“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on,” the sagacious Mark Twain declared. And that was almost a century before Josef Goebbels, cable television, the “internets” and the perpetual propaganda/marketing Mighty Wurlitzer.
The ball having mercifully dropped on Annus Horribilis 2016 and the heavy weight of Annus Insanitus 2017 now fully upon us, the truth, even with jets on its boots, cannot catch up with the shameless audacity and sheer volume of the lies Disinformation Nation USA is spewing around the world.
Or to paraphrase Winston Churchill, in our time the precious truth is being completely overwhelmed by its surrounding bodyguard of lies.
***
Real news was made on election night, November 8th, 2016 after months and months of relentless propaganda, lies, smears, salaciousness and slander, malicious provocations, magical thinking, fortune telling, pathological denials, journalistic malpractice and political awfulness.
Truth: Donald J. Trump, blowfish-faced, weirdly-coiffed, brand-name New York City real estate tycoon and former reality TV star, self-regarding sociopath and seriously uninformed political neophyte yet instinctive world class political disrupter, was in fact elected the 45th President of the United States. Much to the shock and awe of the entire Wall Street/War Street/Washington DC Axis of Evil and their corrupt and tattered standard bearer, Hillary Clinton, the Candidate of Yesteryear. As an extra added bonus, the Bush and Clinton crypto-dynasties, after nearly 40 dismal years, were both chucked into the dumpster of history.
Whodathunk it?? Anyone with eyes to see.
Lie: Vladimir Putin, allegedly Stalin born again, hacked the election, destroying our “wonderful democracy” (huh?) and stealing the presidency from Hillary on behalf of his secret agent Trump. Evidence? None!!
Truth: World Class sore loser Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Money Party’s Queen of You Owe Me, didn’t lose the election because of the Russians or the Martians. She lost the old-fashioned way: She EARNED it!
For all the million$ in moolah mooched and the huge home team of “experienced” enablers, alibiers, fixers, surrogates, apparatchiks, coat carriers, political pimps and backstabbers on the payroll, the ginormous “Stronger Together” / “I’m With Her” Clinton campaign juggernaut succeeded only in meeting the definition of a camel: a horse put together by a committee.
Her entire pitch was based on being the “most experienced” person ever to run for the top office and therefore entitled to be the first woman President. Her battle plan was to out-money and muscle aside any prospective opponents before they could get their running shoes tied and become the inevitable (anointed) winner two years before a single vote was even cast. As a has been, she peaked too soon.
Has been 1st Lady, has been Junior Senator for Wall Street, has been Secretary of State and has been failed candidate for President. Her actual positive accomplishments in those stellar positions did not exactly warrant a statue in the Mall near Lincoln and Jefferson. Indeed, her resume was more like a rap sheet.
Pathological dishonesty. Scandalgates galore. Enabler of Billy goat’s White House Bimbo Eruptions. Neo-con fellow traveler, war monger/cheerleader and coup coordinator. (Can you say: Iraq War. Libya. Honduras. Ukraine.) Shameless insatiable money-grubber: Dining for dollar$ from corporate crook$ and bank$ter$. Hustling (extorting?) million$ in “contribution$” for the Clinton Global Got Bucks Foundation from foreign countries doing business with the State Department. (Can you say: Private email server). Sabotaging the Bernie Sanders primary campaign. Talk about undermining our “precious democracy”!!!!
All these known knowns about this awful candidate were simply re-enforced by the WikiLeaks release of thousands of embarrassing-for-being-true DNC and Clinton Campaign emails, exposing various Clinton shenanigans.
So how does the worst candidate in history explain LOSING to the worst candidate in history?
Putin ate my presidency!
The entire Democratic Money Party that was likewise utterly vanquished in the election, have subsequently snatched up Hillary’s gigantic and historic deception and have been running with the fumble to the wrong end zone. Yelping hysterically: The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! Aided, abetted and cheered on by their irresponsible Amen Corner, the national media and with the connivance of Rogue Nation’s 17 intelligence (duh!) agencies (not to mention much of the ridiculous and despised GOP, who piggybacked on The Trump to dubious victory).
Indeed, the Democratic Money Party, snouts long buried in the deep pockets of their Donor Class and utterly tone deaf, dumb and blind to the needs and desires of their gen pop constituency, have tumbled helter-skelter into such a profound state of alibi and denial it is borderline Crazy Eddie INSAAAANE!!
Exceeding even the tawdry Monicagate “scandal” in frenzy and ersatz righteous indignation, the Dementedcrats and their fellow travelers, almost every day since the election, have cranked out evidence-free accusations and allegations of Putin-Trump criminality, conspiracy and treason with every (fake) news cycle. It has been the Obama is a Kenyan gambit multiplied exponentially. Except in this case, Putin has nukes.
***
There are little white lies: “I love you baby” and “The check is in the mail.” There are big lies: “Climate change is a hoax!”. “Single payer health care is Communism/Socialism!” “Iran is the world’s #1 supporter/exporter of terrorism.” And there are zombie lies that never seem to die and keep coming back in different grotesque disguises: “Poland invaded Germany.” “The North Vietnamese attacked our ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.” “Saddam has WMDs.” “Putin invaded Crimea”.
