A week ago, Roger Stone was finally arrested, mostly just for being an all-around creepy fuckface. Within hours, he was sprung on bail, and instantly bounced from chat show to chat show over the next several days, as the poli-media ecosystem largely subsists on digesting the clusters of algae and scum at the surface of the political swamp. Never mind that Stone, like his boss, has a very long track record as a liar. There was once a time when such a trait would have been disqualifying from respectable outlets. This has not been the case for a very long time.
Obviously, politicians and their henchmen have always maintained some degree of artifice and mendacity instrumental to their goals and outcomes, but more and more -- and more than ever with this human centipede of an administration -- the mendacity itself is now the goal, the sole desirable outcome. There is an internal goal with these individuals, of course; if this group has a discernible policy or outcome in mind, it is basically to function as a chop shop, for the nation and its ordinary citizens, parting out and selling off the resources, leaving the suckers holding the bag.
Therefore, it is essential to lie simply as a way of keeping the ball rolling, to lure onlookers further and further away from the real wrongdoing. If people are arguing over the latest lie or set of lies you told, rather than the crimes you have committed, you start getting away with things. That's Donald Trump's entire life in a nutshell. Even in the rare instances in the past where he was held accountable to some extent, he'd just use his credulous lackeys in the corporate media ecosystem to leverage some industrial-grade bullshit to get something else going.
So, for one example, even though American commercial banks refused to lend him money after 1999, a few years later he hooks up with barrel-scraping "reality" huckster Mark Burnett to foist the notion of himself as a competent -- successful, even -- businessman. No shame in their game.
Now, to cite a much more recent and important example, earlier this week the intelligence community released its annual threat assessment. While the terse, rather sterile nature of the commentary does not lend itself well to full contextual analyses, many of its conclusions are clear, and at stark odds with what Trump has bloviated periodically from his fortress of ignorant indolence.
In the Middle East, Trump is intent on presenting Iran as an imminent danger, and on getting out of Syria as soon as possible, because the Saudis shovel cash in his and his children's direction, and that is what they want. For North Korea, Trump insists that relations are improving and the Norks are on the path to denuclearization, even though Kim Jong Un has made it very clear that he will never relinquish the "treasured sword" his father and grandfather bequeathed him. But our fearless "leader" desperately needs something that looks like a win to his base of dead-ender rubes, and so he insists on humping Kim's leg, even though it is clear to all that Kim is playing his own game here.
Certainly the American intel community has been responsible for a lot of shady shit over the years, from Iran and Guatemala in the Fifties to Allende to El Salvador, and on and on. But even their detractors don't deny their competence in acquiring and analyzing information. Except, of course, for the jabbering dunce in the White Castle. That fat, useless fuck thinks he knows every goddamn thing, when it's clear he doesn't even know one thing. Forget the fox/hedgehog debate, you have to add the dung beetle to the mix. (Which isn't really fair to dung beetles; even they serve some useful function in nature.)
So DNI Dan Coats and CIA head Gina Haspel testify before Congress, on live teevee, as to the veracity of the written threat assessment. It's all laid out clearly, in print and in testimony under oath, for all to read and hear. There is no question as to what the American intelligence community considers vital to our interests around the world. You can agree or disagree with the political bent of those observations and recommendations, and to whose service they are really meant for, but the fact is that the analyses are carefully culled from data gathered by field agents and technological means.
So of course Preznit Tide Pod Challenge has a wittle tantrum, that these so-called "experts" and "professionals" dared to use their "facts" and "experience" to derive a different analysis of the situation from his 4:00 AM twit-kake spatter. He wasted no time in calling them stupid, and then calling them on the carpet to inform them that they actually agreed with his analysis that the Mexican border and Iran were in fact our biggest dangers. To the damnation of their souls, Coats and Haspel meekly complied and scuttled off, leaving the nation's security under the purview of a doddering maroon who gets most of his "facts" from Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro.
