoed NATO at a high level meeting, saying, inter alia, that it was actually Germany that was in Russia's pocket (because of a deal to buy Russian natural gas). Trump went to England, where his first official act was to torpedo Prime Minister Teresa May with vague criticisms regarding Brexit and immigration. He gratuitously torpedoed the Mayor of London almost in passing, accusing him of weakness that had caused terror attacks in London, and taking the occasion to expand on his remarks about immigration destroying European culture.* Next stop: a PRIVATE one on one meeting with Vladimir Putin, “unrecorded.” (What a Rube!) Nothing suspicious about that. We know by now how it turned out.

CNN is discussing all of this as though it were all very normal. All of the newsies and politicians and pundits talk about Trump as though he were a more-or-less normal human being with policies and political goals that may seem a bit off-center, but are actual real-life political strategies nonetheless, just like those of any other president, because, like, they must be, mustn't they? How could they be otherwise? That would be crazy! Occasionally someone goes off-script and reminds us that yes, Trumps behavior and actions are crazy, and they are way outside of the established norms and doctrines of American government and jurisprudence. In reality, of course, he and his weirdly unqualified minions are helping the Republicans and their principals to shred the Constitution and create a Brave New World of money and privilege, a new aristocracy of billionaire legacies, with a destitute, debt-ridden population to serve them. Finishing, as it were, the work that was begun in earnest back in the 1970s, with good old Ronnie Reagan as the first stooge in chief.

Meanwhile, back on CNN, Chris Cuomo is talking to Roger Stone, and taking him seriously, giving him all of the air-time that he needs to make all of his talking points about the greatness of Trump, the terrible danger of an out of control intelligence apparatus, and the evils of Hillary Clinton. It seems that there is always some clampdown flunky on camera saying that there is no problem, no collusion, and that Trump is saving America and returning it to the real Americans.

This is all a recipe for disaster.

Who is this Trump character anyway? Why are people suddenly taking him seriously? We've all known for forty-plus years that he is an untalented, spoiled rich kid who shoots his mouth off indiscriminately and leaves behind him only the wreckage of failed businesses and marriages. He's on his third marriage, with five children by three women, that we know about. He, himself, has always made sure that we know that he's getting more ass than a toilet seat, inside and outside of his marriages. If you asked people about him in the year 2000, almost everyone in every nook and cranny of the United States would have said, “what a jerk-off.”

He never stops talking about how rich his is, and what a financial genius he is, when the real fact of it is that if he had simply taken all of that money that he got from his father and invested it, leaving it to grow on its own without his interference, it would be a greater fortune today. He has only managed to lose money at that as well.

Now, all of a sudden, people who certainly DO know better are normalizing Trump, and people who SHOULD know better are voting for him, and people who obviously DON'T know any better are cheering him on. It's disquieting.

The man himself loves every minute of it. All of the chaos, the attention. One morning I watched him, on CNN, playing golf in Scotland, at a course that he owns. He was being trailed by about fifteen golf carts full of what, security? Were there reporters in there somewhere? Security from multiple countries and political entities? Fifteen carts is not an exaggeration, it was grid lock out there, and they were all watching him hit the little white ball. And of course he was billing everyone in sight, he made a fortune that day. He must have been in heaven.

We have Fox News on one side, and they are 100% “fake news; no collusion; Hillary is the crook; the missing server! Bengazi!” That's 24/7, because this is cable. And then we have CNN, which is the same kind of crap at least half of the time, to be, you know, fair. (I will leave the field clear for others to clarify what is going on with the other sources of so-called news in America. The MSNBCs, etc. As far as I can see in my limited observation, the only outlet approaching objectivity and delivering actual news about what is happening around the world is Al Jezeera. Yeah, I just said that! Go and watch some if you think that I'm wrong!)

The Democrats! Let's see what that crop of misguided losers can come up with in November. So far all I see is the “establishment Democrats” desperately fighting off the real democrats (the hated progressives). The Democrats laugh off as Utopian every good idea that rears its head, all of the things that would actually help a working man or a young family, preferring the occasional half measure, like raising the minimum wage, yeah, raising it from hopelessly low to merely very, very low. Jesus wept. Those people were once good for something. 

My advice to young people today is to figure out a way to make your own way into the market place. Figure out a way to sell a product or a service to the super-rich at wildly inflated prices. They have the money, go for it! I saw a guy on TV recently who did children's parties on private planes. Those rich assholes are now prepared to pay good money to avoid having to interact with their own children, the mostly neglected, maladjusted children that will grow up and become your billionaire bosses, and your landlords. The airborne party that was filmed for TV news was a very nice coast-to-coast affair, with a bunch of kids. There were balloon animals, and party hats with feathers, and I'm sure the affair was catered. The clown's bill to the parents was, I think, $85,000. Get into a scam, I mean business, like that, boys and girls. Whatever you do, don't borrow money for college! That's a Venus Flytrap of debt slavery right there. If you completely lack the entrepreneurial spirit, there's always crime.

