Do you recall the phrase "it's Giuliani time"? That refers to Rudy
Giuliani's first term as mayor when the devious prick we now know as a
screaming, foaming at the mouth maniac "allowed police to trample civil
liberties -- particularly those of blacks, artists and welfare recipients -- in
the name of maintaining public order."
Well, now it's Trump Time.
Ever since Trump put his hat -- or whatever that thing is on top of his
head -- in the ring of presidential politics, I've considered him to be a litmus
test for conservatives. Trump tests conservatives' ability to distinguish
objective reality from the fabricated reality that their emotional biases urges
them to believe in.
According to the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of Human Nature, this urge is
innate and exists, to varying degrees, in all of us. Whether these biases are
conservative or liberal is biologically determined.
Our brains are designed to want and to seek out leaders. In order to
satisfy this need, we often project certain qualities onto these leaders, even
when they don't exist. Democrats and liberals did this with Hillary. We wanted
her to be the honest, selfless and upstanding standard bearer of our values, so
we ignored her many self-serving ethical lapses, contrary political
positions and just pretended that those lapses and contradictions didn't
matter.
As for Trump, he took this phenomenon and drove it into hyperspace. He has
created a space-trumptime continuum in which our nation has been
plunged into a different dimension -- an alternate universe where reality is
being defined by Trump and his supporters.
As more and more people normalize Trump, those who believe in an objective
reality will become marginalized -- accused of and viscously attacked for being
anti-Trump and thus unfair, dishonest and not to be listened to. I've even
started to hear the term "Trump Derangement Syndrome" being used.
Oh my God, it's already begun! Reality has been turned upside down.
Early on, during Trump's primary campaign, I expected him to implode. While
I realized that his unvarnished racism would appeal to that portion of
republican voters that Hillary gave as a reasonable estimate for constituting
half of his supporters, I was sure that his denigration of American prisoners of
war, the disabled and women who don't live up to his standard of suitable
attractiveness would turn off enough primary voters.
And certainly, his endless string of blatant falsehoods, moronic utterances
and comical third grade vocabulary would be enough to doom his campaign.
And when Jeb Bush said Trump couldn't insult his way to the presidency, I
couldn't have imagined how wrong he would be.
But by the time we got to hear Trump bragging about his ability to get away
with grabbing women's pussies, I knew he would get away with those boasts, too.
After all, Hillary's own husband had already normalized that kind of
behavior.
If only Democratic voters had chosen someone without all of Hillary's
baggage. Someone who could not be attacked for personal behavior. Someone who
had Trump's populist message without the ignorance, stupidity and racism.
Someone who had a consistent, lifetime record of promoting that message. Someone
who had polled much better than Hillary against Trump. Someone who would have
brought out the youth vote.
Ahh, but I guess no one like that even exists.
I was heartened by the number of conservatives who came forward to
accurately describe Trump's appalling personality and behavior. These are the
conservatives who have passed the litmus test.
Unfortunately, they have been overwhelmed by the number who have
enthusiastically climbed aboard
Trump's insane train and described him in a manner that
is exactly opposite of the way he truly is.
A case in point. Former Michigan Congressman Pete Hoeksrtra has recently
described Trump as a healthy sceptic for doubting the intelligence community's
conclusion that Russia hacked into Democratic Party computers. He repeated this
description in a number of interviews last week.
And the point is, Trump is the exact opposite of
a healthy skeptic.
As I've pointed out in previous posts, Trump has never met a false right
wing allegation that he hasn't bought lock, stock, barrel and promoted like it
had his name on it.
This is Trump we're talking about. The King of the Birthers.
He "heard things" and "read things" about Obama. Like how he spent 2
million dollars to hide his birth certificate. Or how there was no proof he ever
attended Columbia University.
A healthy skeptic would have performed a simple fact check and discovered
that all of those things were proved in excruciating detail to be demonstrably
false by numerous fact checking organizations. But Trump immediately believed
every word of every false allegation he ever heard of and continued to promote
all that birther related nonsense for five years.
And it wasn't just the birther stuff. The number of phoney shits he
believed in was countless. He gets his information from right-wing conspiracy
web sites like World Net Daily and Info Wars. He has collaborated with and guest
starred on these sites.
Here he is on Bill O'Reilly's show defending his retweet of some
outrageously false black on white murder statistics that he got from some White
Nationalist/Supremacist web site. Check him out at the 3:59 minute mark where he
says he's probably the least racist person on earth. When O'Reilly scolds him
for the false tweet, the world's healthiest skeptic then goes on to ask "am I
going to check every statistic..." in a way that obviously means "I am
not going to check every statistic".
Why couldn't at least one of Hoekstra's interviewers have pointed these
things out? Wouldn't you have loved to hear Hoekstra's response? Wouldn't it
have been nice for the American public to be reminded of the fact that Trump is
not normal and that Hoekstra's description of Trump is the exact
opposite of the way he really is?
Interestingly, after looking up Hoekstra's Wikipedia bio, I saw that
Hoekstra himself, as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee in 2006, put
forward information that was deserving of skepticism (because it was
apparently disputed by Pentagon officials, the Duelfer Report and the
intelligence community) claiming that weapons of mass destruction had been found
in Iraq.
In 2007 he created a report about Iran producing weapons grade uranium that
was also deserving of a healthy dose of skepticism -- being that it was labeled
by various sources, including the IAEA, as erroneous, misleading,
dishonest, incorrect and outrageous.
But Hoekstra seems a lot like Trump, himself. Maybe, just like Trump knows
more about ISIS than the generals, Hoekstra knows more about Iraq, Iran and
weapons, both of grade and destruction, than all of those organizations. He's a
leading candidate to be the new head of the CIA and, like Trump, he's all in
with waterboarding.
Most importantly, just like Trump and his supporters, he believes what he
wants to believe.
And the things they are willing to believe are absolutely
frightening.
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