The Destruction of Honesty

Photo from the Slate article on today's press conference, which it called "a stunning display of Trump’s ability to lie, exaggerate, obfuscate, and mislead the public while insisting that it was actually the media who were doing all of those things."

An excerpt from "The National Nightmare Has Just Begun" by Gabriel Schoenfeld, a Republican political advisor, writing for USA Today:

It is not too soon to tally the damage wreaked so far by our 45th president.

Donald Trump's rampage through key institutions is an obvious place to begin. The executive branch of our federal government has never run like clockwork, but in peace or wartime it has rarely been this chaotic. In effect if not by title, the White House now has three competing chiefs of staff, each with walk-in privileges to the Oval Office and each playing our ignorant and impressionable president as if he were a piano. The disarray has radiated outward to the agencies to the nation and even to the world. The botched formulation and execution of Trump’s travel ban, and the ouster of national security adviser Michael Flynn via surprise trapdoor, are of course Exhibits A and B.

The judicial branch has suffered a blow of a different sort, with the president blasting Judge James Robart, appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate unopposed, as a “so-called judge.” Dismissal by the president of the judiciary’s role as a check and balance on his own power could derail our democracy. In a tweet, he has already, and pre-emptively, assigned blame for the next terror attack to Robart and our entire court system. We have been duly warned: Should such an attack come, it will be a moment of maximum danger not only for our safety but also foor our freedom.

Then we have the Republican Party, which, following Trump’s siren song, is committing moral-intellectual suicide. Defenders of religious liberty have turned into proponents of a backdoor Muslim ban. The banner of free trade has been dropped for protectionism. Budgetary thrift has given way to profligacy. So many things the GOP stood for a mere two years ago — good character and ethical conduct, a clear-eyed view of Russia — have been replaced by their opposite. To the party’s leaders, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, political principles are nothing. Political power is all. In their apologetics for the billionaire blockhead at America’s helm, never has hypocrisy been more perfectly distilled.

Our free press remains intact; indeed, it has been rising to the occasion as it has come under assault from a president who, even as he relentlessly castigates it, stays glued to its coverage, obsessing over every criticism and slight. But though the news media are performing their critical function, they are losing — along with our entire society — a more fundamental battle.

Here we come to damage of a different sort: The destruction of honesty, one of democracy’s most fundamental norms.

Trump and his team lie as naturally as leaves grow on trees. America is being polarized along a new axis of division. On one side are dupes, possibly numbering in the millions, who accept the president’s preposterous fabrications as gospel. On the other side are those appalled by the dawn of post-modern America in which truth is supplanted by “alternative facts,” the euphemism employed by Kellyanne Conway, the president’s most brazen flack, for the projectile falsehoods that spurt from her mouth. As every aspiring authoritarian leader grasps — and Trump is no exception — a world without truth is a world without rules, without justice and without the possibility of democratic deliberation.

And in today's press conference at the White House, Trump was caught red-handed dispensing "fake news" himself - kudos to NBC's Peter Alexander for calling him out:




Just for your information fellas, here are the electoral college results for all elections since 1932. The three number columns show, respectively, the total electoral votes, the winner's share, and the runner-up's share.

From Wikipedia.  Click to enlarge.

Update, 7:55 pm: Shep Smith of Fox News, which for many years has been the propaganda mill of the Republican Party, incensed at the way Trump tried deflect attention from his staff's undercover dealings with Russian intelligence by branding all reporters as purveyors of fake news, lashed out at Trump on camera after today's press conference: “No sir. We are not fools for asking the question and we demand to know the answer to this question. You owe this to the American people.”

Newsbites

• In a major reversal of attitude, General Colin Powell comes out for DADT repeal, saying "In the almost 17 years since the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ legislation was passed, attitudes and circumstances have changed.  I fully support the new approach presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee this week by Secretary of Defense Gates and Admiral Mullen."  As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Clinton, Powell opposed allowing gays to serve openly, and presided over the application of the DADT policy.

• Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) says if gays are let loose in the military, it will "lead to alcohol use, adultery, fraternization, and body art. If we change this rule of 'Don't Ask, Dont Tell' what are we going to do with these other rules?"  Joe Jervis responds:  "[He's] worried that if DADT is repealed, soldiers will get drunk, visit whorehouses, and get tattoos. Unprecedented!"

• Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council not only doesn't want the big, bad, drunken, tattooed, rapist gays in the military - he wants Lawrence v. Texas overturned, so homosex in civilian life can be recriminalized. 

• Rob Tisinai reacts:  "We see what their position is — and how can you compromise between full civil equality and being thrown in prison? What would that compromise even look like?"

• The ACLU and Lambda Legal are planning to sue the state of Hawaii over marriage equality, after the Hawaii House defeated a civil-unions bill last week by voice vote - the same bill they had already approved in two previous sessions, and which had passed the Hawaii Senate.

• Nine Republican senators have introduced a bill to block same-sex marriages in Washington, D. C., pending a voter referendum on the issue.

