CSotD: Promises, compromises and outright betrayals
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Jack Ohman leads off with a list of broken campaign promises that didn't even make it to Inauguration Day. Aren't you supposed to kind of trickle out the disappointment, so that, a year or two into your administration, your supporters begin to wonder if they've been hornswoggled?
Never mind. Someone noted during the campaign, and I may have repeated it here, that Trump is not so much a liar as a bullshitter, the distinction being that he will say, at any moment, whatever comes into his mind as advantageous, even if it makes no sense, even if he's not prepared to defend it.
It's not the same as "lying" because it's unplanned and unsupported.
What Tim Eagan describes is lying, and why on earth anyone thinks this sort of purposeful distortion ended with the Tobacco Settlement is beyond me. Of course the lies are being formulated and spread by Big Oil, and not just about climate change.
I'm also a little suspicious of the wind turbines kill birds information, which, if not as dishonest as climate change denial, seems to go largely unchallenged.
In any case, you're being jobbed and, while it's your own fault, there has always been a profit to be made by exploiting the gullible. The difference between the lies of the Tobacco Institute, Big Oil and Clean Coal, and those Nigerian princes is that the Nigerian only needs for one or two people to be that foolish.
The others have to tailor their lies to take in as many suckers as possible. And they do a nice job of it.
Juxtaposition of Time
These cartoons — only half of each shown here, go read the rest — juxtapose not concepts but timing. The first shows a neocon who is never wrong even when it's obvious he is, but note that it was first published before the Obama election. The second mocks the idea that false information is being generated more or less spontaneously on line, or by some conspiracy of the providers.
In both case, it shows people the victims of their own lack of critical thinking, and that's going to be a major factor over the next four years. (I'm hoping it doesn't take eight for people to wisen up.)
There is a study from Stanford getting a lot of media play, showing that kids don't have much ability to tell ads from news stories or to identify true news sources from advocacy sites, but – at least at a quick glance — it appears they are comparing the kids' performance to some ideal, not to a typical adult performance.
Not to say that we shouldn't teach this, but we should have taught it a generation ago.
Middle-schoolers didn't just elect a bullshit artist.
Jimmy Margulies has it right, but the question is, will Trump supporters even realize that the jobs aren't coming back? Or will they, like the frog in the by-the-way-this-isn't-true-either, sit in the water not noticing that it is becoming warmer and warmer?
Trump's tactic of distracting us with silly tweets really only works to cover up breaking news. It won't mask trends.
I suspect, instead, that he will be distributing blame for things like his failure to put the coal back in the ground so miners can dig it up again.
If he can't totally disarm OSHA and the EPA, they will be the villains whose petty, bureaucratic concerns about black lung and cave-ins and pollution are keeping America from being great.
Another Juxtaposition
Trump did, finally, get around to more or less kinda sorta renouncing the support of white supremacists. In his sit-down with the New York Times, he had this exchange:
DEAN BAQUET, executive editor of The New York Times: As you describe it, you did do something really remarkable. You energized a lot of people in the country who really wanted change in Washington. But along with that — and this is going to create a tricky thing for you — you also energized presumably a smaller number of people who were evidenced at the alt-right convention in Washington this weekend. Who have a very …
TRUMP: I just saw that today.
BAQUET: So, I’d love to hear you talk about how you’re going to manage that group of people who actually may not be the larger group but who have an expectation for you and are angry about the country and its — along racial lines. My first question is, do you feel like you said things that energized them in particular, and how are you going to manage that?
TRUMP: I don’t think so, Dean. First of all, I don’t want to energize the group. I’m not looking to energize them. I don’t want to energize the group, and I disavow the group. They, again, I don’t know if it’s reporting or whatever. I don’t know where they were four years ago, and where they were for Romney and McCain and all of the other people that ran, so I just don’t know, I had nothing to compare it to.
But it’s not a group I want to energize, and if they are energized I want to look into it and find out why.
What we do want to do is we want to bring the country together, because the country is very, very divided, and that’s one thing I did see, big league. It’s very, very divided, and I’m going to work very hard to bring the country together.
Telnaes and Horsey aren't buying it, and Horsey has written one of the more eloquent of his essays on the topic. Telnaes doesn't have to elaborate, of course, because her graphic sarcasm says much the same thing.
Which is that it sounds a lot like the regrets of someone who waited until the battle was over before repenting of how it was won.
And who knows that nothing succeeds like success, and that deja vu is just another term for nostalgia.
So here's your moment of nostalgia:
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