Jen Sorensen skips the clever rhetoric and metaphors and gets right to the point: Tuesday is going to tell the story.
There are any number of cartoons out there about how sick everyone is of political advertisements and arguments, and I’m sympathetic, but that’s how the system works, or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work.
In other times, it’s been a question of degrees, because we’ve all agreed more or less on the major items and it’s just a matter of who you feel will get us there more efficiently. In those times, it was easy to keep on the road, with a little of this here and a little of that there.
But this isn’t one of those times, and, as she suggests, the usual safeguards have let us down.
There’s an interesting cause and effect analysis to be made, but that’s for the historians.
Our task is to show up on Tuesday and make the decisions those historians will ponder after we’ve lived through the results of our choices.
I’m reminded of a remark my mother made when I was waxing profound about World War II. She said, “You have to remember: At the time, we didn’t know who was going to win.”
I hope my grandchildren have a chance to look back at this election and be profound about it, but that may well depend on who wins.
David Horsey notes the frustration many people are feeling over the silencing of editorial boards in what seems like a caving in to external pressures at a time when those external pressures are very much the center of the issue.
It’s not just the newspapers, but it certainly is the newspapers.
That is, people say “Shop local” but what is local anymore? The money I spend on groceries doesn’t go to Mr. Hooper. It goes to Schenectady or West Bridgewater or to Portland, and the money that goes to Portland ends up in Holland.
And that’s true, too, of drug stores, clothing stores, book stores, department stores. It’s hard to find locally owned enterprises anymore.
It’s certainly true of media.
In the early 80s, when I worked in talk radio, we were local but our FM station was one of the early satellite stations, in which the DJs never commented on the weather and they said how many minutes past the hour it was, but not which hour.
Today, that’s the norm for radio, and your “local” paper probably takes orders from some corporate headquarters a thousand miles away. Meanwhile, the newsroom is being cut and cut again until it’s no longer possible to cover what’s happening in your town.
Even local ownership is no longer a guarantee. In one place I lived, the AM station’s noon news show was mandatory listening, because their news director covered everything. Then it was sold and the new owner didn’t want one of his friend’s DUI made public. The news director quit and the noon news show was canceled.
Expand that by a factor of a few thousand, and that’s why journalists are worrying about the Washington Post and the LA Times. And the country.
It’s not so much that we worry about what Jeff Bezos or Patrick Soon-Shiong are going to do, because their cancellation of endorsements may be a solitary event.
But the overall vacuum of coverage is being filled with deliberate misinformation, and Matt Wuerker (Politico) points to one of the oligarchs determined to rule the world through propaganda.
CNN expresses it clearly:
Elon Musk’s misinformation megaphone has created a “huge problem” for election officials in key battleground states who told CNN they’re struggling to combat the wave of falsehoods coming from the tech billionaire and spreading wildly on his X platform.
The Wall Street Journal opened Twitter accounts in which the users claimed interest only in non-political topics like sports and cooking, but found their accounts flooded with pro-Trump, anti-Harris postings and claims of election fraud.
Perhaps the millions Musk lost in purchasing the social medium represented a long-term investment.
Juxtaposition of the GIGO
The latest false outrage comes with Donald Trump having hired a comedian to open his Madison Square Garden bund rally by calling Puerto Rico garbage plus, as Rogers notes, his describing the United States as a garbage can because it allows minorities to immigrate here.
As Jones notes, it’s hardly the most insulting, degrading thing Trump has heaped upon the nation.
But when Joe Biden — who is not a candidate for public office — called out the garbage attitude of those who buy into Trump’s insults, well, bring out the swooning couch and the smelling salts for poor sensitive Donnie!
The latest wrinkle is the accusation that the transcript was changed from “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American” to “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
Because, of course, the stenographers who prepared the transcript clearly heard that there was no apostrophe, regardless of what the president says he said and meant.
The controversy being that it matters whether one person or more than one person demonizes Latinos, because apparently if it’s more than one person, you’re not allowed to criticize them.
Kind of like the way you can criticize the comedian for calling Puerto Rico garbage, but not for also saying Latinos breed too much or for a watermelon joke, and you mustn’t mention other comments from the evening, like Stephen Miller echoing Nazi rhetoric with “America is for Americans only” or lying about how often immigrants rape and murder our white women.
As Lalo Alcaraz (AMS) suggests, Trump’s performative stunt of riding around in a garbage truck should awaken memories of Michael Dukakis in the tank, which drew ridicule and damaged his campaign.
But it won’t, any more than Trump followers will change their votes because of a Halloween parade where Trump supporters depicted Harris being led down the street in chains.
Juxtaposition of America’s Image
Marian Kamensky — Austria (Cartoon Movement)
The whole world is watching to see what happens Tuesday.
“You have to remember: At the time, we didn’t know who was going to win.”
How does one “hear” an apostrophe? And couldn’t it also have been supporters’?
Reading the text, it seems fairly obvious through context clues that JRB was referring to DJT’s statements as garbage.
But then again, some people today are working hard to find something to get outraged about.
As the Daily Show pointed out the other night, American’s don’t know how to use apostrophe’s anyway’s.
P.S.: Some trumpster left a comment under a Facebook post of mine last night complaining, without a trace of irony, about how “libtards” call the people on his side “deplorable.” (Oh, how 2016!)
I live in Arizona. I bought a refurbished laptop once used in Nevada. Now I’m an expert on the Nevada ballot.
Nothing betrayed the MAGATs’ phony outrage like Marco Rubio rushing on stage to tell Trump the good news of Biden calling them “garbage”
It was very much a “See!? Your guy is just as bad as us!” moment. They were thrilled at being insulted.
Not disagreeing with your broader points, but the issue with the Biden quote is that his staff added the apostrophe. Whether it had ended up supporters’ or supporter’s didn’t matter. The original transcript had “supporters” plural, no possessive. So the meaning was Trump’s supporters are garbage. Or deplorable. Take your pick.
My point was that a stenographer would not have heard an apostrophe. They only exist in print. How can the steno’s version be the correct one?
“How dare those Marxist satanic baby-killers call us garbage!”