A reckless con man as president: LA Times burns Trump to the ground in brutal editorial

[Vidal]

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by DonViejo (a host of the Latest Breaking News forum).

Source: Raw Story

Writing in the LA Times, author and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman took the American electorate to task for electing “a reckless con man as president,” adding the country is now facing a reckoning.

Dorfman admitted that he is tired of hearing about investigations into Russian collusion in the 2016 election of President Donald Trump when the focus should be on how in the hell did American voters let his election happen.

“What is it, in our American soul that allowed the Russians to be successful?” he asked.

“Those were not Russians voting in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, handing the election to the Republican candidate by a bit more than 80,000 votes. They were American men and women,” Dorfman wrote. “As were the 62,984,825 others who decided that such a troublesome, inflammatory figure expressed their desires and dreams. Trump could be impeached or resign, or his policies could simply implode under the weight of their malice, divisiveness and mendacity, and the country would still be defined and pressed by the same conditions and dread that enabled his rise.”



Read more: https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/a-reckless-con-man-as-president-la-times-burns-trump-to-the-ground-in-brutal-editorial/

[RKP5637]

1. Basically, group think ignorance and a complicit/complacent media. n/t

[tblue37]

4. And tribalism. People support their "team," and hate the other " team" on cue.

This is exacerbated by the way the media report elections only as sports competitions, not as what they are: choices that determine our future and that of our children.

[RKP5637]

6. Excellent point!!!!!! n/t

[tblue37]

10. Since it is the right wing's fans that are subjected to 24/7 propaganda from

the pervasive RW media, they are far more mindlessly reflexive in their team support and their rabid hatred of the other team, but there is certainly a fair amount of knee-jerk team support on our side, though it plays out in less horrifying and damaging ways.

It also helps that liberals tend to be more tolerant of difference and more civil when they encounter people with other views.

I am reminded of how differently my school's (KU's) fans behaved compared to Missouri's fans whenever the two teams played each other in a long-running sports rivalry known as the Border War (after the Bloody Kansas violence preceding the Civil War).

Missouri's fans threw filled bottles at our players as they came onto the field when playing on their turf. They keyed cars with KU decals and Kansas license plates. They even sometimes attacked people wearing KU shirts or hats.

ONE time a couple of KU football players attacked a Missouri fan--and were kicked off the team immediately. KU's coaches were very strict about controlling their players' potential bad behaviors, and the KU administration really harped on how important it was for fans to demonstrate decency and good sportsmanship toward the rival team's fans.

But Missouri's coach treated it like a real war rather than just a sports rivalry. He called KU and its team ugly names, and he bragged about never gassing up the team bus or fans' cars once they got to Kansas for games played here, because he hated Kansas so much that he didn't want a single penny of revenue to go to a Kansas business, or any tax money to go into the state's coffers from Missouri.

I had a student once from KCMO whose family told her not to bother coming home for Thanksgiving or Christmas now that she had committed treason and joined the enemy!
Fortunately her roommate's family welcomed her for the holidays, and she stayed here during the summer, too, and took classes. (As a result, she graduated a semester early.)

The right wingers similarly brag about harming liberals and Democrats. I have seen RW posters say that they don't even care how crummy a Republican policy is, even for themselves, as long as it "triggers the libta**s"!

[BeyondGeography]

2. So true

“We must vigorously protest the president’s craven actions, but above all we need to acknowledge that what ultimately matters is not what a foreign power did to America, but what America did to itself,” he lectured. “The crucial question of what is wrong with our country, what could have driven us to this edge of catastrophe, cannot be resolved by a special counsel or a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives or spectacular revelations about Russia’s interference.”

[TranssexualKaren]

12. Let me pose a serious question then....

Maybe as a country we are finished.
The electoral college robbed us of our choice in president, the weighting of the senate by state rather than population robbed us of control of the senate and gerrymandering robbed us of control of the house so we are clearly no longer a democracy.
“Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, when a government becomes destructive of these rights it is the duty of a people to dissolve that government”
We’ve had an impressive run, almost 2.5 centuries. But like every other civilization that waxed, waned, dissolved and became something else, maybe this is just our time.

