Thursday, June 20, 2024
When I was in high school I went to a camp in Canada for a month. Camp Tawingo, it’s still there. There was no TV or communication with the outside world, except an AM radio station that had commercials for local businesses so many miles north or south of the swinging bridge. As campers, we’d talk about the same things. It would’t take long for those same conversations to come around the horn. In a closed environment like that how long does it take for something that was mentioned or suggested to be then thought of as fact? How many times does it have to be brought up?
I mention this because last night I saw clips of Newt Gingrich, Steven Forbes, and whomever the replacement on Fox for Tucker is all spouting how the economy is in trouble and Joe Biden is a disaster. The reality is much different. Do they know this or are they lying? It may have started out as a lie but continually saying this nonsense may have convinced them that it is true.
Meanwhile the RNC is showing doctored clips alleging Biden is “wandering off” when in fact he was turning to talk to some paratroopers. Yet, the RNC persists in repeating the obvious lie.
A new book “Apprentice in Wonderland how Donald Trump and Mark Burnett took America through the Looking Glass” just came out. It is from an author who works for Vanity Fair and has interviewed many actors and celebrities. His assessment of Trump is that Trump is not a politician but a person craving attention. That Trump is playing a character, who when he drops the mask knows he lost the 2020 election, and whose days are filled with trying to seek revenge on those who he feels have slighted him and who is hurt that other celebrities don’t like him.
There is also speculation that he has a form of sundowner’s syndrome, which says late in the day he gets confused. This some believe will make him back out of the debate and is also the reason that he is not scheduling any rallies at night.
What is very concerning is the constant attacking of Democrats and other unnamed or illusory groups that need to be destroyed or driven out. This is not political rhetoric. This is the kind of talk that would eliminate our democracy.
A consortium of conservative groups have banned together to create the “2025 Project.” This is a 900 page document that is a blueprint for what these folks want to do if they take power, e.g. if Trump wins. They want to do away with the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, the FBI, the CIA, and the IRS. They want to strip the top levels of the civil service of their protection as civil servants and make them political appointees. In this way they can be fired and replaced with political appointees.
Those levels of civil service are people like Anthony Fauci. Why would they want to get rid of such people? People who know what they are talking about? People who actually know things? People who have spent their lives trying to make the government function?
The answer seems to be that those people, people with knowledge have power, and the 2025 Project want to centralize all the power. So what if the people in charge don’t know what they’re talking about?
Combine this with the repetition of things that aren’t true and you have a dangerous mix. We’ve already seen that when Trump was president. Remember he ask Zelensky to get dirt on Joe Biden based on a conspiracy theory that there was a server in Ukraine? There wasn’t. What’s Zelensky to do? You can argue that it’s as Fiona Hill said “a political errand,” but should Zelensky hire Tucker or Geraldo to drum up something?
Then we get to the 2020 election, the Republicans have a guy to watch over the election to make sure there was no cheating. What does he find? No cheating. Obviously, he came to the wrong conclusion and had to be fired. Oh wait, there was some cheating. It was by a few nutty Republicans. And then Rudy had the names of all the dead people who voted. Great give it to Brad in Georgia or the guy in Arizona who testified that he was asked to not certify the election because of all the dead people who voted. Once again, he needed names. No names were produced. There were the 62 legal cases about the election, 61 were tossed and the last one had a technical something or other, which meant it wasn’t a total loss.
Why, one has to ask, are these people deluding themselves? Have they repeated these lies so often they believe them? There has been a long history of people covering up for Trump. Be it Mark Burnett, the banks that allowed his bankruptcies to continue, his handlers when he was in the White House, or the Senators who voted not to impeach, and people that the actor known as Trump told them the election in 2020 was stolen? Or as Inspector Pierrot asked, “Why? Why are all these people lying to me?”
Why indeed.
Oh yes, they also want to do away with NOAA. Why would they want to do that? Well, during Trump’s presidency they put a guy in charge of the weather service who had a competing platform. This fellow took the NWS stuff repackaged it and charged a fee. What he wanted to do was to forbid NOAA and the weather service from publishing anything and only letting him have it. This would have meant that only subscribers would know if a hurricane or tornado was coming. Great idea. Capitalism at its best.
I suspect that’s what the motivation behind the “get rid of NOAA” thing is all about. Don’t get rid of it just make it the personal tool of this other weather service.
Project 2025 is a roadmap to Communism. You know that belief that Republicans keep accusing Democrats of. I am again appalled at the lack of reporting by the news media on Project 2025. Especially NPR. Jon Oliver had a great piece on it last Sunday.
I cannot understand how the Republicans have become so despicable. Any respect I had for them in the past is totally gone. The media seems to find it their job to allow FaceTime on all the idiots of the party. That FaceTime gives them reality. On the other hand the media should be spending their time reporting on why all these people are seeking asylum. Instead the media is adding to the angst of immigration.