America's Other Pandemic: Right Wing Hate

Hannity on February 27, 2020.

Each day Americans who choose to tune into Donald Trump's coronavirus press conferences get to watch a series of lies, untruths and a times dangerous misinformation by the narcissist -in-chief.  Yet Trump is hardly the only one spreading lies and, even worse, hatred and the embrace of egnorance and bigotry.  Fox News, after weeks of lies and misinformation, has its anchors denying what was said on video and captured for the world to see. Beyond Fox News, in the ugly underbelly of the right wing media, conspiracy theories are promoted, health experts are attacked - Dr. Anthony Fauci has needed increased security - and efforts to excuse the right's "glorious leader" malfeasance are non-stop. It is all part of the larger unleashing of hate that has plagued America since Trump's election which has given a green light to white supremacists and coddled some of the most extreme and bigoted acolytes of the Christian Right.  America needs to win the war against Covid-19, but it also needs to win the war against hate, bigotry and the celebration that Trump has unleashed.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this reality:

We see the best of America in the health-care workers and first-responders risking (and sometimes losing) their lives to help others. But we also see the pathologies that have surfaced (or recurred in new mutations) during Trump’s presidency: the scapegoating of religious minorities, attacks on science and scientists, and promotion of globalist conspiracy theories (in this case, that the World Health Organization conspired with communist China to conceal the virus).

This country’s woeful response to the virus has an obvious cause: a president who refused to heed warnings and to prepare, instead offering false assurances while the nation snoozed. Even now, inexcusable delays limit tests, ventilators and respirators, and even now President Trump resists a nationwide stay-at-home order.

But it’s painful for some to put the responsibility where it belongs. Christian broadcaster Rick Wiles, therefore, took a different tack. He blamed the Jews. “God is spreading it in your synagogues! You’re under judgment because you oppose his son, the Lord Jesus Christ,” he proclaimed on his TruNews platform. This is the same Rick Wiles who in November called Trump’s impeachment a “Jew coup.” And this is the same Rick Wiles whose TruNews outlet was granted press credentials by the Trump administration to cover the World Economic Forum in January; Wiles stayed in a room booked by the administration.

Others follow Trump’s lead in blaming scientists for our woes. As The Post first reported, the government had to step up security for Anthony Fauci, the top infectious-disease expert at the National Institutes of Health and the most visible scientist responding to the crisis. Threats had been made against the 79-year-old doctor, who frequently contradicts Trump’s uninformed happy talk. Fauci has been attacked by pro-Trump outlets such as Gateway Pundit and American Thinker, which labeled Fauci a “Deep-State Hillary Clinton-loving Stooge.” The dark-web conspiracy theorists from QAnon and the like do worse to Fauci, a loyal public servant under every president since Ronald Reagan.

Still others try to distract from the Trump administration’s failures by blaming a globalist conspiracy. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) demanded an investigation into the WHO for “helping Communist China cover up a global pandemic.” Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, former Trump U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), and Tom Cotton (Ark.), Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and pro-Trump outlets such as the Federalist and Breitbart have proclaimed similar sentiments. The scientists issued a report warning that the virus is “spreading with astonishing speed” and called for governments to “immediately activate the highest level of national response,” including immediate and extensive testing and planning for closing schools and workplaces.

And yet, Trump slept. “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” he said on Feb. 28. He blew it. Not the scientists, not the WHO, and not the Jews.

Are Trump Supporters Over Confident About 2020?

In what I hope my turn out to be a prophecy, a piece in New York Magazine posits the question of whether Donald Trump supporters are too over confident about Trump's re-election prospects in 2020 and, as a result might not turn out in force to vote.  The piece considers the non-stop pro-Trump propaganda by the right wing media which could result in his cult like followers finding themselves in a bubble detached from mainstream America where - much as the far left of the Democrat base - and posed to receive a severe shock if the con-man of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is not re-elected. The piece also notes the over confidence of the Clinton campaign in 2016 that allowed Trump to eke by in three states by the slimmest of margins and win the Electoral College.   Democrats are nowhere as confident and, hopefully, this will cause them to strive harder and to go to the polls to stop the human cancer that currently inhabits the White House.  Here are highlights:

If you forced yourself to watch significant portions of the House Judiciary Committee’s markup of articles of impeachment, you undoubtedly heard the Republican hypothesis that the entire exercise is an effort to head off a certain Trump reelection next year. This assumption was often hurled at Democrats as a taunt . . . .
 Impeachment aside, any casual perusal of pro-Trump conservative news and opinion outlets shows an impressive consensus that the president is cruising to a 2020 victory, with impeachment viewed as a base-mobilizer rather than a development that will repel swing voters, . . .
 This take on impeachment rather notably collides with the claim that it is intended to head off Trump’s reelection, since Democrats infallibly know the Republican-controlled Senate will acquit him. But the fact remains that Trump fans are feeling more, not less, confident about 2020, and they were pretty confident earlier, as National Review observed over a month ago: . . . . The survey shows that 56 percent of voters believe the president will be reelected. Eighty-five percent of Republicans and 51 percent of independents were confident in Trump’s reelection effort, compared to 35 percent of Democrats.

Eighty-five percent is a lot of confidence in a president who lost the popular vote the first time around and has never been anything other than underwater in his job-approval ratings.