And good luck! Get it while you can, 'cause it ain't gonna last.

*The Mayor of London was later interviewed for CNN by Christine Amanpour, who seems more independent minded than her co-workers at CNN, much to her credit. The mayor listed all of the other European cities that have been the victims of fatal terror attacks, with death counts, and wondered out loud why HE ALONE was singled out by The Great And Powerful Trump for criticism. Standing there on camera, the reason was obvious. The mayor is of Pakistani heritage.

What's The First Word That Comes To Mind When I Say Fox News?

The last couple of days have served to reacquaint me with Fox News.  It’s always interesting to see what they’re up to.  Not that it changes much.  Fox is like a soap opera:  you can miss a few weeks and come back in right where you left off.  

On Saturday morning alone they mentioned Bangazi six times, usually apropos of nothing in particular.  The Hillary bashing is to be expected, that’s their bread and butter after all.  It’s no surprise that Fox doesn’t like Bernie Sanders either.  He’s a socialist!  And not like that sneaky President Obama either, Bernie is proud to describe himself as a socialist!  No, the only surprise this time around was how much time and effort Fox is putting into slinging mud at one of the Republican candidates for president.  Only one, the other twenty-two are fine.  You know which one they hate. 

Yes, The Donald. 

One of the newer smear techniques on display was a “word cloud” graphic made up of verbal  information gathered in some kind of poll.  The pollster would prompt the pollee, “what’s the first word that comes to mind when I say . . .” (name of a candidate).  The most common words offered in response were the most prominent in the word cloud, set in the biggest type, and so on down the line. 

 

Amazingly, but not surprisingly, the resulting descriptions of the candidates lined up perfectly with the Fox News propaganda line.  (Amazing because that it such a bold faced display of moral corruption; not surprising because Fox News is famous for that kind of thing.)  

Hillary is a liar!  She’s dishonest!  The Fox News party line since they went on the air.  What’s the truth of the matter?  The odds are that she’s no angel, but she’s running for president, not pope.  We’ve had one angel as president in my lifetime, and most people did not appreciate his goodness.  (Jimmy Carter, of course.)  Hillary happens to be competent, cool-headed, resilient and experienced.  Qualified, in other words.

Trump is arrogant!  A more recent development, but these days all of the extensive Fox coverage of Trump is negative.  Is he arrogant?  Well yes, he is all of that, and more.  He is also wildly unsuited by temperament for the presidency, and wildly unqualified by experience.  Oh, and he’s dangerous too, he’d be a huge liability in the job.  Fox is not anti-Trump because he would be a clear and present danger to the country though.  Most of the other Republican candidates would be dangerous too.  Fox is on the attack because Trump is trouncing the candidate who is the obvious choice not only of Fox News, but also of the Koch brothers et al.  Which brings us to . . .

Bush is experienced!  The negatives in Bush’s word cloud were limited to the ambiguous “Bush” and “dynasty.”  Experienced is a big stretch though, I mean, come on.  He’s experienced like his brother was.  He’s experienced at getting his way without much effort.  John Bush, like George before him, is a mediocre rich kid legacy with a wild and demanding sense of entitlement.  John and George have always been coasters, coat-tail riders, and total jerks.  The power brokers can only love him because they have decided that he has the best chance to beat Hillary.  What else could it be? 

Here are my quickly noted responses to the poll:

Hillary:  strong, confident;

Bernie:  smart, ethical;

Trump:  abrasive, moronic, rude, selfish, overconfident;

John Bush:  stooge, wimp, lightweight;

Cruz:  maniac, ugly, mediocre;

Huckabee:  phoney, duplicitous;

Carly F.:  unknown;

Marco R.:  desperate, hopeless;

Ben Carson:  ungrateful, uncaring, unqualified;

Scott Walker:  asymmetrical, fascist, hateful;

Rand Paul:  liar, plagiarist;

Bobby Jindal:  anchor-baby.

I must have left out a few.  Oh!  Chris Christie!  (Fat, creepy, bully.) 

I left out Joe Biden too.  Is he in the race?  If he is, it’s only because the Democrats are as afraid of Bernie Sanders as the Republicans are of Donald Trump.  The Republicans already have twenty-plus alternatives to Bush lined up.  (I say Bush, he’s the obvious choice of the Republican party and their money people.)  If something happens to Bush, like some unfortunate campaign airplane crash, somebody, probably Kasich, could step in.  But so far the Democrats are limited to Hillary and Bernie.  If someone shoots poor Hillary, an unpleasant but not entirely inconceivable eventuality, the Democrats would be left with Bernie.  And Bernie scares the Democrats.  So they need Joe Biden as backup. 

I’m home now, so no more Fox News for a while.  Not on my cable, thank God.  I can only take it in small doses.  Only fifteen months before the election!  Man, I just hope that it goes by quickly.