Us vs. Evil: Lies and Elections Matter

On October 30, the Washington Post updated its fact-check monitoring of Trump's lies.  In 649 days from his swearing-in, the count of fact-checked violations of truthfulness by the so-called president had ticked up to 6,420.  Mmm, that's ten a day.  

As rumpistas anxiously say at every TV opportunity, past presidents and most politicians have lied too.  So you know, what's the big deal?  

The big deal is that this corrupt and criminal regime is unique in predicating its entire communications and policy strategy on lying.  As Paul Krugman recently wrote, the New York Times' editors had never allowed writers to comment on politicians' lies as "lies"... until Trump.  We all know that the dam has burst on that constraint all over the print, online and TV/radio news media.  For Trump cultists, the "they-all-do-it" fig leaf is good enough; they say they know he lies, but it's all good cuz it's just the fake-news media and the elitist libs who care about it, and the cultists "never took him at his word anyway".  Vey is mir.      

The thing to keep in the foreground about lying as an everyday political strategy is that it is a primary and necessary building block of autocratic despotism.  When there is no longer any independently verifiable truth, then reality is reduced to whatever is heard from those with the most visibility and the most unbridled appeal to the lowest urges, grievances and hateful prejudices in the population.  

As to the visibility, the stupefyingly venal American media disgraced themselves for years by overexposing rump's daily demagoguery throughout 2016 and for most of the time since.  These days, as the maga-rally ratings boon has faded, that overexposure has been ratcheted down quite a bit on the networks.  The most responsible hosts on MSNBC have made it their policy to show his face or his tweets only briefly and rarely, when it's deemed essential to telling a particular story.   

As to the urges, grievances and hateful prejudices, it's been said a thousand times that the good old days of GOP dog whistles have morphed into bull-horn messaging that has steadily shed layers of discretion as each day of this corrupt administration has unfolded.  Some may consider it over-the-top hyperbolic or even hysterical for me to say this, but this trend is more than just reminiscent of the way things went down in Germany and Poland in the late 1930's and early '40's.  

On Wednesday night, Yona and I viewed a film called "Who Will Write Our History" that used contemporary film and photographic images (mostly shot by Nazis for propaganda purposes!) along with recreated scenes to show the history of the Warsaw Ghetto and the fate of the Polish Jews from the time of the Nazi invasion to the ultimate razing of the entire Jewish sector.  Three million Polish Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis during WWII.

The film documents the incremental tightening of the noose as the city was divided, as the Jews were barred from more and more spheres of city life, as one order after another, each more outrageously inhumane and sadistic, was posted on the walls and doorways, until carts full of skeletal remains of those starved to death were rolling through the streets to mass burials.  (This was shown at the National Museum of American Jewish History adjacent to Independence Mall as part of the Jewish Film Festival, but I spoke afterward to the director, Roberta Grossman, who said it would be shown on at theaters and on PBS at some point. If you can bear it, you should see it when it shows.) 

The parallel with our present situation is not necessarily that genocide would be on the agenda of an American dictatorship -- not necessarily, though not at all unthinkable -- it's the famous frog-in-boiling-water pattern of death by degrees.  Whether it's the stepwise heinous starving -- and often the gunshot-in-the-back -- mass-murdering of Jews or the death of freedom-protecting civil rights and democracy, the pattern is to perform increasingly naked acts of cruelty and criminality.  

Having gotten away with each act, and having acclimated the populace and the world to another normalized outrage, the next act pushes the boundaries of evil down to a new level... until the boiling point is reached and mass murder -- or autocracy -- goes on without interference.  There is no bottom to this spiral, absent an uprising from within or a mobilization of forces from outside.  

The GOP, as Paul Krugman wrote in the above-linked article, have thrown in their lot with mendacity and rump's evil attack on American values and the Constitution.  Hey, it gets votes, and that's the name of the game, right?  

Or so they thought, before Tuesday, and now the ones that are left in the House are even more viciously committed to rumpism.  (By the way, while the bot army of right-wing rump apologist-pundits spew forth a wave of lies that the Democrats' gains were nothing special [biggest Dem gain in House since 1974, no biggie], my guess is that the GOPers whose asses are up for re-election in 2020 are not so sanguine about their prospects.  Damn, if the voters saw through their pre-existing lies, what BS might they not swallow next time?)  

Right now the demagogues are gnashing teeth and accusing election officials in Florida, Georgia and Arizona of -- wait for it -- vote fraud!  Florida invested disproportionate resources in the election infrastructures of Northern Florida precincts and withheld them from the Democratically-inclined counties in the south, and now they attribute vote-counting problems in the latter to "liberals trying to steal the election" (words of Gov. Scott.  Broward County's top election administrator was appointed by the Honorable Gov. J. Bush, 'case you were not aware.)  Georgia, for God's sake: Sec of State Brian Kemp, purger of 1.5 MILLION voters from rolls.  Arizona, where the bad-people party is suing to abort the vote count and Cindy McCain tweets in response that she expects her damn vote to be counted!

Imagine those bastards, now pro-abortion.  

There will be no international rescue mission for American democracy.  We be the whole ball game.  I don't think there's anywhere else in the world even to take refuge.  

The water heat just went down a degree or two with the influx of a cooling BLUE WAVE, but the work has only begun.