White House counselor Kellyanne Conway appeared on President Trump’s favorite network on Wednesday to hype the mercurial President as an even-keeled politician delivering a unifying message in the wake of two mass shootings.
I’m glad, if that’s the exact word, to find I’m still faintly shocked to hear her simply turn reality on its head. If Trump said 2 +2 = 5 she would come out there and say actually he’s right because if you listen to what he’s really saying yadda yadda yadda. Still faintly shocks me. So yay?
A pretty good article by TPM alumnus, Brian Beutler, now with “Crooked Media”:
Today, before our eyes, Trump and his allies seek to crush the foundations of multiracial democracy and replace them with a white ethnostate where the ruling class directs violence at scapegoat communities to create the climate it needs to get away with looting the country and dismantling all checks on its power. If you can see that, and articulate it, you don’t ask what Trump might do to make things better, or say he “urges unity vs. racism.” If you can’t see it, or your job requires you to blind yourself to it, you must treat his ultimate purposes as an impenetrable mystery. You might explain away his efforts to end an investigation of an attack on the United States, and his coziness with the perpetrator, as impulses of a man who merely worries the Russia matter undermines his legitimacy. You might marvel at his occasional, scripted, disingenuous condemnations of all the forces he has fostered, and chase down Democrats to ask them if they think Trump is racist. But seriously: What the fuck?
And particularly interesting, at least to me, “journalism worth defending.”
What does this all mean? People are pissed, and rightly so. In the Trump era, liberals have had to balance their criticisms of the media with the broader and more important goal of defending it from a right-wing assault, which Trump has led, to discredit neutral journalism altogether. This week’s developments show liberals are willing to use their clout to demand that those outlets produce journalism worth defending.
This is all totally predictable. They think they can retake the narrative and bend it to their will. Trump is finished. Even before this latest mass murder Trump was done, but now he is a dead man walking. Just call it what it is. Now we work to make sure every f’ing Republiclan out there loses.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” – Joseph Goebbels
So I grew up in the Southwest, lived in El Paso for 12 years, and got my undergrad degree from UTEP. Like O’Rourke, my name is Robert. To this day, I still have friends from there who call me Beto. I don’t have a drop of Hispanic blood. It is their term of endearment for me.
Calling O’Rourke “Beto” shows what they think of him, not what he thinks of himself.