When Trump loses the Presidential race, what is the media going to say?
Not what is Trump going to say. That’s easy to figure; he’s going to say whatever he needs to say to keep feeding the ego-circus. He’ll probably have more rallies and say it was all rigged. Yes, more rallies.
Yet, already you can feel he’s a hop-skip-and-jump from becoming as marginal a character as Sarah Palin, who dropped out of her governorship in favor of cheap cable shows wherein she shot wild animals from a chopper. Trump might be a little higher class and actually have a movement, but most of us will say, in wonder, “That guy once had the nomination?”
But what about the mainstream media? Aye, there’s the real story. Because the mainstream media botched this one. Therefore, the safest thing for them to say when Clinton wins is, “See? The system worked! The good guy/woman won!”
Well, just because your teenage son and his idiot buddies went drunk driving and came back alive doesn’t mean the system worked; it means everyone got very very lucky.
The truth, in the case of the 2016 election, is this: the establishment media almost gave the United States of America its first fascist dictator, and an idiot to boot.
How did they do it? And why?
Well, firstly, the guy meant ratings, so they made him an equivalent not to Hillary Clinton, but to Jeb Bush and John Kasich and those other creepy phonies who are, nonetheless, acceptable to me because they at least nominally adhere to the Constitution and probably read books in their spare time. For its part, the Republican Party almost gave the country Trump because they are craven worms who simply don’t care about their country.
(That sounds over the top, but let’s stop being kind. Republican Party chairman Reince Priebus is an appliance salesman who, I guess, views his job status as more important than the welfare of the other 330 million Americans he shares the continent with. God knows what he tells himself at 3 a.m. Same goes for Kellyanne Conway, who is the modern-day Goebbels, or Leni Riefenstahl at best, but without the camera skills. And, of course, the Profiles in Gutlessness gang, headed by Paul Ryan, John McCain, and the rest of the GOP creepy squad, not only gassed up the car, they gave the teenagers the alcohol and told them to enjoy themselves spinning around town, and don’t mind the speed limits or cross-walks.)
The second thing the media did was close their eyes to what’s really going on around the country. They did this years ago, and that’s why right off the bat they missed the truth about Trump – that he was so appealing – and they missed the threat until it was too late.
This is eerily reminiscent of how the media marched in weird patriotic lock-step with Dick Cheney when it came to the Iraq war.
The problem is that TV journalists in particular make too much money, live too close, and pal around with politicians in a proximity and equality that’s antithetical to decent journalism. They are now as much a part of the problem as Priebus and even Trump himself. And they won’t risk being out of favor.
Case in point:
I watched Kellyanne Conway doing her glib performing-dog act of deflecting every criticism of Trump and stressing that he’s just, let’s face it folks, Mr. America while Hillary is Lady MacBeth. In this, Kellyanne was defending and doing everything she could to elect America’s first fascist dictator. Once this interview was over, Chuck Todd of NBC told the rest of us, “That was Kellyanne Conway, folks, who has one of the toughest jobs in politics right now, but let me tell you something – and this is important -- she’s a good person.”
No, Chuck! No! This isn’t a game. This isn’t high school. This is serious.
Chuck, I like you. I want you to be our tribune. Our defender. In short, I want you to be a journalist of some sort. But you should have beaten that woman to the wall. You should have nailed her on every inanity she uttered. But after your usual two or three crocodile tries, you gave in. “She’s really a swell person, folks.”
Chuck, when you tell us you know Kellyanne Conway or that you’re friends with her, that she’s a good person, you reveal that everything you’re doing is a show, a sham. You don’t have to be insulting to Kellyanne, but to sell her to us is to give the whole thing a wink. Imagine Edward R. Murrow telling us, “And it’s important to remember that Senator McCarthy is still a decent man who loves his mother.” Unthinkable. Because we didn’t need Murrow for that. We needed him for something loftier.
This is it in a nutshell. Politics is media and media is politics. They pal around, they dine with one another, they make sure they’re all in favor with one another, and they all make too much money. To them it’s a game. The rest of us have our faces pressed against the window. For this reason, they will never report the real story of the 2016.
The real story is not that we didn’t elect America’s first fascist dictator, it’s that we almost did.
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