After months of relentlessly waterboarding The Trump with Putin! Putin! Putin!, his bitter and desperate political establishment torturers resurrected a recent trickeration that hadn’t worked the first time around on Obama. The Syrian arch-villain Pres. Bashar al-Assad poison-gassed his own people. And Putin helped him! OMG! OMG! Don’t just stand there, do something!!
It was a grim echo of a 2013 false flag propaganda operation by the “rebel” side (i.e. al-Qaeda by various names and other assorted Sunni Muslim mercenaries) in the gruesome, seemingly endless, Syrian civil war. A never-officially-determined number of innocent men, women and children in a rebel-held Syrian village had been killed in an alleged sarin gas attack by the Syrian government. Supported by no “evidence” beyond a slick and shrill anti-Assad media blitz and some YouTube videos of dubious provenance, the incident was intended to shock and awe Obama into ordering US troops to invade that hapless long-suffering country and do the Saudi/Qatari/Turkish-funded “regime change” Sunni outlaws’ dirty work for them.
The propaganda ploy failed on that occasion, due, ironically, to some fancy diplomatic footwork by none other than Vladimir Putin, the Syrian government’s longtime ally. With the agreement of the Obama White House, Putin convinced, cajoled, bribed (?) Bashar to give up all the chemical weapons in his arsenal to a UN agency.
That was then. This is now.
On the morning of April 4th, as if performing from a script, accompanied by a continuous dramatic loop of wobbly cell phone videos of dead babies and women frothing at the mouth, Breaking News! Breaking News! TV headlines breathlessly declared: “Bashar gasses his own people. Again.”
As if on cue, with no true evidence but a culprit already teed-up, the usual talking heads and ex-military brass hats rushed onto the network and cable news shows crying crocodile tears for the victims in the videos and war-whooping against Bashar al-Assad, the new new Hitler. It was déjà vu all over again.
Something pretty dreadful had occurred in another small rebel-held Syrian village in the middle of nowhere. Innocent men, women and children had died. Never mind there were no reliable witnesses, no independent investigation or chemical analysis underway, and not a single legitimate journalist within 100 miles of the scene. The Syrians and the Russians immediately denied they did it. Bashar had given up his chemical weapons 3 years ago. The government and their Russian allies were more or less already “winning” the brutal civil war. And only a week earlier the US Secretary of State had essentially taken “regime change” off the menu.
But the Mighty Wurlitzer once cranked into action is not easy to turn off.
President Twitter in the White House, who admitted during the election to getting most of his news and information from “the shows”, reportedly saw the Breaking News loop and was miraculously “converted” from the “Can’t we all get along with Russia?” guy to a neocon saber-rattler, as if channeling Hillary Clinton. He might have been watching the Zapruder film.
Two nights later, doubtless after a briefing (“do this or else…”) from his tinpot generals, playing Commander-in-Chief on TV and adlibbing exaggeratedly a trait he had never been known to possess, empathy for the “beautiful dead babies”, he announced that 59 Tomahawk Cruise missiles had been launched in the direction of a Syrian airbase. And God bless America!
In the New American Empire, it has become a Presidential tradition to solemnly declare we are about to bomb the crap out of a country we don’t like, in the name of democracy, freedom, human rights and free ice cream. Obama’s mellifluous baritone was ideal for that hypocritical purpose. George W tended to stumble over his words and giggle. For the reality TV alumnus, it was a brief, less than inspiring speech, sounding more like a cross between a hostage tape and baby talk. But it had the effect, at first blush, of temporarily disarming his yowling critics.
The permanently deep state embedded neocon war mongers, Putin-crazed Dementedcrats and somber TV anchormen lauded the ersatz militaristic move. The “beautiful” dead babies loop was replaced with the “beautiful” rockets’ red glare loop. CNN know-it-all newsman Fareed Zakaria set the new tone by gushing, “(tonight) Donald Trump became president of the United States…a kind of interesting morphing…”
In the next days, compared to the constant waterboarding he had endured, the narcissist in The Trump naturally responded to the approval and adulation. He tripled down on his saber-rattling. Threatening longtime bogeyman Iran, North Korea’s cartoon villain Kim Jung-Un and the Chinese, with a few gratuitous digs along the way at Putin. In a dizzying turnabout, he gave a public brohug to the criminal enterprise known as the EU and “undeclared” NATO irrelevant. For good measure, our never victorious military dropped a 21,000-lb “Mother Of All Bombs” on Afghanistan just to hear the boom.
What now?
America duly elected the candidate, who most resembled the loudmouth at the end of the bar yelling at the TV news, over the Anointed One, who had little to offer but more of the same old same old corruption and arrogance and not even entertainment value. But after months of near-national nervous breakdown over the election results, the legitimate 45th President of the United States, like him or lump him, has “morphed” into a POW. Prisoner of the Warmongers. Doomocracy in action.
****