The twisted genius of Donald Trump is his ability to deflect and to paint his opponents with his own weaknesses.
I suppose it started with Swiftboating. John Kerry was a decorated war veteran, who actually went to Vietnam, while George W. Bush got a cushy deal with the air guard to fly jets one weekend a month and avoid being shot at. Seems like a simple thing - who's the war hero and who's the draft-dodger?
Well, by the time Rodger Ailes got done with Kerry, people thought Kerry was the coward, and George W. valiantly patrolled the skies over Texas, preventing invasion from Mexico. And sadly, the media went along with this - needing "news" for the "news cycle" and reporting on any stupid thing, no matter how sketchy, so long as it sold eyeballs to advertisers. So these "Swift boat veterans" (all two of them) got lots of air time. But no one else did.
And before long, the mainstream media was baited into stories about whether Kerry threw away his medals, threw them over the White House fence, or how many medals he threw, or maybe it was just the ribbons. No shit, this crap-reporting went on for days - weeks, even. "This just in! New controversy as to whether Kerry threw three or four medals over the White House fence. We'll have pundits on both sides of this pressing issue with their analysis!"
What the ever-loving fuck? Dick Cheney was no doubt cackling with glee when he saw the mainstream media get sucked into this. Before long, everyone forgot about Bush and the focus was on Kerry - was he a hero or a zero? The coupe de grace was a shitty piece on 60 Minutes done by that douchebag Dan Rather (why, just why?) using what was clearly a phony "Memo" that they never bothered to vet or submit to a document expert - or a 3rd grader - either of whom could have pointed out that Word 2000 fonts don't print on an IBM Selectric typewriter in an era before personal computers existed. Bush was exonerated - by a classic false-flag operation!
Maybe it started with Reagan - the "Teflon" President. They could make credible accusations against him and nothing stuck. Even the Iran-Contra kerfuffle (whose repercussions are still being felt today, with the war in Iraq, our relationship with Iran, and the migration caravans at our borders) which was clearly a violation of many Federal laws, was swept away when Ronnie went on TeeVee and aw-shucked us into believing that he had no idea what was going on. I mean, I could believe that about George W, but Ronnie? Well, maybe he was starting to lose it. It happens to all of us.
But those guys were freaking amateurs compared to Trump, who appears to be dumb as a post, but has this almost autistic-like handle on the American psyche. He knows just when to drop a Tweet-bomb to distract from bad news and once again the mainstream media is taken in. GDP craters the worst since 1929 and the "leade" story (I hate that spelling - Newhouse fags!) is that Trump is going to delay the election, which apparently he can do through Twitter, as under the Constitution, Tweets are now considered Presidential decrees.
What is odd is that the media runs as a sidebar article how Trump drops these Tweet-bombs to distract from what is going on. So the story is, "We've been taken in by Trump yet again - and rather than do something about it, we'll just get taken in!" But of course, they are now firmly addicted to the powerful drug of click-bait. They know what we want to read and watch and what makes money for the network or paper. So they have to go with click-bait. If they don't, viewers and readers will migrate to other channels of information.
So yes, we are the problem, or more precisely, the great unwashed masses who believe just about anything you put on TeeVee.
Trump's latest whopper of a lie - and one dutifully reported only by the right-wing media this time around - is that Biden is"ducking" the debates. Emphasis on the word "ducking" which is in every article and thus was created by design, no doubt after testing the word with focus groups. The reality is (boring! change the channel!) that Biden has agreed to three debates so far and Trump has agreed to none.
Trump huddles in a bunker in the White House and "ducks" the press and won't commit to any debates. So the narrative is.... Biden did that, not Trump. Trump isn't the Teflon President, he's the trampoline one, whatever you say about him bounces back and sticks to you.
Or it will, if we let it.
I said early on in this blog that any business relationship you enter into predicated by a lie, no matter how trivial will go downhill from there:
Liars play their hand early. When you answer the phone and someone says "how are YOU today?" they are lying to you, as they really don't care about how well you are doing. When you get a piece of mail that says "urgent!" when it is just an ad, or is faked-up to look like a tax refund check or something important - to get you to open it - they are lying to you. When a commercial says you can "lease a new car for $199 a month!" and you get down to the dealer and realize it will cost far more than that, they are lying to you.
People who lie to you at the get-go aren't going to become more honest over time. Just walk away from deceptive advertising, practices, and come-ons. Every time you send business to people to operate this way, you encourage more people to do it - and drive out of business the few honest people left.
This mantra is a useful tool in helping you parse your way through the numerous financial obligations and offers you see every day in your life. It is hard and time-consuming to wade through pages of fine print on some credit card offer to figure out if it is legit or not (most are not). But if you can spot a whopper of a lie early on - or even a trivial one - odds are, you can safely dismiss the rest of the offer without reading it.
For example, a credit card offer comes in the mail, faked up to look like a government check, official communication or has the words, "Important! Open Right Away!" on it. These are all lies and you can assume that the offer won't be a good one, otherwise they wouldn't have to lie to you about it.
Sadly, people go for the lies and eschew truth. I received an offer from Capital One that sounded "too good to be true" and what made me nervous was the lack of four-point fine print that went on for pages, or the lack of a faked-up mailer. I almost threw it away because the offer was too direct and too honest, oddly enough. But it turned out to be a good deal - offering a $200 bonus if I would make a deposit, and paying interest almost ten times what I am getting from an ordinary savings account.
But getting back to Trump, the same rules about commerce should apply to politics as well. Yea, I know, everyone says that "all politicians are liars" but let's face it, Trump can't tell the truth if his life depended on it. He has to spin everything in his life to be "great" or "fantastic" even if a truckload of horse shit fell on him. The guy lies to us - all the time.
And to me, that's all I need to know. Yes, you could go through policy analysis - the actual policies, not the click-bait camera-ready Tweet-bombs designed to distract and disseminate. And if you wade through all that you would come to the same conclusion you get from the 300-yard drive-by view. If it looks like a scam from that far away, odds are, it is.
But again, the genius of Trump (and his lackeys) is that they can flip even this. Trump lies whenever his lips are moving, but if you confronted them about this, they would dig through 1,000 hours of interview videos stretching back decades to find an instance of Biden putting a favorable spin on something and then say, "See? He's the liar! Not Trump! That's why he won't debate!"
And sadly, the mainstream media will go along with this, calling it "Liar-gate" or something to that effect, with its own spinning logo and text crawl on the evening news, and talking heads debating the matter until the plebes don't even know what to think.
But make no mistake about it, Trump is a big fat liar, and the reason why he lies all the time, is that the truth is scary - and scariest of all to him.
