Deathwatch U.S.A.

I am old enough so I remember hearing the children of Republicans telling other children to "go back to Russia", on the school playground.   I was told that, myself, my parents being liberal Democrats, I remember hearing people say that in town meetings.   That the people saying it were, in some cases, the parents and grandparents of and, in some cases, the same people who are supporting Donald Trump for president, is ironic.  When you deal with people who have incorporated hypocrisy into their thinking and acting to the extent that the Trump supporters have, that the media which promoted him have, the irony comes in tsunamis, not in drops of drizzle.

We are in an election cycle when this kind of thing has to be said about the Republican nominee, the Republican nominee that has the support of the farthest right of the Republican party.

Morell told ABC's "This Week" that he had "no doubt" Putin viewed Trump as an "unwitting agent" of Russia, and noted that as a trained KGB intelligence operative, Putin had manipulated people "much smarter than Donald Trump."

"He played this perfectly, right? He saw that Donald Trump wanted to be complimented. He complimented him. That led Donald Trump to then compliment Vladimir Putin and to defend Vladimir Putin's actions in a number of places around the world. And Donald Trump didn't even understand, right, that Putin was playing him," Morell said....

... "Mr. Putin is a great leader, Mr. Trump says, ignoring that he has killed and jailed journalists and political opponents, has invaded two of his neighbors and is driving his economy to ruin," Morell wrote. "Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests — endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia's annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States."

When Gerald Ford made a gaff and claimed, in a debate, that the Soviet Union didn't dominate Eastern Europe it was enough to give the Republican friendly media reason to doubt his competence, the jokes about him playing football without a helmet and not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time were probably enough, by themselves, to sink his fortunes.   Today Donald Trump, not making mistakes during a debate but, repeatedly and openly inviting the Russian oligarchs to dominate Ukraine and the Baltic states is not enough to seal his fate.

The cynical decision made by Republicans somewhere along the way to try to win with the support of the worst in us, the cruel, the cynical, the bigoted and the ignorant, harnessing that force so that our own oligarchs could dominate the government to the detriment of democracy has backfired in that segment of the Republican electorate choosing the reality TV star for president.   This is the whirlwind they sowed, so diligently, making a steady progress down that slope, accelerated with the Rehnquist and Roberts courts, the rigging of congressional and state legislative districts, the discouragement of minority voting in a return to blatant Jim Crow, and, most of all, the regime of televised an broadcast an cable fed lies, cruel, cynical, bigoted an ignorant which is what the Donald Trump cult is made of in the name of entertainment.

If we dodge the bullet that Donald Trump is, there is no reason to believe we will the next time.  Looking back over the past forty years, this has been a steady descent into the place we are today.  You can listen to even Ronald Reagan, bad as he was, and Warren Berger, bad as he was, and hear vestiges of responsible, adult thinking which were largely absent in George W. Bush and, now, Donald Trump.   Any responsible thinking expressed by John Roberts from the Supreme Court is more of a cynical calculation about what might cost him in esteem or risking a backlash than it is an expression of any kind of inner integrity or love of the American People or democracy.

The media has been incredibly irresponsible in the past half century, anyone who maintains any faith in their ability to, voluntarily and in any reliable manner, support and promote the necessary foundations of democracy among the voters is a sucker for another brand of cynical fraud.  They have promoted their own profit and self-interest, not the needs of a decent society and a democratic government.   I recently looked at the Bogart movie, Deadline U.S.A. and was struck by how hollow the platitudes expressed in it sound in light of the behavior of the press during most of my life.  Though it was a news paper, back when that was the news, today it's TV and the radio that pretend to be doing the same thing.  No doubt those guys like to believe the ridiculously romantic and unrealistic view of their profession, its allegedly lofty mission and ideals even as they undermine the necessary ingredients that will produce a democracy.   As mentioned the other day, the ridiculous pose they present is even-handedness, "giving opposing views" meaning, inevitably, empowering the political right*.

Their excuse of impartiality was always a lie and a basic violation of the pretense of why the corporate press, the media are given the privileges misnamed "rights" in the First Amendment.  If the reason for those is the service the media does to the right of a free people of good will to make an informed vote, then that is a responsibility that isn't optional.  Either the media serves and promotes democracy or it serves and promotes its own profits.  Any media that doesn't give the advantage to those things that promote democracy over the interests of the oligarchs - and that includes most of it in the past fifty years - has aided in the creation of the world we have now in which Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, talks and acts like an asset of the KGB man running Russia.   I can only imagine what the reaction of the press would have been if a major candidate for president had spouted the KGB line, explicitly, even forty years ago.   I don't have to imagine what would have happened if one had, through a gaff, done something faintly like that because it happened.   If you want to know what happened, how we got to this point, look at the changes in the media over that period, they created the disaster.

*  In some ways,  PBS was the worst offender,  certainly before FOX started, giving William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, John McLaughlin, and a host of other right-wing pitch men lots and lots of air-time, "balancing" their clear intentions with Washington press hack who were, in most cases, the soft-sellers of the same message.   And liberals were the biggest suckers in the world for that.  P.B.S. and  local"public stations," both TV and radio, were most eager to take the dirty money of the oligarchic fascists, greasing the tack on the downward slope to where we are, today.   There really isn't much reason to even turn the radio on, these days.