6 years ago
7
What if the right-wing media wins?
Conservative critics of the press want more than just a louder voice. They want The New York Times and The Washington Post to go away.
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Polarization of the political discourse is most evident in the media. The next step is for the populist leader to eliminate those on the opposite side.
Perhaps you give Trump too much credit. Not for being a lying, corrupt, populist gadfly whose rise to power charts our descent into wreck and ruin, because sure, he is that. Rather, I think you may give him too much credit for being the only one. Or the only one whose rise can be anticipated, step-by-step, from the usual prophecy of the authoritarian despot.
If anything, this political jester is the comedy relief whose term in office keeps the crowd in stitches before the main players get back to the melodrama at hand. Figuring Trump to be the antichrist, while it's all the rage in liberal circles, is as short-sighted as it was when Trump himself was wallowing in bigoted muck with his fellow racist pigs saying Obama was. Mind you, I'm not saying these are political figureheads who stand in for the country's actual owners. That may be, but what the article misses and I think your brief comment lets stand, is that he isn't uniquely the archetype of the authoritarian demagogue.
The article assumes, or more distressingly pretends, that it's only one end of the political continuum that makes its bed in barking dog insanity. It accuses ordinary people, whom it typifies as conservatives, of heresy against dogma for not blindly accepting the fever-dream hysteria of the Clintons' Democratic Party as if it were the same thing as believing the Earth was flat. This article's a self-satire of talking down to people whose common sense tells them they're being lied to all the way around.
The intended audience for this piece is assumed to understand that the New York Times and the Washington Post are sacred bastions of truth. Me, I don't think those people stand much to gain from this kind of screed. Very much like Ann Coulter fans don't get a great deal of illumination from the fires she runs around setting. We, reading the piece, are meant to gasp in horror that anyone, ever might've suspected there was anything but the purest, refined, unadulterated truth to be found in those Establishment dailies. Not even Soviet citizens had such an inbred adoration of Pravda and Tass at the height of Stalin.
As comforting as it is to think Trump's going to be a one-term Confederate president, it seems likelier that a more intelligent, more capable and more effective rising authoritarian demagogue will eliminate him. You know, in accordance with prophecy.
I actually intended to focus on the polarization, which is the first problem we need to solve if there's ever going to be a United S of A again. I'm well aware that the entire Washington establishment is rotten beyond repair, and that they have resources beyond belief to spread the rot.
It can always be worse, and if people don't change their attitude toward each other it will. I can tell you how it went in Venezuela. The first popular uprising against the establishment was lead by another "dotard" called Rafael Caldera. Only after him we got Hugo Chavez. It's definitely possible that a populist smarter than Trump follows suit. It doesn't take much to be smarter than Trump.
I know I'm being repetitive, but unless we start listening to our political opponents in a respectful way, and trying to find a consensus, shit's going to keep getting worse. And it can get much, much, much worse.
BTW, about NYT and WP, if anyone knows a way to block them permanently I'd like to know. I'm tired of them asking me to pay them to brainwash me. It's like political televangelism.
Mark them as SPAM. I recently somehow got added back to the Daily Kos cause of the never ending emails. I suspect someone sold my email address to um. Well not only did I unsubscribe again,marking them as spammers sends their crap to the spam filter.
Caldera sounds like the opposite of a demagogue. From what little I've found, he sounds like a practical man that wore himself out building unpopular consensus about hard problems. Forgive a stupid question, but would you say he ultimately let the country down, the country let him down, both, neither?
He pardoned Chavez. If that's not letting the country down, I don't know what is.
I won't begrudge you any grudges. I've still got an evil eye for Ralph Nader, a sometimes third party presidential candidate who tore that mask off in the final days of the Nov. 7, 2000 election to campaign, not for his party to get votes essential for the party's standing on state ballots, but to make sure votes went to his kindred-spirit Republican George W. Bush. Nader was the third man on Bush/Cheney's ticket. So keep stoking the fires of hatred for Caldera, and warm yourself by them as I do. It's cozy. Familiar. Am curious one thing, though, does your contempt extend to his pardoning Communist guerrillas as well?