Trump News, 4/3/18

1.  Our Dear Leader is going to send military troops to guard the Mexican border against migrants.  I'm certain-sure that Mexico has no problems with the idea of foreign troops massing at its border without a declaration of war.

2.  The Sinclair Broadcast Group, a Trump-adoring local news network, which will soon reach 70% of American households (mostly because all anti-trust enforcement has ended as the rich don't want it), has gone on full assault against the mainstream media as the purveyor of fake news. 

 The chairman of the group, David Smith, the son of the founder of the company and an extremely rich man,  says that all print media lack credibility.  All. Note that he is one of the handful of very rich men who actually run this country.

Watch John Oliver's take on the latest news about Sinclair news.  It's worth your time:



I have long suspected that the daily brainwashing by Fox News is one of the main reasons for the ever-increasing anger and hatred American conservatives feel.  Their grievances are coddled and justified every day on Faux, the news they are offered are very biased (in both the tilt of the coverage and what is not covered at all), and they get regular messages about those who don't share their political news as the real enemies of the country who are not really even quite human.  After a few years of that it's no wonder that the Fox audience lives in a different reality and believes in a totally different sets of "facts."*

So the Sinclair group is something to worry about, unless the idea of a dictatorial right-wing United States is what you truly prefer.

3.  The most powerful leader on this planet keeps using the Twitter to yell about his private grievances and to pick on his personal enemies.  He gets his information from Fox News, refuses to learn anything about anything (say, that erecting import tariffs will cause retaliation) and probably thinks of war as something that would make him look like an even bigger warlord, with a penis so large that he would need a wheelbarrow to cart it around.

That he spent Easter tweeting angrily about migrants might look very minor in that context.  But remember that in other countries the leaders would probably just wish their citizens a pleasant holiday and so on. 

That used to be the case here, too, but no longer.  This new president of the country can use his bully pulpit to bully people just because he gets a kick out of it. 

Extreme selfishness, crudeness and bigotry is something we now take for granted in a leader, though naturally not in any woman who strives to gain that position.  Women must be absolutely flawless in every single possible manner, and ambition (such as is shown by running for an office) is a terrible flaw in a woman.  It demonstrates selfishness. 

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*  We all need to make sure that we don't live in information bubbles, of course, and we all need to learn how to judge evidence, how to assess the reliability of someone purporting to give evidence and so on.  But the belief in the deep state, the Pizzagate, the Seth Rich debacle and the new scandal about QAnon are signs of something far worse than not knowing how to assess evidence.  Probably not caring at all if something is true or not.