It's actually kind of surprising that he hasn't made Steve Doocy chief of staff or SecDef or something, or given a plum job to the interchangeable bottle-blond tit-monster on the couch next to Doocy. Might as well. But this is an unprecedented and frightening thing, that the chief executive has massive, unparalleled intel sources pulling in data from all over, and analyzing it at the top levels, and still coming away with completely unfounded reasons to shit on their findings. And it's all just accepted with a shrug. Well, whaddaya gonna do? Indeed.
What the New York Times does is interview him, that's what they do. Because like his hench-people, he hasn't had quite enough platforms to keep spouting all his lies. So let's just give him another, shall we? You keep thinking that at some point, the vaunted notion of journalistic integrity and responsibility will win out or at least show up, but that day never seems to come for some of these people.
The stupid wall is another prime example, as he contradicts himself daily as to whether the wall is being built or if it's a national emergency because Nancy Pelosi refuses to give him money to build it with. (And if it is a national emergency, then we are in truly deep shit, because even if Congress gave him $100bn tomorrow for it, and they got the thousand miles of Texas border expropriated under eminent domain overnight, it still would take months and years to get all that built. So which is it? If only we had an objective media obsessed with facts and accuracy, rather than access and stenography, to help sort all that out.
None of this happens without them, you know -- and by this I mean look around you, and by them I mean the complaisant, lazy, facile shih-tzus posing as pit bulls, with their tiresome "last bastion of democracy" schtick. There's a small number of honorable individuals, but most of them can fuck entirely off. This is their fault, right from the very beginning, all the way back to the Eighties. It's their job to be skeptical, and instead they were credulous, simply because this mouthy asshole returned their calls and gave them something quotable. (And it's our fault as well, for being so collectively lazy and mendacious ourselves, and for falling for this shit over and over again.)
And now they're all just overwhelmed, because these fuckers have figured out that if you just keep lying, the journos will then set about discussing the latest lies, spiraling further out in orbit, while the original crimes diminish in the increasing distance.
It would be something if they set about trying to fix this problem they've created. Instead they keep interviewing him, letting him lie and dissemble, encouraging him to make shit up and deny what we all see right in front of us -- deny even what he's said himself.
We need a new political system, and we need a new media system. Because enough of these systems are pure shit, and the parts that have not yet been corrupted do a piss-poor job of self-regulating the corrupt and lazy elements out of their respective bloodstreams.
Obviously, politicians and their henchmen have always maintained some degree of artifice and mendacity instrumental to their goals and outcomes, but more and more -- and more than ever with this human centipede of an administration -- the mendacity itself is now the goal, the sole desirable outcome. There is an internal goal with these individuals, of course; if this group has a discernible policy or outcome in mind, it is basically to function as a chop shop, for the nation and its ordinary citizens, parting out and selling off the resources, leaving the suckers holding the bag.
Therefore, it is essential to lie simply as a way of keeping the ball rolling, to lure onlookers further and further away from the real wrongdoing. If people are arguing over the latest lie or set of lies you told, rather than the crimes you have committed, you start getting away with things. That's Donald Trump's entire life in a nutshell. Even in the rare instances in the past where he was held accountable to some extent, he'd just use his credulous lackeys in the corporate media ecosystem to leverage some industrial-grade bullshit to get something else going.
So, for one example, even though American commercial banks refused to lend him money after 1999, a few years later he hooks up with barrel-scraping "reality" huckster Mark Burnett to foist the notion of himself as a competent -- successful, even -- businessman. No shame in their game.
Now, to cite a much more recent and important example, earlier this week the intelligence community released its annual threat assessment. While the terse, rather sterile nature of the commentary does not lend itself well to full contextual analyses, many of its conclusions are clear, and at stark odds with what Trump has bloviated periodically from his fortress of ignorant indolence.
In the Middle East, Trump is intent on presenting Iran as an imminent danger, and on getting out of Syria as soon as possible, because the Saudis shovel cash in his and his children's direction, and that is what they want. For North Korea, Trump insists that relations are improving and the Norks are on the path to denuclearization, even though Kim Jong Un has made it very clear that he will never relinquish the "treasured sword" his father and grandfather bequeathed him. But our fearless "leader" desperately needs something that looks like a win to his base of dead-ender rubes, and so he insists on humping Kim's leg, even though it is clear to all that Kim is playing his own game here.
