CSotD: Slaughter on Fifth Avenue

So it’s come to this: Rob Rogers lays out the new rationale for canceling someone’s vote.

Because he’s lost his mind. Because he believes a man who lies so often that his greatest success as a “job creator” has been in the area of fact checking.

But, of course, that’s part of Trump’s game.

By constantly accusing the media of lying, by pushing the Lügenpresse button, which worked for his spiritual predecessors and sure seems to be working for him, he leaves us in a position where any attempt to correct the record is dismissed as yet another lie from his — and thus “our” — enemies.

 

Lio poses a question that I’ve been pondering, and which is germane to this issue: What is keeping network TV alive?

I cut the cord earlier this month, when I discovered that Fubo would give me my local stations, which are actually my regional stations, since, if they were local, I could get them on an antenna. Perils of country living.

But back when I was in the business, just under a third of homes had cable, HBO was a five-year-old movie service and Ted Turner was just ramping up WTBS Atlanta.

There was half an hour of local news and half an hour of network news around dinnertime, and then a half hour hybrid of the two just before Carson.

You might have an independent station showing Gilligan reruns, but most households made a choice: “News,” or “Off,” and the result was that our communities had a certain unity of input.

Today, our media is so fragmented that the President of the United States can lie his ass off knowing a substantial portion of the public will never hear any disagreement or correction.

 

As Pat Bagley notes, there’s one group who have no idea what’s going on and don’t want to be dragged into a conversation they’re afraid they won’t understand. (Love the sandwich)

Whatever Bagley thinks of them, I’d just as soon they remained non-voters, because they’re dumbasses and you wouldn’t be able to trust them to make an intelligent choice.

Which brings us to the dumbasses who do vote but who get their information from carefully filtered partisan sources and I want to be fair about this but leave us not bullshit one another: Most of the dumbasses on the left who vote are wandering off in search of Jill Stein and the Seven Cities of Perfection and have no impact on the results.

I had read an analysis that said Trump’s support came from people who were previously uninvolved, but I haven’t seen a bulge in voter numbers to substantiate that. I think there were protest votes, and I think there were potential anti-Trump voters who trusted the polls and stayed home, but I don’t think there was a huge mass of new voters.

But there were a lot of voters who believed a man who lies constantly. This is a NYTimes piece, but it’s very good, plus it’s early in the month and you’ve likely got some freebies left.

And here’s a point you needn’t burn a freebie for:

“We’re not letting them into our country. And then they never show up, almost, it’s like a level of 3 percent. They never show up for the trial. So by the time their trial comes, they’re gone, nobody knows where they are.”

Only three percent show up. Or, Justice Department records show, possibly 97 percent or 89 percent.

The actual figure depends on whether you are talking 2015, 2017 or Out Your Ass.

At a time when we all shared our sources, this would most certainly be a topic in and of itself: How the President could come up with such a obviously cockeyed number.

Today, if someone cites that statistic on-line, even calling them “gullible” simply shifts the topic to “I must be right, because you’ve resorted to name calling.”

It won’t cause them to change their mind. The President could cite an asinine, totally fictional, absurd, ridiculous three percent rate in the middle of Fifth Avenue and it wouldn’t cost him a vote.

 

As Edison Lee suggests in an only slightly more foolish setting, it’s a matter not of fact and fiction but of faith.  And if it doesn’t work out, it was, clearly, your fault.

Perhaps you should try again.

 

For instance, there is this caravan a-comin’ and it’s full of scary, scary Middle Eastern terrorists though, as I pointed out the other day, I was wrong to say Trump had accused George Soros of funding it.

I should have waited a day or two.

Jeff Danziger captures the moment when Cadet Bone Spurs has ordered his men into inaction, given that they’re not allowed to do most of what he’s bragged they’re going there to do.

He has backed off his “shoot the children” order, but it’s not clear he understands military law in any other areas.

 

What he does understand, what is even clearly visible to Dave Brown clear on the other side of the Atlantic, is how this hare-brained, hate-filled, ludicrous, fabulist initiative pleases the slack-jawed, slavering mutant garbage we used to think were no longer part of our country.

Which brings us back to the question: How can you communicate even obvious truth to people who are not listening? To people whose choice of information is never going to include any fact-checking?

 

There was a point, during the 2016 campaign and for a few months after, when the messages were indirect, but, as Matt Wuerker points out, Dear Leader no longer feels any need to mute his clarion call.

It was nice when we could say, “Oh, I’m sure he didn’t really mean it.”

But he does, and he doesn’t care how you feel about it, because he is the bad shepherd and he knows his goats and his goats know him.

 

And on Tuesday, Ann Telnaes predicts, we’ll find out what happens when a system gives access to a liar and allows its most cherished values to be kicked to the curb.

Or, perhaps, when it refuses to.

But there are no longer any guarantees.