The True Believers of FOX News

Lies told often enough become alternative facts.....

Recently, I attended a dinner party at old friends’ house, and I expected a relaxed evening.  The food was spectacular, a very finely nuanced codfish, served on a bed of exquisite lentils.  That dish was preceded by a mango-yellow tomato soup, with really fine wines and a desert of homemade pie, fresh blueberries rolling off the top of a delectable key lime filling.  Our hosts were flawlessly polite and gracious.  Most of the meal was spent on polite conversation, where are you from, do you have kids, and other pleasantries.

Another couple attended, whom we did not know, and whom, I believe our hosts had just met. A neurologist on the staff of the University of Miami school of Medicine.  Born in Mexico, he had been in the United States, I believe, for twenty years.  He was an intelligent, soft-spoken fellow and but had some infuriating opinions, including a denunciation of Hillary Clinton’s emails and that President Obama was the worst president of the United States ever to inhabit the White House.  He reluctantly admitted that Obama had been born in the United States, but had Muslim sympathies and was anti-Semitic.

He also professed his deep admiration for Benjamin Netanyahu and the excellence of Donald Trump’s moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem as a symbol of American strength, “the only things the Arabs understand.”

Other perorations included the inherent bias of the New York Times, The Washington Post, anti-Semitism of Thomas Friedman, and the bias of the American media, against Donald Trump.  Although he said he did not object to a two-state solution, he defended the settlements and that Israel had no partner for peace negotiations, citing the result in Gaza when Israel pulled out and stating that the same thing would happen to the West Bank, should Israel cede sovereignty to the Palestinian authority.

He presented himself as an authority in these matters by stating that he had been to Israel many times and therefore was in a better position than American Jews to analyze the situation than those of us who had only visited a few times. Also, that since he came from Mexico, he understood America and its constitution better than ordinary Americans.  He made no mention of the corruption of Mexican politics having any potential influence on his ideas. 

I hate condescending people who confer greater expertise on themselves simply because they have visited a place a few more times than others or they simply had a different life experience. 

He did recognize that 70% of Israelis wanted peace and were willing to give up the settlements for a peace treaty with the Palestinian authority but said that Israel would still have to occupy the territories to provide security for Israel.  I did not disagree with him.

I argued with him, however, that most secular American Jews now believe that religious zealotry among those who are in the settlements are an impediment to a peace treaty, that the borders are basically already decided, and that with minor land swaps there could possibly be a settlement.

At that point the conversation returned to his advancing the argument that Trump was a great president, and that the economy was booming.  Moreover, he claimed that Obamacare had destroyed the private practice of medicine in the United States, that President Obama was the worst president ever, and had lied about people keeping their own doctor.  I was enraged that he created a false moral equivalence between the constant lies and criminality of Trump and Obama.

When I pointed out to him that 30 million people now were covered and that before they were not and that insurance companies could dismiss clients for preexisting conditions and now, they could not, it fell upon deaf ears.

I asked this gentleman where he got his news.  He said he watched the FOX news channel, which he claimed was an unbiased arbiter of the facts, unlike the Times, the Washington Post, or the other biased news media such as MSNBC, ABC, NBC, PBS, and CNN.   That all these organs had it in for the president and were purveyors of fake news.

He told me I should watch FOX between 6-7 pm for an unbiased news menu, ostensibly to prove that all of FOX was therefore “fair and balanced.”    I said,” let me get this straight,

You want me to watch FOX for one hour and thereby come to the conclusion that the rest of the day is not propaganda?”

This gentleman, who had set himself up as a latter-day Mexican Alexis de Tocqueville was judging the American constitution based upon his marginal understanding of it.  He thought the electoral college was set up as a fair governance of space, rather than a sorry compromise to get the constitution adopted in 1787 that enabled slave states to perpetuate their injustice throughout our turbulent history.

He sounded like a rerun of FOX and friends and had no understanding of the forces that should be dominating our national discussion:   Climate change, technological displacement, and nuclear war.  The distractions of the FOX news propaganda machine are not limited to the uneducated.

This led me to inevitably conclude:

FOX is an Orwellian propaganda channel that has been profoundly destructive of our national polity and that education is often no defense to persistent lies and propaganda, as Orwell had told us long ago.

FOX sits by itself as an organ of Trump and its hijacked Republican base, who despite their minority, have managed until now to dominate the legislative and executive branches of government, exploded the deficit, shut down the government, encouraged racists, divided the country, fed lies to the public, shredded the dignity of the Presidency, alienated our allies, conducted a needless trade war, provided subsidies to large corporations, disrespected the rule of law, obstructed justice, sullied all those around Trump, conducted a revolving door for respected diplomats and public servants, trashed our national intelligence services, including the CIA and the FBI, presided over the shrinking of the middle class, and is enraptured by a president who is a blaggard, a crook,  a buffoon, a  knave and a scoundrel.