Certainly the American intel community has been responsible for a lot of shady shit over the years, from Iran and Guatemala in the Fifties to Allende to El Salvador, and on and on. But even their detractors don't deny their competence in acquiring and analyzing information. Except, of course, for the jabbering dunce in the White Castle. That fat, useless fuck thinks he knows every goddamn thing, when it's clear he doesn't even know one thing. Forget the fox/hedgehog debate, you have to add the dung beetle to the mix. (Which isn't really fair to dung beetles; even they serve some useful function in nature.)
So DNI Dan Coats and CIA head Gina Haspel testify before Congress, on live teevee, as to the veracity of the written threat assessment. It's all laid out clearly, in print and in testimony under oath, for all to read and hear. There is no question as to what the American intelligence community considers vital to our interests around the world. You can agree or disagree with the political bent of those observations and recommendations, and to whose service they are really meant for, but the fact is that the analyses are carefully culled from data gathered by field agents and technological means.
So of course Preznit Tide Pod Challenge has a wittle tantrum, that these so-called "experts" and "professionals" dared to use their "facts" and "experience" to derive a different analysis of the situation from his 4:00 AM twit-kake spatter. He wasted no time in calling them stupid, and then calling them on the carpet to inform them that they actually agreed with his analysis that the Mexican border and Iran were in fact our biggest dangers. To the damnation of their souls, Coats and Haspel meekly complied and scuttled off, leaving the nation's security under the purview of a doddering maroon who gets most of his "facts" from Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro.
It's actually kind of surprising that he hasn't made Steve Doocy chief of staff or SecDef or something, or given a plum job to the interchangeable bottle-blond tit-monster on the couch next to Doocy. Might as well. But this is an unprecedented and frightening thing, that the chief executive has massive, unparalleled intel sources pulling in data from all over, and analyzing it at the top levels, and still coming away with completely unfounded reasons to shit on their findings. And it's all just accepted with a shrug. Well, whaddaya gonna do? Indeed.
What the New York Times does is interview him, that's what they do. Because like his hench-people, he hasn't had quite enough platforms to keep spouting all his lies. So let's just give him another, shall we? You keep thinking that at some point, the vaunted notion of journalistic integrity and responsibility will win out or at least show up, but that day never seems to come for some of these people.
The stupid wall is another prime example, as he contradicts himself daily as to whether the wall is being built or if it's a national emergency because Nancy Pelosi refuses to give him money to build it with. (And if it is a national emergency, then we are in truly deep shit, because even if Congress gave him $100bn tomorrow for it, and they got the thousand miles of Texas border expropriated under eminent domain overnight, it still would take months and years to get all that built. So which is it? If only we had an objective media obsessed with facts and accuracy, rather than access and stenography, to help sort all that out.
None of this happens without them, you know -- and by this I mean look around you, and by them I mean the complaisant, lazy, facile shih-tzus posing as pit bulls, with their tiresome "last bastion of democracy" schtick. There's a small number of honorable individuals, but most of them can fuck entirely off. This is their fault, right from the very beginning, all the way back to the Eighties. It's their job to be skeptical, and instead they were credulous, simply because this mouthy asshole returned their calls and gave them something quotable. (And it's our fault as well, for being so collectively lazy and mendacious ourselves, and for falling for this shit over and over again.)
And now they're all just overwhelmed, because these fuckers have figured out that if you just keep lying, the journos will then set about discussing the latest lies, spiraling further out in orbit, while the original crimes diminish in the increasing distance.
It would be something if they set about trying to fix this problem they've created. Instead they keep interviewing him, letting him lie and dissemble, encouraging him to make shit up and deny what we all see right in front of us -- deny even what he's said himself.
We need a new political system, and we need a new media system. Because enough of these systems are pure shit, and the parts that have not yet been corrupted do a piss-poor job of self-regulating the corrupt and lazy elements out of their respective bloodstreams.
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