The Russians are Eroding Our Democracy Through Con Artist King Trump, and the Media Acts as if "It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood."
February 22, 2020
New York Times article headline in middle of main page from Feb. 21. Just slightly larger on the net.
Washington Post front page headline on February 20. About actual size.
New York Times article headline in middle of main page from Feb. 21. Just slightly larger on the net.
MARK KARLIN,, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
You would have thought that after a week of Trump declaring himself a king, claiming to be the chief law enforcement in the US, inverting the DOJ into the Department of Injustice by interceding in Roger Stone’s sentencing to keep Stone from “ratting” on him, firing honorable civil servants in retribution, threatening career intelligence officers and FBI agents who investigated his Russian relationship in the 2016 campaign, discarding Congress as a co-equal branch of government, keeping cases that might reveal his corruption on hold in the Supreme Court that he controls, and so much more — you would have thought that the New York Times and Washington Post, as examples of prominent media, would have had blaring four column headlines that Trump was denouncing his own intelligence staff for briefing Congress on how Russia was going to interfere again in 2020 to elect Trump.
You would have thought Trump would have created a cover-story by chastising Russia, but remember Trump claimed in a Helsinki summit with Putin to have asked him if had interfered, Putin said “no,’ and Trump said he took him at his word, maybe the only person to claim to do so.. But no, Trump fired his acting intelligence director and denounced the reports. In short, it has been a four-year loop in which the Russians gave birth to Trump’s presidency and now are working to ensure that he is elected again (although Trump tells cult members at rallies that he may have four terms.)
The NYT and WP like many other mainstream papers often appear to engage in “Groundhog Day” Trump news, where instead of reporting on the context of Trump’s four years of being aided electorally by the Russians and Trump’s big lies (although the WP does keep a record of them), the papers seem to regard every new piece of evidence in isolation and allow Trump to balance facts with “falsely equivalent” lies.
And then there is the preoccupation of much of the media, particularly the transcriptionist DC Press Corps to speculate on Trump’s moods. That is represented by the middle (above) actual small size of the front page headline in the Washington Post on Thursday. The WP appeared more preoccupied with Trump’s anger that once again staffers were being disloyal for telling the truth than with writing a banner story on the history of Russian election interference on his behalf, the Ukrainian quid-pro-quo and CrowdStrike, his invitation to foreign powers publicly to interfere in elections on his behalf, “Russia, are you listening,” his admission to George Stephanopoulos that he wouldn’t necessarily report an offer of foreign electoral assistance to the FBI, and his achievement of Putin’s three main goals for his administration: 1) to divide American into factions; 2) to create a cynical public attitude toward government by dismantling and corrupting it; and 3) by defeating any attempt to remove him from office.
We are in a Constitutional crisis under the despotic rule of an unleashed and unhinged con artist who wants to invert justice into corruption. The very foundation of our nation is under siege that hasn’t been seen since the Civil War, only with the twist that we now have a new King George ruling over us.
Why then did the NYT run two small headlines (on the upper left and right of this commentary) basically appropriate for announcement of a cabinet appointment and place them down in the middle of their February 21 front page.
You get the sense from these two national papers that their journalistic guidance comes from Mr. Rogers,
It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood
A beautiful day for a neighbor
Could you be mine?
Would you be mine?
And then the media perennially gets sidetracked with saying that Trump wants to disown Russian interference because he sees it as a “stain” on his victory. No, he doesn’t. That’s nonsense. For four years Trump has fought a mountain of evidence of the Russians’ helping him to win and stay in power (because they are doing that too on social media) because if too exposed it will perhaps lead them to being stopped — and of his compliance with many of Putin’s major foreign policy goals including the weakening of NATO; what concerns him is that the disinfectant of sunlight may somehow stop the Russian interference, even though Mitch McConnell is ensuring that there won’t be enhanced election security.
Wash, rinse, repeat and start all over again, media. Trump doesn’t give a fig about the legitimacy of his election. He only cares that nothing changes in Russia’s assistance to keeping him in the White House. He is a creature of accumulating raw, bare-knuckled and merciless dictatorial brute force. Why the press loves to speculate on his so-called emotional states when he is a con man entertainer is baffling, and to what end besides creating reader and viewer interest in the reality-TV spectacle of Donald Trump and increasing media corporation profit in an age when politics and entertainment have largely merged.
We learned on Friday that Bernie Sanders had also been informed that the Russians were “aiding” his campaign via social networking and that they may have done so in 2016. This makes perfect sense because Trump would rather have run against Bernie than Hillary in 2016. And he would rather run against Bernie in 2020 than some of the moderates. So the Russians are helping Trump, yet again, by trying to get the man Trump thinks is the weakest Democratic candidate (although he may not be) because Trump is going to plaster him with the false “Communist” label. This is not to say that Trump’s thinking is true, but merely to reflect how he and the Russians see their 2020 election planning.
In fact, when informed of the Russian efforts to promote him (and likely to create hostility between the followers of the different candidates), Sanders acted positively presidential, putting Trump to treasonous shame. According to Friday’s Washington Post, Sanders had a message for Putin:
“I don’t care, frankly, who [Russian President Vladimir] Putin wants to be president,” Sanders said in a statement. “My message to Putin is clear: \Stay out of American elections, and as president I will make sure that you do.”
“In 2016, Russia used Internet propaganda to sow division in our country, and my understanding is that they are doing it again in 2020. Some of the ugly stuff on the Internet attributed to our campaign may well not be coming from real supporters.”
That is how a president should sound, unless he is engaged in treachery. Unless our media wakes up from its commercial profit considerations and journalists who are more concerned about keeping their anonymous administration sources happy, and TV interviewers who need to get administration spokespersons on so they generally treat them with kid gloves, unless our media rallies to the Constitution and saving democracy, we face a horrifying downfall.
On Friday, retired Navy Admiral William McRaven ominously wrote about Trump’s enraged, impetuous, uninformed dismissal of Joseph McGuire as acting director of national intelligence:
As Americans, we should be frightened — deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security — then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.
That strikes closely to resonating Hitler’s triumph of evil, a comparison that gets many liberals squeamish, but if you don’t see the legions of brown shirts Trump has created — and his unshackled authoritarianism, racism, alternative reality, and defiance of law and order — then you won’t realize that fascism and cruelty have become a daily part of your life until it is too late — and that you no longer live in a democracy.
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