Trump's Drugged Up Strong Man Act - Unless The Collapse Has Happened Since I Started Writing This

I suppose the Republican-fascist practice of putting empty-headed dummies in the presidency, Reagan, Bush II, Trump, supported by the Murdoch-Sinclair wall-screen would come to this level of criminal insanity.  This is having your cornered rat pumped full of drugs and run, not through a maze because your rat never ran anywhere and couldn't get through a maze but through the simplified routine permitted for Republicans with media support.

They're, no doubt, putting pardons in front of him for him to touch a pen to, or maybe it's one of those automatic signing things, no doubt they've got some Dr. Feel Good pumping him full of steroids - I've never known someone on steroids who didn't later report the strong mental effects of them as being strong and generally dangerous.  But this is only the most extreme of show-biz supported dummy as president we've had, a phenomenon of the 24-7, talk-radio-cabloid "news" industry.  Though since 1964 the broadcast networks were greasing the skids into this sewer, the 1968 campaign which elected Nixon was a milestone in it as his presidency was a great stride in presidential criminality.  The 1972 campaign, even as his criminality was obvious was even more so on the part of the electronic media.

TV, radio, movies, all devolve into creating images and slogans and tunes for selling stuff, whether good quality at a good price or deceptively presented garbage, even dangerous garbage, it doesn't matter.   That's as true of the "creative content" as the advertising.  It was the great innovation of electronic mass media that they were able to use the deceptive, enticing practices of the advertising industry to more generalize the bilking of the public to all areas of life.  That was something that was realized by the people running all of them almost from the start.  People may have wondered how Orson Wells had such a deep understanding of the world and mind of a king of the tabloids, it was because they were in essentially the same  business, show biz, the creating of illusions, the creating of fiction, the manipulation of peoples' emotions, first, knowing the inclination of how people thought was more likely to be led by what they wanted to believe instead of what their harder reasoning and previous experience of consequences told them was real.  Getting people to ignore their own experience in favor of what is on a screen in front of them is one of the things most praised about the movies, TV, show biz and one of its most dangerous aspects.

They didn't have to sucker most people most of the time, they just had to sucker those whose votes could be counted with the percentage of the population whose inclinations were firmly fixed through their prejudice, their greed, their resentment, envy and hatred - they always had the convinced and motivated racists on board they just needed enough of the non-racists or mildly frightened to go along with them.

Oh, and don't forget the "civil libertarians" who are generally white and affluent and know which side their bread is buttered on and what is not going to really be much of any danger to them.  They are more like the margin of otherwise not depraved people who can be suckered, in many cases the "civil libertarians" have merely played the such on TV or in other media, they never really cared about much of anything. Dershowitz is merely the iconic example of such "civil libertarians".   Nat Hentoff, may he long linger in purgatory, was too.