Let me know what you think.

[BeyondGeography]

13. I have spent my whole adult life appalled by American carelessness

when it comes to politics. That’s from Reagan to the present. If I have anything remotely interesting to offer maybe it’s this: the good news is many if not most Americans aren’t very political and the bad news is many if not most Americans aren’t very political. The careless class, as I call them, are ignorant of their own country’s history and of history in general. They run with the herd and can be too easily swayed. They are up for grabs and assume no responsibility for their choices. Both parties have a shot at their vote; but you need to win the right side of their brain if you’re going to get it. How else to explain how a 2008 vote for Obama becomes a 2016 vote for Trump? I see our trend as downward but not in a straight line. For some reason the Democratic Party hasn’t figured out why their policies poll better than their politicians. Trump will help them, but until individual candidates learn how to connect with more persuadable voters we will underperform and our country will suffer. The fact that we still have that chance gives me some hope though.

[TranssexualKaren]

14. Ok, so what is the solution.

I agree, but what then?

[StarzGuy]

15. And The Rich...

...will inherit the wind or is it all the riches that use to belong to all of us...

[TranssexualKaren]

16. Refusefascism.com

[bucolic_frolic]

3. American minds eroded by stupidity, delusions, greed, narcissism

I talked with a Trump campaign worker a year ago. Not the brightest bulb. No real reason for working for Trump, but hated HRC. Thought Trump would eviscerate the IRS, which had assessed him for something or other and had difficulty reconciling two mailing addresses. Where did anyone get the idea that Trump would intervene in every little problem facing people? They worshipped him for no reason other than a TV personality and a seemingly successful con man.

Like I said, stupidity, delusions, greed, narcissism. Our pop media culture, those 500 channels of cable plop, have destroyed our brains rendering logic, common sense, sound judgment - all useless.

[cab67]

9. last time I checked,

these types of people were the majority of those posting responses to the LAT op-ed. It took a lot of fortitude not to respond to them.

[tblue37]

5. THIS passage speaks directly to our situation (emphasis added):

It took many years for the self-criticism to bear fruit, but without it the followers of Allende could never have built a coalition with the Christian Democrats, many of whose members were fierce opponents of the revolution’s radical measures. They had at first thoughtlessly welcomed the coup. Our coalition beat Pinochet in a 1988 plebiscite and then voted into office a center-left president two years later.

[Solly Mack]

7. K&R

[weydowner]

8. The Biter Bit

Practically everything over the last 2 years has concerned this individual.
Basically the entire coverage of the thousands of reporters and 'experts' and pundits and talk-shows, written, aural and online, have been devoted to this phenomenon as though it were normal, just a hiccup in the slow march of democracy. Everything will be fine before bedtime but now isn't it exciting, isn't it incredible, aren't we living through interesting times.
A bad analogy would be the thoughts of a tarantula watching itself slowly being devoured by a venomous wasp that has had its nervous system dismantled at the start of the process.

This editorial comes out on the week that Alternet has written an equally scathing critique of the probably permanent damage that has happened to the US. Rather than altering the mentality of the whole country in one fell swoop (which would be impossible), Trump has, hour after hour, day after day, week after week changed the mood of the country. Like boiling frogs, he has used one outrage after another, half a percentage point after the other, until something rich and strange and disgusting has resulted.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-democracy-dies

I have been complaining over the last couple of years (very few 'likes', no replies online, no reactions) about the fact that the media has taken it in their stride; every pathetic tweet forensically scrutinized, every outrage tutted over; - all grist to the mill in the constant quest for the latest headlines.

What has happened to Texas or Florida or Puerto Rico? What has happened to the shooting in Las Vegas? Oh, they must be OK because they are last weeks news, and - look - Donald has mis-spelled a word on his new tweet or Melania has designed a bizarre Christmas display or Sarah has told a new lie.

[jaysunb]

11. +1 n/t

[DonViejo]

17. Locking....

News articles about Editorials and Op-Eds are opinion and analysis in and of themself.