I went home with a major headache despite the graciousness and charm of the hosts of the dinner party.  I guess people really cannot talk any more.

Nancy at the gates.

Welcome to another week of Trump world.  Trump surrendered to, of all things, a woman.  A powerful one at that. Pelosiwoman! Faster than a speeding bullet, able to pontificate to the President of the United States in a single bound, tougher than nails, the woman of steel, pledged to defend the American way. 

The government is open for the time being.

There she was in the Oval office in her green dress, looking regal, all but missing a crown, speaking for a strong Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, finally a coequal branch of government again, able to stand up to the Lex Luthor of presidents, whose Kryptonite had all but paralyzed his Republican minions in the Senate and the sniveling Paul Ryan House.  

Paul has been banished to snow-covered, freezing Wisconsin, a former somebody who turned out to be a nobody. A man whose pretense of independence from the wicked Lex Luthor/Individual 1 presidential impersonator was thinly disguised by his aura of a baby face and sparkling blue eyes, a sort of Shirleytempleman defrocked from his Obamacare destroying, Medicare privatization, entitlement demolishing, trickle down agenda, all in service of a deficit exploding trillion-dollar tax cut. But hey, why should poor people who pay no taxes not be relegated to homelessness?  After all, society owes them nothing. Let them eat cake. Good thing Paul is gone, he would be in a tumbrel headed for the widowmaker.

And let us not forget Mitch McConnell, the turkey-necked loathsome impresario of the Senate, known for his refusal to allow a vote for Merrick Garland and his plot to make Barack Obama a one-term president.  Mitch now finds himself hostage to Pelosiwoman as well.  He will be powerless to prevent his soon to be former Trumpist GOP colleagues from jumping off the rat-infested barge of incompetence. Now brought low by Lex Luthor’s plot to shut down the government over a diabolical wall, he is feeling the slings and arrows of a small minority-supported wall designed to inflame racial hatred.  Keep out those poor Honduran children who will not make America great again.

What of 800,000 hard working federal employees who needed their pay checks, ordered to work without pay, and in some cases be fired if they did not work in indentured servitude, needing to meet their mortgage payments, food bills and living expenses?  Well, Lex calls them “patriotic heroes” sacrificing for their country, just as he does. Just like Ivanka, Jared and the other misanthropes of this tragic undertaking, like Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and the rest of the unseemly rogue’s gallery now surrounding Lex.

But wait.  Lex’s cohorts had trouble navigating the flight delays from Washington to New York, the optics of Air traffic controllers not showing up to work because they needed money and called in sick so they could bag groceries at Wall Mart or drive Ubers?  My goodness, what hath Lex wrought? How could Mitch get back to Kentucky to pacify his base?  What about Ted Cruz flying down to Dallas from Dulles?  Let’s agree to open the government!  In three weeks when the next Mueller indictment comes out, we can declare a national emergency to distract all the dumbass people who voted for me and are beginning to awaken to the con.

But now enter Pelosiwoman, Alexandriawoman, and others crying “let’s impeach the mother…ker.” 

Now the walls are really closing in on Lex.   Mueller will be issuing more indictments, Roger Stone, who says he will never testify against the President will be facing years in federal prison.  We will see about how that turns out.  Badly, for sure.  Despite his bravado yesterday, either Stone will flip or Stone will be nursing his Nixon tattoo in Leavenworth.  I think the flip eventually will come.   And the Donald will soon face indictments of Jared, Don, Jr. and perhaps even the plastic surgeon’s dream, Ivanka.

Buckle up America.  This will make “Survivor” look like a poor imitation of a reality show.

Unelected and Unhinged

“A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.”

           

William Shakespeare 

Think about it.   Hillary Clinton got three million more votes than Donald Trump.  Many Americans saw the handwriting on the wall before the election. An election hacked by the Russians, and aided by an inept, quiescent, uninspired campaign by the Democratic candidate, and the general antipathy toward Mrs. Clinton artfully employed by Mr. Trump, a master flim-flam man.  A man who still knows how to appeal to the baser instincts of a dispossessed minority.  A minority vulnerable to a cynical promise that they would get their coal mining and auto assembly jobs back, 80% of which are forever lost to technological displacement.  When Trump made those mendacious promises, he probably knew they were wickedly disposed to fool misguided souls who supported him and still mostly do.

We have a president who does not have the confidence of close to 70% of the American public.  If a vote of no confidence were held today, the president would not get more than 38% of the vote. And in a system that were fair he would never have been elected in the first place.  We have an unelected president.  And what is worse, an unelected president whose fealty is to himself alone and less able to accept responsibility than a raging Pinocchio.

