The Demonization Machine

Conservative talk radio and Republican PACs have sabotaged the last two U.S. presidential elections and as a result gave us a President Barack Obama in both of them - the most liberal, divisive and constitutionally destructive president in U.S. history. A number of these radio shows continually bashed McCain and Romney during those two primaries and damaged their reputations so much that they could not recover for the general election, and many talk show hosts are again in the process of sabotaging the 2016 election. The PACs (political action committees) are just as bad and if they had held their fire and their tens of millions of dollars during the primaries of the 2008 and 2012 elections we may never have had Obamacare, and Libya, and ISIS, just to name a few. As for radio, I am speaking particularly of Glenn Beck and Mark Levin who are doing the kneecapping and who have very large audiences, but it is certainly not limited to just them.

What the intraparty destruction of other candidates does is make some Republicans and Independents so hate or fear the other candidate that once their guy or gal loses and it comes down to the general election, they just can't see themselves voting for the Republican candidate because they have been painted as so flawed and so evil that they don't vote or vote for a third-party candidate in protest. What we then end up with is a liberal Democrat president in the last two presidential elections. That alone should have been enough to motivate Republicans and conservative independents to vote for the Republican nominee, but as I say, the Republican nominee was seen as damaged goods by such a wide majority of Republican voters (due to the Demonization Machine) that they didn't feel like they wanted to have to vote for the lesser of two evils yet again and so didn't. The result of this is Obamacare, a lower standard of living, a lawless president with a weak foreign policy, etc, etc.

Of course the candidates in this 2016 election year are no better. It is ugly the tactics they use to destroy the other guy. Citizenship has been brought up, accusations of lies and financial mismanagement, character assassination, mocking.

What happens after all of this is that the supporters of each candidate get on Twitter and Facebook and double down on the trash talk. Twitter is the place where ridiculous claims about the candidates go to fester and metastasize into viral slander and unsupported lies.

So whether it is Donald Trump, or Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio who ends up as the Republican nominee for President, the dirty fight leading up to the nomination is already souring voters in regards to the other candidates. Beck says he won't vote for Trump if he is nominated. What if a couple million of his listeners follow suit? Levin is clearly pro-Cruz and quite anti-Rubio and anti-everyone else. If the nominee is someone other than Ted Cruz will his support for that nominee be like it was when the fight had settled on a Romney nomination after months of kneecapping? Tepid at best? Will his listeners again not bother to vote because they have been schooled in all that is wrong with the nominee?

An Obama presidency would never have occurred if Republicans and independents had held their noses and voted for the "lesser of two evils" because the U.S. certainly has had the GREATER of two evils for the last seven years. The lesson to be learned is first, that there is no perfect candidate. The second lesson is that talk radio hosts (and PACs) have a huge impact on their listeners and ought to consider their culpability when it comes to that influence. Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh seem to have had the right tone in 2016. Though one knows who they might favor to be the nominee they don't bring the weight of their influence like a hammer onto the candidates, saving the brunt of their attacks for the Democrat challengers.

Unfortunately, the same thing seems to be happening this time around, but we may just be lucky that the present Democrat candidates will cause the same sort of voter apathy in 2016 which will help the Republican candidate win in November. But if a Republican wins in November it won't be because the Demonization Machine isn't well-oiled, because indeed it is operating as well as ever.

Donald Trump, "Political" Opportunist

Donald and Melania Trump (by Boss Tweed)

I hate to admit it. I too was caught up in the Donald Trump possible-presidential-run media-hype, protocampaign tour as much as many other Republicans, conservatives, and independents are. He has compelling arguments. He is saying all the right things about China, OPEC, and Obama's spending. Trump's a successful, self-made "billionaire". He says he's conservative. He's a businessman and would do things as president that would benefit the American economy, and from the point of view of a CEO. I read "The Donald"'s first two books, the first one, The Art of the Deal, was a runaway bestseller and I enjoyed it very much. It was a motivating read. The second book, which may or may not have been called BlaBlaBla, wasn't nearly as interesting. Additionally, the real estate mogul and casino owner also has a successful show called "The Apprentice" and a commanding presence to boot. How many people can say they have a catch phrase? ("You're Fired") In short, he's a doer, not a socialist, community organizer looking to bring the U.S. down a notch.

But my thanks go out to radio talkshow host Mark Levin for opening my eyes to who this guy really is. Mark has been skeptical of Trump since his potential presidential run began. It started with questions about his financial contributions to politicians which were all over the map and seem to actually favor Democrats. Trump sloughed off this criticism as him just being loyal to friends and though he didn't say it, from how it looks it seems as if he is basically greasing the palms of everybody just in case in the future he ever needs to call in a favor from one of these politicians. I'm not saying he is doing this. I'm just saying it looks like that.


Here is the text of some of the recordings of Trump that Levin played on his show on Friday. You can hear them on Mark Levin's website and find them easily on YouTube. Go to the tape: "I'm impressed with Nancy Pelosi...but I'm surprised that she didn't try to have Bush impeached, which personally I think would have been a wonderful thing. He lied. He got us into the war with lies." "I think Obama will lead by consensus." "He's (Obama) done an amazing job." "Bush has been a disaster, he's been terrible...who could be worse?" "Bush has been so bad, so incompetent, so evil, I don't think any (Republican) could have won." And here's the pièce de résistance, something we conservatives say whenever we wake up in the morning, but in this case they are Donald Trump's words, "We must have universal health care."

