Mark Jacobs: This is not normal

[highplainsdem]

Twitter thread starting here, full text below.

Link to tweet

Mark Jacob
@MarkJacob16

This is not normal.🧵
A candidate for president is explaining how a worm ate part of his brain while a rival who’s an ex-president is “cursing audibly” in court while listening to a porn star describe lousy sex with him while a key supporter who wants to be the ex-president’s …
10:21 AM · May 10, 2024


… running mate is bragging about shooting her dog in the head in a gravel pit and saying the current president ought to execute his own dog. Meanwhile, a Supreme Court justice whose wife plotted to overthrow the government is ruling on cases involving …


… the coup and whether the guy who led the coup had the right of “immunity” to order Seal Team 6 to assassinate his rivals if he felt like it. And while the court is considering that, it’s also deciding whether pregnant women in Idaho must wait in a …


… hospital parking lot until they get sick enough to convince emergency room doctors that they’ll definitely 100% die if they don’t get an abortion. Meanwhile, the ex-president’s party is accusing college presidents of antisemitism but not accusing the …


… ex-president himself even though he dined at his Florida resort with a Holocaust denier who jokingly compared the murder of Jews to cookies being baked in an oven. And the ex-president is selling Bibles while his supporters in Congress wear pins …


… in the shape of a rifle often used in school massacres, and his backers include a lawmaker who felt up her date in a theater while they were surrounded by children, and another lawmaker who showed photos of the president's son’s private parts …


… during a congressional hearing, and another supporter who said the president should deny baby formula to migrant infants at the border, and another supporter who said the deadly assault on the Capitol was a “normal tourist visit.” And this same …


… Bible-selling ex-president is a “law and order” guy even though he’s charged with 88 felonies, joked about a home invader using a hammer to fracture the skull of the House speaker's husband, and wants to pardon thugs who beat up 100+ cops at the Capitol.


Whew. I’m out of breath. For more about how media normalizes these absurdities, check out my free Stop the Presses newsletter.
https://www.stopthepresses.news/

[dweller]

1. Yep

In a nutshell
😐



✌🏻

[highplainsdem]

3. Yes. Which is why I wanted to post it here.

[live love laugh]

24. The Republican media cracks the nutshells and piles up a bunch of nuts.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. That says a lot that voters ought to consider. Kick and Rec.

[highplainsdem]

4. Thanks!

[ancianita]

5. Jacobs' opening line was a big DUH. But his map that follows gets five stars. Thanks!

The more democracy is chipped away, the more corporate media normalize their own bloody profiteering.

[karin_sj]

6. Boy, this says it all...

It's beyond the comprehension of a normal, decent person, but here we are. It's just unbelievable that our country has come to this. The founding fathers must be rolling over in their graves.

[AmBlue]

7. INDEED.

Rather like a sledgehammer to the side of the head when you hear it all in one breath like that.

What in the world has happened to us?

[Elessar Zappa]

8. K&R

This will never be normal.

[LudwigPastorius]

9. Two timelines diverged when the..

Large Hadron Collider began full power experiments, rending space-time.

Somewhere, the normal, sane timeline moves on without us.

[FirstLight]

29. I was literally going to ask where we took a wrong turn on the timeline...

somewhere we fell off the friggin map! lol

[Lonestarblue]

10. I heard an interview today with Doris Kearns Goodwin about her new book.

The interviewer played a short clip of Bobby Kennedy speaking in South Africa, and I was once again struck with the richness of language we used to enjoy and the elevation of principles and human decency. We rarely have that these days. I love Biden, but he is more plain spoken, and of course Trump speaks in threats, lies., or utter nonsense.

The Kennedy speech was called the Day of Affirmation speech, and Richard Goodwin helped write it. Here’s an excerpt.

“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice. He sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest wall of oppression and resistance.”

How I miss such eloquence in our political speech.

[Biophilic]

12. Another time, another place.

I had forgotten how much we’d lost.

[PufPuf23]

11. USA is a sick nation and a sick society with failed media.

Should put our own house in order.

Not very optimistic about what may occur in my own limited life span.

[Cosmocat]

18. Yep

nm

[Sogo]

13. Indeed....not normal.

[mahina]

14. Well put!

[Hekate]

15. Sigh. Is it the End Times yet?

[hvn_nbr_2]

16. Two roads diverged in a red white and blue wood, and they...

they took the bat shit crazy road.

[birdographer]

17. I don't see anything in there that is not

republican-based. Every single one of these insane things comes from republicans. Every single one. And people support them and want to stay onboard. This should be spread far and wide, though of course the morons would be saying "cool" through the whole thing.

[70sEraVet]

19. Well, when you say it like thaaat.......

[Uncle Joe]

20. That was a most excellent summation of our current state of affairs.

Thanks for the thread highplainsdem.

[republianmushroom]

21. It is possible that is could become normal.

Best one votes this year.

[Mr. Ected]

22. There are Americans that read that and think "that's absurd!" and there are others that think "WHITE NOISE...ZZZZ".

Someone needs to figure out how to turn off that white noise cognitive dissonance machine. It's killing us.

[dalton99a]

23. Kick

[czarjak]

25. Nothing beats...

"I'm a great Christian." from the guy that says he can't think of anything he needs forgiveness for to prove RealBS.

[summer_in_TX]

26. Thanks for posting that, highplainsdem. I've bookmarked it.

I am a follower of Mark Jacob on Twitter. One of my favorites. Ex-editor at Chicago Tribune & Sun-Times. Co-author of 8 books. He has a free newsletter on politics & media at http://stopthepresses.news that I think you'll really enjoy. As a former editor, he is both an expert on and highly critical of what the NYT and other mainstream newspapers are doing. Plus he has a gift for a concise turn of phrase with a punch.

Here are a few recent Twitter posts of his that I've enjoyed.

MAGA Mike Johnson says he knows “intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting.” Which means he doesn’t know it, has no evidence of it, and is just spouting the Republican propaganda that facts don’t matter but feelings do.
They’re attacking our democracy with vibes.

I’m not asking journalists to campaign for Joe Biden. I’m asking journalists to say clearly that there’s a right-wing plot to create a fascist dictatorship.
Many journalists are afraid to say it even though it’s true. And their refusal to say it makes a dictatorship more likely.

There are working-class Trump supporters out there who think people like Trump and Jared Kushner are sticking up for them — when they’re really sticking them up.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

27. Ripley's Believe It Or Not can never top this.

[k55f5r]

28. Suspension of disbelief

Wikipedia

American psychological critic Norman N. Holland provided a neuroscientific theory of suspension of disbelief.[15] Neurally, when a person engages with a narrative in a work of fiction, the brain goes wholly into a perceiving mode, engaging less intensely with the faculties for acting or planning to act; "poetic faith" is a willing act that is supported by the value of a narrative that is being engaged with. When the person stops perceiving to think about what has been seen or heard, its "truth-value" is assessed.[12]

[SupportSanity]

30. The worm ate the part of his brain that would've

stopped him from talking about the worm.

[highplainsdem]

31. Wow. 290 recs in 24 hours. I knew when I ran across this on Twitter that a lot of DUers would want to

see it, but the response still took me by surprise.

Finding something like this thread is why I'm still skimming Twitter posts. There are a lot of very interesting and intelligent people there still.