• Former Eagle Scout, Air Force Captain, and Congressman, and current Republican Governor of South Carolina Mark Sanford, who came to national attention last summer while hiking the Appalachian Trail some Argentinian tail at taxpayer's expense, insisted on removing the fidelity clause from their marriage vows when he wed his wife Jenny in 1989, Mrs. Sanford has revealed in a Barbara Walters interview that will air this Friday.  They are the parents of four sons; Mrs. Sanford filed for divorce in December.  Governor Sanford has publicly opposed civil unions, same-sex marriage, and gay adoptions.  Of course.

• And finally, not only does it seem to this old dude totally astounding that the world has changed so much that a Cosmo centerfold can grow up to be a United States Senator; and likewise totally amazing that there has not been one single fucking word of objection to that fact on anyone's part, most specifically the oh-so-holy "family values" right; but it also seems totally pornographic to watch this blonde newswoman getting her panties soaking wet right on national television at the very thought of stroking some good, solid Republican cock, even the plastic kind:

Obviously, for the Republican gals, Brown has that same "starburst" effect that Palin has for the men.  And they all think that's so cute, so funny, so adorable, so Christian.  So "normal."  So "natural."  Oh, yes, all the good Republican heteros are so upright, so moral, so totally on God's side.

But me and my husband and the little dog, living a quiet, obscure life in a tiny town far out on the prairie, we were a "locus of evil" in the world. 

Fuck 'em all, is what I say, the filthy grandstanding hypocrite lying bastards.  And you can quote me on that, boys.

Fox/GOP Inaugurates Goddess Worship

Hear, O America, Sarah is our God, and Glenn Beck is her prophet. . . . 



"I think a voter first needs to sincerely know who that candidate is, to see what their track record is, and to see if they have lost their soul along the way."  Sarah Palin.

Andrew Sullivan:

The Ailes launch of a new political-media party is being framed around Palin as a "reluctant to serve" outsider, a new Washington combined with Esther. Hence her resignation is a reason to support her! It proves that she was too pure, too Godly, to survive the worldly political corruption that infects everything in Satan's capital city, Washington. And that's why the elites will do everything to destroy her - not because they have some idea that a political leader should not be a congenital liar or ignorant of fifth grade history or devoid of any relevant experience - but because they are on the side of Satan.

Ailes' new political-media party is fueled by Beck's integration into the paranoid far right, aided by O'Reilly's fading but still significant grip on ageing Reagan-Democrats, and galvanized by Hannity's nightly unvarnished propaganda and endless demonization of all things not-Republican. But until Ailes found Palin - a figure who instantly short-circuits rational thinking in those who support and oppose her, he had not yet found the sub-rational rallying point.

Now he does: the fusion of Fox Barbie-doll beauty, marinated in evangelical Christianity, mouthing every cliche that survives from the Reagan era until it has no relation at all to reality, propelled by what former Christianist Frank Shaeffer has called "the deepening inferiority complex suffered by the evangelical/fundamentalist community."

This FNC/RNC merger is another threat to reasoned discourse in public life, because it is a showman's concoction of very powerful emotional elements: resentment, sex, religion, anger. It creates its own reality. "We Do Not Torture"; everyone in Gitmo was the "Worst of the Worst"; the stimulus lowered growth; all the debt is Obama's fault; Obama is a Muslim and non-American; the White House is stacked with the Islamist/socialist enemy within; if we had not bailed out the banks, we would be roaring back from the recession; Obama wants to ignore the war in order to effect a radical transformation of America into some kind of scary version of France and Waziristan. And on and on. I'm not exaggerating. Listen to these maniacs.

The last idea was fomented by Dick Cheney. And they are waiting for their moment: another terrorist attack that they will blame on the deliberate negligence of Barack Obama. Then the Dolchstoss card, played only faintly so far by Cheney and Giuliani, will be played with a crudeness and radicalism that could well be explosive. You think they won't pull that trigger? Dream on.

This new political-media conglomerate endorses a supreme executive unrestrained in his or her conduct of the war against Islam (for that is the real import of the Giuliani complaint), and empowered to seize anyone anywhere and torture them in the name of national security. It is also critically connected to the settlement movement in the West Bank - for Palin's vision of more and more Jewish population expanding outwards in that region is part of the plan for the End-Times. Hence its belief in waging war on Iran.

Non-believing people have a hard time swallowing all this. It seems so wacko. Religious people who have had any experience of fundamentalism in their lives know it all too well.

Forget the RNC, Michael Steele or John Boehner. Ignore Romney.The new RNC is FNC. Roger Ailes is creating a new political entity that could redefine the right in America for a generation, and if it gets to power, will make the two terms of George W. Bush look like a golden era. No one in the GOP can stop this. Because Ailes now has their entire base in his hands. What he frames they will believe. When McCain surrendered to Palin, it was his last - and unintended - blow to a sane or responsible conservatism.