Wow! What a true-blue conservative. Yep. What? You can't hear me through the dripping wet digital sarcasm that's slogging its sticky way through your broadband Internet connection? Sblorry.

 

But wait! Just when you thought we'd had enough fun for one day, Mr. Trump switches gears. Back to the tapes: "I used to say Jimmy Carter was the worst president in U.S. history, now I say it's Barack Obama." "Barack Obama is the worst president ever."

Donald Trump calls himself a conservative, and practically called himself a compassionate conservative (which was George W. Bush's label) the other day on Sean Hannity's television show. But many of Trump's views are downright liberal Democrat views. His venomous position on George W. Bush and the Iraq war is a liberal Democrat position. His view that America needs universal health care is a liberal Democrat position. His previous support for Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi is certainly not a conservative position. And a conservative would not financially support Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and the like.

While Donald Trump would be certainly be better to have in the office of President of the United States than Barack Obama, he would not be better than ANY of the other serious, and proven Republicans. He just happens to know how to play the media. His opportunistic "campaign" for president will end by his own hand when he sees the jig is up, when he doesn't need a ratings boost any more, or when skeptical Republicans dismiss him as the "fake, phoney, fraud" that he is.

Butt-Ugly Political Discourse – Par for the 21st Century

At present, the political discourse in my home state of New Jersey is butt-ugly. There’s no more apropos way to say it. Just look at the replies to newspaper blogs and web-posted articles. Look at the political forums on Craigslist, or on the Usenet newsgroups. Look at many of the writers of political blogs and the commenters posting there. (Letters to the editor at newspapers are less venomous, but that’s because there’s an editorial filter there that the Internet doesn’t tend to have.) Is this butt-ugliness confined merely to the Web, where anyone with a computer and an alias can sling mud without personal repercussion? Just imagine if this kind of language was what you could expect when you went to the grocery store, the mall, or work? Not to slander middle-school students unnecessarily, but the communication being displayed is really grade-school/middle-school level communication. Nothing more.

Hmm…it’s not just New Jersey where the discussion lacks decorum. I get that. Pretty much all of the U.S. has the same problem. We’ve all seen it on Facebook. And it’s not just the Internet either. Media personalities engage in mud-slinging too. Bill Maher does it, Michael Moore does it, Keith Olberman and Ed Schultz do it, Mark Levin does it too (though he consistently discusses policy in a high-level manner as well).

So Why? Why does the discussion devolve to middle-school personal attacks, instead of arguments for or against a policy? Sarah Palin is dumb. Joe Biden is a clown. Chris Christie is fat. So-and-so has big ears.

It could be because the easiest attacks to hurl at someone are the ones you don’t have to think about. Or the ones you make up. Look at the person and the first thing that comes to mind is the source of your disparagement. Easy. For Maher’s recent sexist slur, that was Sarah Palin’s gender. Sometimes it’s race, sometimes it’s the size of someone’s nose, sometimes it’s someone’s weight or even age. And many times the personal attacks are just baseless jabs using generalized, well-worn insults.

I have this theory that serious people don’t ever read the comments on blogs, or the comments to online articles because they know that a bunch of uneducated yahoos and uncivilized lurkers are the progenitors of the insults and vitriol that are usually found there. And it is part of the same theory that serious people rarely comment on blogs or online articles for the same reason.

For instance, it’s really disgusting to me to read blog comments like the following:

• “I’d love to see Christie’s response if his food allowance was cut. When you are fat, dumb and happy (and well off your whole life) you cannot connect with working people...”
• “Just another fat cop that thinks he is above the law”
• “She is, as I have said before, hyper-partisan, painfully ignorant, pathologically dishonest, chronically unethical, intellectually unconscious, and jaw-droppingly stupid. And those are her better qualities.”

The person who wrote this last blog comment at the DailyKos blog could not prove or support one of the hate-filled statements that flow with ease through his slanderous blog post. In fact, “painfully ignorant”, “intellectually unconscious”, and “jaw-droppingly stupid” all mean the same thing, so his list is unnecessarily padded, perhaps to bolster the word count for his “editor”, or just to express more completely his hate for a successful woman.  I feel sorry for mal-educated people like him and Bill Maher, and for the fact that they want to exist in this gaseous fog of venom, or as Sean Hannity has put it Palin-derangement syndrome.

All this being said, I have seen useful, thoughtful comments, replies, and blogs all over the Internet, so there’s no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but sometimes it’s no inviting bath either. I think it will take a major rejiggering of our society to expect any change on this front, however. When we learn to respect each other more as human beings, each of us struggling to survive as individuals and providers for family members, maybe then we’ll see improvement. When we begin to treat each other with some measure of honor, as is still done in some societies, perhaps then we’ll see more respect. But I’m not holding my breath.

It is indeed hard for me to feel that sort of compassion for a weasel-punk like Bill Maher when he says something like he did about Sarah Palin. I am not a saint after all.

(Comments excerpted from an Asbury Park Press weblog, and the DailyKos)