The sorry fact remains that if the House of Representatives were decided by non-gerrymandered districts, it would have been Democratic all along, the midterm results starkly emphasizing gross abandonment by white, suburban, former (mostly educated white women) supporters.  And if the electoral college had been abolished, there would have been no war in Iraq, climate change would have been addressed earlier, and the nation would not now be in the throes of being sold out to our adversaries by a corrupt criminal enterprise

All of this generated by the anachronistic electoral college and a system engineered over a compromise in 1789 Philadelphia where the framers were obliged to pacify landowners in Southern states more concerned with their sovereignty and perpetuating slavery than equal representation.  The Constitution provided our nation the stability needed in the crucible of creation.  Those present at the genesis that sizzling summer in Philadelphia knew that without it lay disunity and disunion.  That did happen 80 years later anyway.

At the founding, the delegates to the constitutional convention feared the evils of centralized power and in that fear created a system for the thirteen colonies that distributed the power in the senate among states that were populated with only 3 million people.  And now that system perpetuates representation that allows people in North Dakota with 500,000 people the same representation in the Senate as California with 40,000,000 people in a nation of over 300,000,000.  (The system also provided that slaves were 3/5ths of a person in determining apportionment of the members of the House of Representatives with the members of the electoral college calculated on a similar basis.)

The advantages of this system of government no longer work.   The rationale of a geographically balanced (power to vacant land) system has given us a minority president five times in our nation’s history, the most recent of whom were George W. Bush who lost the popular vote by 500,000 voters and now Donald Trump, no fitter for office than an errant school boy and loser of the popular vote by the largest number in the nation’s history.

But wait. It gets worse. There is much talk of impeachment, of "high crimes and misdemeanors," which are basically a political rationale for long vote of no confidence.    Impeachment is a political, not a legal process.  And it was designed by those same framers to excise unfit presidents; Impeachment starts in the House of Representatives, however, not one president has been convicted in the Senate and removed from office.   Arguably, Richard Nixon (at least an intelligent crook) would have been removed but resigned having been told by a bipartisan group of Senators that he did not have the votes to remain.

Unlike George Washington whose humility manifested itself in his temperate and self-effacing behavior and who assembled a stellar cabinet of statesmen and turned down a crown, Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants, admires dictators and tyrants, would like a crown, and carving away at our institutions. 

Those voicing policy differences with him are humiliated, fired or demeaned in tweets which could be better written by an angry seven-year-old.  Many other presidents sought the best talent they could for their cabinet and not fearing but instead seeking diversity of opinion.  Lincoln had a team of impressive rivals whose initial respect for him was slim, until he chose them to work together to save the union.  His own team members called him an ignorant baboon before his election but by appealing to the better angels of their nature and of the nation he did save the union. Many presidents, good and bad, had different personalities, but none were so obviously unhinged as Trump.  Perhaps that is a product of today’s unbridled media, or some other dark psychological processes, but still, the trauma imposed upon the nation is breathtaking.

The concept of humility and measured thought of what is occurring in the world, does not even register with a man who does not read, who does not think of others and thinks narcissistically how to bask in faux adulation. Tax cuts for corporations that buy back their own stock and enhance their bottom line, one robot displacing four workers in “value added zones,” as recent economic analysis shows, money distorting the electoral process, climate change denial, a plunging stock market, immigrant scapegoating, racist pandering, rampant corruption, abandonment of allies, criminality and just plain demagoguery.  The two years left in the term (hopefully not) has produced a tranquilizer popping public riddled with anxiety.

Finally, what does this say about Republican members of congress who have enabled and even encouraged such behavior?  I speak of Mitch McConnell, a reptilian paradigm of a power hungry zombie whose utterances debase us all.  Let us not forget the departing Paul Ryan, a fraudulent unprincipled puppet whose master is party over country.  What does it say about those who voted for this band of knaves? They are angry, mostly rural people who, having been ignored by the elites on the left and on the right vented their frustration and gave us Frankenstein instead.  All this speaks volumes about FOX news propagandists who have enabled and encouraged the Trump metastases by giving a platform to pundits not worthy of the appellation.

What we really should be talking about are the three greatest threats to the world, hardly mentioned:  climate change, technological displacement, and nuclear war as well as a need in the not too distant future for a Universal Basic Income and a renewed infrastructure.  But the Trump conversation sucks all the air out of the room because it all seems like a horrid and surreal nightmare.  People actually cannot believe what is happening.  We are watching  a grand guignol cinema verite horror show.

 What will be the judgment of history about how a frenzy of anger over technological displacement amid those whom Theodore Roosevelt called the “malefactors of great wealth?”

Of such complacency and indifference of the political elite to a displaced, shrinking middle class, are revolutions born.