My fellow people’s comrades!
Maureen Dowd writes in Grifters Gone Wild
Con artists have always been slithering around.
Huckleberry Finn tangled with flimflam men on Mississippi riverboats. There was a flirty snake oil salesman in “Oklahoma!” And Marian the Librarian fell in love with a charming charlatan, Professor Harold Hill, in “The Music Man.”
It was all part of an amusing American tradition of rapscallions doing their little side hustles.
But now narcissistic con artists are dominating the main stage, soaring to great heights and spectacularly exploding.
We have one running amok in the Oval.
The NY Times’ Sunday editorial DONALD TRUMP’S GUIDE TO PRESIDENTIAL ETIQUETTE provides a depressing and outrageous yet impressive list of the norms that Trump has destroyed with an endless-seeming string of lies.
Remember when President Michelle Wolf outraged the conscience of conservatives across America by cracking a joke about the press secretary’s eye makeup? Oh, wait — Ms. Wolf is a comedian. Telling jokes is her job.
A better example is President Hillary Clinton, who disregarded all protocol and endangered our national security by relying on a private email server to conduct some government business. Hold on, you say Mrs. Clinton isn’t president, either?
O.K., then — how about Barack Obama, an actual president? His disrespect for that station is the stuff of legend. A tan suit. Shirtsleeves in the Oval Office. Those big, impertinent feet defiling the presidential desk.
President Trump has managed to avoid those particular offenses. His suits are dark, his ties patriotically long. Yet in so many other ways he is violating Americans’ expectations of how presidents should behave — even of how adults should behave, particularly when children are watching. Yes, Mr. Trump has now been compared to Joseph Stalin by one senior senator from his party, and, yes, he has been pre-emptively disinvited to the prospective funeral of another. But most Republican leaders, usually such vigilant guardians of Oval Office decorum, have remained strangely silent.
So, for the fourth time in a year, we’ve compiled a list of Mr. Trump’s more egregious transgressions.
Today on “Morning Joy” no punches were pulled as Joy Reid and her guests called out Trump on his repeated use of pure propagandistic buzzwords like the always capitalized witchhunt and Spygate — both outright lies. The latest easily disproven lie is Trump falsely accuses the New York Times of making up a source. It was an official who briefed reporters (Washington Post).
HoHum. This will be covered in every real news outlet, but Trumpers will never read it and if they did they’d still believe Trump.
What difference does the truth make? You don’t even have to click on this lead HUFFPOST story (below) to feel a flood of rage and dismay over the effectiveness of brainwashing on the populous.
Almost Half Of Republicans Believe Millions Voted Illegally In The 2016 Election: Republicans also said by a 56-point margin that voter fraud is a more widespread problem than eligible voters being prevented from voting.
I don’t know what’s more frightening, the numbers of Republicans who said they thought voter fraud in favor of Democrats occurred or weren’t sure --
— or the fact that “ Just under one-quarter of Democrats said they believed the allegations that millions of votes were cast illegally, while 51 percent said they didn’t and 26 percent said they were unsure.”
We are living through, if you can call it living, an era where the power of Trump’s lies to turn reality inside-out have reached Hitlerian levels. It is instructive to look over an essay written by none other than Joseph Goebbels:
The lengthy essay begins:
My fellow people’s comrades!
Napoleon spoke of the “press as the seventh great power.” Its significance became politically visible with the beginning of the French Revolution, and maintained its position for the entirety of the 19th century. The century’s politics were largely determined by the press. One can hardly imagine or explain the major historical events between 1800 and 1900 without considering the powerful influence of journalism.
The radio will be for the twentieth century what the press was for the nineteenth century. With the appropriate change, one can apply Napoleon’s phrase to our age, speaking of the radio as the eighth great power. Its discovery and application are of truly revolutionary significance for contemporary community life. Future generations may conclude that the radio had as great an intellectual and spiritual impact on the masses as the printing press had before the beginning of the Reformation.
The November Regime [the Nazi term for the Weimar Republic] was not able to understand the full significance of the radio. Even those who claimed to have awakened the people and gotten them involved in practical politics were without exception almost blind to the possibilities of this modern method of influencing the masses.
At best, they saw it as an easy way to distract the masses from the difficulties of our national and social life through games and entertainment. Only reluctantly did they think of using radio for political purposes. As in all other things, they viewed radio through the mildew of an ostensible objectivity. They left the radio and its development to its technical and administrative experts, limiting their own use of it for partisan purposes to times of particular domestic crises.
It goes without saying that the National Socialist revolution, which is modern and intent on action, as well as the popular upheaval we have led, must change abstract and lifeless methods in the radio. The old regime was content simply to fill empty offices or change the faces, without however changing the spirit and content of public life. We on the other hand intend a principled transformation in the worldview of our entire society, a revolution of the greatest possible extent that will leave nothing out, changing the life of our nation in every regard.
Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), we have come a long way since 1933 when a despot was limited to mere radio broadcasts and massive rallies to incite huge masses of people to believe his hateful lies. Not only to believe but what is terrifying, to act on them.
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