Your Daily Trump––Torches and Pitchforks and Burning Crosses

Trump urges his angriest followers to intimidate voters in black and hispanic neighborhoods

Reported by SLATE

And those communities are preparing to face that

Reported by Reuters

We may have a defining moment of Trump the politician.

A revealing and chilling few seconds from debate 3 reported by SLATE

Not since Nixon have we seen a paranoid this close to power.

From SLATE, the paranoid style in Republican politics

Trump’s anger is less political than it is personal. It’s always been about him. He’s addicted to the attention. He enjoys having people afraid of him. The great primatologist says it reminds her of dominance behavior among chimps.

Reported by Alternet

Donald Trump’s lewd and offensively sexist talk has given new life to a bad old habit among men of keeping women down through fear and intimidation.

Reported by SLATE

This stoking of fear is a central theme of his campaign. Trump has been intimidating women, people of color, immigrants, employees, and every group that has experienced repression in the past. He seeks vulnerabilities he can exploit. Any group that can be conveniently and quickly marginalized and excluded is quickly targeted and instructions go out to his millions of supporters, who are mostly white men or people who see an advantage siding with the supremacy of white men.

Trump's voter intimidation strategy reported by VOX

And by the Boston Globe

And the news media has been complicit. They see a commercial advantage in stoking the ugliness. Fearful audiences watch cable news. Angry audiences are bigger than happy and contented ones.

Reported by Bill Moyers

“If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it,” Dan Bowman, a 50-year-old contractor, said of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. “We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take. . . . I would do whatever I can for my country.”

Once again we find sheriffs among the leaders of this pitchfork mob

The Milwaukee sheriff and his pitchfork posse, covered by the Guardian

Is Trump campaign a cult?

Question asked by the New Republic

Beyond the talk of armed revolt, there is the sheer profanity and ugliness of Trump’s revolution.

Reported by the reliably conservative Wall Street Journal

Trump's post election plans may include 24/7 rhetoric on his own news network

Reported by the Christian Science Monitor

In the last debate Trump refused to say he would accept the results of the election. It is growing clearer he will lose and he hates losing. When he loses he needs to say he was cheated.

This is how Republicans and Democrats used to congratulate the winner.

The LATimes looks back on the more gracious politics of George H. W. Bush.

(Of course Bush first won the White House using the Willie Horton ad.)

In an even more disputed election in 2000 Al Gore, who had seen the presidency decided by a split Supreme Court, gave one of the most gracious and dignified speeches of his political life.

Al Gore's speech via CNN. What a different and better and safer world we might have had if Gore hadn't been barred from the presidency by the prejudices of five justices.

One Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice warned of the wave of ignorance and anger we are experiencing today.

Via MSNBC and the Rachel Maddow Show.

Donald Trump: How Am I Disgusted? Let Me Count The Ways.

I began reading this New York Times story this morning.

You really should read it now.

It's about Donald Trump and his behaviors around women. He is repellant in so many other ways but this article had me repeatedly washing my hands and stepping outside for air. I had to put the article down. (If you go read the Times story now you can come back to this blog when you have to stop and catch your breath.)

We are not unfamiliar with men in power behaving badly. Trump takes it to a new level. He views women like a judge at a livestock show. There is a sinister eugenic aspect to his creepiness. I might say it's almost Nazi-like but Hitler was so asexual. Trump is more like a buyer in a Roman slave market. A deviant trolling in a black sedan.

Donald Trump is a creep of monumental proportions. We thought he was a weird rich insecure narcissistic bully but there are so many stories that have not been told about him. Why has the news media waited until now? Why have they focused on the laughable, stupid things he says? The funny statements, the funny hair, the funny orange tan, the silly bravado of a phony Romeo on a street corner in Queens. What about his mob connections? What about his multiple bankruptcies? His many shady business deals? What about his behavior toward women, which seems like something out of Saudi Arabia or Hustler magazine?

If reporters ask him a question he can’t answer why don’t they keep asking it? Why do they cave? Why do they cater to his weirdness? Why do they cover up his weirdness and pretend that it is normal? They act as if they need him more than he needs them, which is untrue. Trump craves attention. Journalists should give it to him but if he lies report that he is lying. If he denies the ugly truth report the ugly truth repeatedly until he has to admit it. If Trump runs away and hides report that. Instead the media obeys this man. Which is one reason we have a loathsome human being at the top of a major party ticket. The other reason he is there is the Republican Party has become the party of voters who want a loathsome, weird, rich, insecure, narcissistic bully as president.

Here is a Mother Jones article about how Trump plays the news media.

Another weird thing emerged recently.

Trump is always willing to brag about himself, about his sexual conquests, about his alleged penis size, about his fabulous possessions (material and female), about his money, about the famous people he is pals with, about the important people who “love him” ("The Queen is wonderful! She loves hanging around with me!”) He brags endlessly and unsupportedly about the huge fabulous things he will do, the promises he will get out of the moment he pockets the money. He is a carnival barker. He is the guy bragging about the strippers on the sidewalk outside a topless bar. He is the guy who lies you into buying a junk car. He is the slimy investment shill who calls you uninvited from a call room in Costa Rica. But mostly he is a braggart. His favorite topic is him. Sometimes he prefers to brag about himself in the third person. Maybe he is practicing to be Queen. Accounts have emerged, and recordings, where Trump has pretended to be his own publicist so he can brag about himself without seeming conceited.

Here is the New Yorker article about it. Instead of electing him president maybe we should start discussing which kind of mental ward we should confine him to.

They know when you're sleeping and they know when you're awake

Big Brother is already here. He's very tech savvy, very control-minded, very cynical and (no surprise) very right wing. Is there any wonder the 1% knows how to game the financial system?

First, from the Daily Beast: is your IPhone app secretly working for the pro-life movement? It sure appears that way.

Here's a similar story from Alternet about how the Wisconsin Governor's right wing is gaming the internet and social media to shut down the effort to recall him. Are Go-Daddy and Facebook in league with national Republican operatives?

It's all pretty chilling. Media dominance and concentrated money go hand in glove. Look at how cynically the Republican Party uses FoxNews to dominate the political argument, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in 50 states. And their viewers are less informed and more misinformed than people who don't follow the news at all. They want Americans dumb, lost and clueless.

Invisible Protesters Occupy Wall Street

Keith Olberman featured this invisible phenomenon the other night, and then again with Michael Moore the next night.

Nobody is covering the protests on Wall Street that have been going on for a week.

Meanwhile five people show up in colonial costumes with signs saying Obama is a Nazi and it's on all four network news programs and the front page of every newspaper.

Is it because most American side with Wall Street?

Or does Wall Street own the public conversation?

The Greater Danger–False Equivalency

I have been writing about this problem for years, to no avail. Both sides of every political issue are carefully equalized in most news reports. Even when opinion is heavily on one side, as is the case with the tax/deficit issue right now––a sizable majority in most polls want some spending cuts but also want revenues raised by taxing rich people more, at least by removing the enhanced cuts they got from Bush. But false equivalency ignores consensus. It gives the two sides equal weight.

More worrisome, the false equivalency ignores merits of the arguments. If (as I believe is the case now) one party has become dangerously radical, impractical, inflexible and irrational, it's automatically made equal with the more rational, moderate, flexible, practical party opposing it. The Republican Party's dominant fringe has made compromise impossible. Compromise is the essence of democracy. To cut it out of the process endangers how our democracy functions, but this radicalism is disguised and denied. The Republican Party's radical tactics are reported very cautiously and respectfully. In the midst of a serious crisis precipitated by one party, the media's habitual balancing makes it appear both parties are equally to blame.

This false equivalency rewards and encourages radicalism, it rewards inflexibility, it rewards extremism. It penalizes flexibility, reason, moderation and maturity on the other side. And it makes cynics of us all, because we are constantly told that both parties are equally extreme, equally inflexible.

I see the present impasse as a hostage situation. The Republican Party's radical fringe knows that moments of crisis can be exploited for political gain. They are holding 300 million Americans hostage and making demands. Their demands would seriously degrade the lives of the poor, the weak, the unemployed, veterans, the sick, the working poor, the middle class and further enrich and empower the rich and powerful. But they hold the gun, and because no news organization feels comfortable reporting this we are left believing that the hostage takers and the people negotiating for their release are morally and rationally equal. This is why the international community wants to downgrade our debt, because we are behaving irrationally. And our news media aren't helping.

I think the present predicament is largely attributable to news media's false equivalency. I'm not sure if it's cowardice or laziness or naive faith or a very wrong sense of fairness, but it's a dangerous habit.