You don’t need a poll to grasp that Democrats aren’t remotely as confident about 2020. The simple fact that Democratic voters are obsessed with the electability of prospective nominees tells you all you need to know about that. And this anxiety — if not pessimism — is constantly reinforced by analysis suggesting Trump can again win while losing the popular vote by an even greater margin than before.

This contrast in moods is, to put it mildly, a reversal of the situation going into the 2016 general election. Of all the reasons Trump won, you have to figure overconfidence in the HRC camp — leading to strategic missteps by the campaign, and indifferent turnout and protest voting among the rank-and-file — was a significant factor.

There is no polling lead by the Democratic nominee or mistake by Trump this time around that will convince Democratic voters this election is in the bag. But it’s possible that a solid year of triumphalist braying from Trump, his campaign, his party, and his media allies, will persuade some of his own voters that he’s already won, so it’s safe to spend Election Day in other pursuits, or at the grocery and liquor stores stocking up for the big victory celebration. It could be a fatal mistake.

"MAGA Bomber" - A Portrait of a Growing Segment of the GOP

When the first pipe bombs sent to CNN and prominent Democrats who are constantly targeted by Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, began to be discovered, many on the right - think Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, et. al. -  claimed they were a "false flag operation" backed by liberals. Indeed, Der  Trumpenführer twisted reality into claiming that he was the victim, not the addressees on the bomb-containing packages.  They had no evidence, of course, but nowadays, evidence and facts are devoid for what passes for news and discourse on the right.  Deliciously, when Fox News tried to secure the rights to use a photo of Cesar Sayoc's van covered with pro- Trump and anti-CNN and liberal stickers, the couple who had taken the picture replied they "won't allow you guys to use it [the photo] because you aren't a reliable source of what's going on in our country today. Sorry!"  Now, as facts about Sayoc have emerged, as disturbed as he is, he is a portrait of the core base of the GOP: inspired by hatred and extremism and blindly eating up Trump's lies.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the right's crumbling and dishonest effort to disavow Sayoc and the causation of Trump rhetoric that he subscribed to whole-heartedly.  Here are article highlights:

Rush Limbaugh, the most influential conservative talk show host in the country, and a man whom Republicans made an honorary member of the 1995 freshman class in recognition of his role in helping them win the House majority, explained recently that the still-anonymous bomber could not be on the political right. “Republicans just don’t do this kind of thing,” he explained. “From the Haymarket riot to the Unabomber, bombs are a liberal tactic,” added Ann Coulter.

The discovery that the person suspected of mailing bombs to various figures Donald Trump has described as enemy threats is in fact a Trump-supporting Republican has necessitated a change in emphasis. Whereas before conservatives insisted the bomber’s method told us everything we needed to know about his ideology, now they insist it tells us nothing at all about his ideology. “Crazy person attacks Republican Congresspeople: blame the crazy. Crazy person sends bombs to Democrats: blame the Republicans,” tweets right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro, whose analysis was recirculated by Donald Trump Jr.

It is of course true that the overwhelming majority of Republicans are not violent. . . . . Nonetheless, the relationship between the two parties and violence is not symmetrical, and the fact that alleged bomber Cesar Sayoc had a strong identification with Trump and his partisan message is not a coincidence. The Republican Party encompasses an extremist fringe that nurtures violence in a way the Democratic Party does not.

Political violence — when it is attached to political ideology at all, as opposed to simple mental illness — is associated with Manichean, paranoid, illiberal thought. That is a description of a large and steadily growing wing of conservative politics. . . . . Sensible conservatives roll their eyes at this sort of nuttery, but by this point in history, such modes of delusional thought have gained such deep inroads in the party that purging them is a hopeless task.

Even figures as deranged as Limbaugh have long since found themselves outflanked by even more deranged minds like Alex Jones, who has received respectful attention from President Trump, himself an avid conspiracy theorist. Trump has praised a member of Congress for assaulting a reporter; pardoned ranchers who inspired a right-wing militia attack, the right-wing conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza, and lawless authoritarian racist Joe Arpaio; literally today, at an event in which he was attempting to project some measure of dignity and decorum, Trump invoked a far-right conspiracy theory by attacking George Soros as a “globalist” and chuckling appreciatively at an audience member shouting “Lock him up!”

The left certainly has illiberal, paranoid modes of thought. The difference is that the left-wing version resides outside the boundaries of two-party politics, because the Democratic Party is fundamentally liberal not radical. . . . . The street-fighting cult antifa lies outside of, and is primarily hostile to, Democratic politics. Left-wing violence from the 1960s likewise came out of radical groups who viewed the Democratic Party with contempt.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, has followed a course that has made its rhetoric amenable to extremism. Republican radicalism enabled the rise of a conspiratorial authoritarian president, and that president has expanded the bounds of the party’s following farther out to the fringe. It is getting harder and harder to distinguish the “normal” elements of conservatism from the “kook” parts. That some of those kooks would resort to violence is not an accident but a statistical likelihood. Trump’s party is a petri dish for diseased minds.

Decent, moral people ought to be embarrassed to admit they are Republicans.   The fact that people don't speaks volumes about them and none of it good.

March for Our Lives - Republicans Are Not Getting the Message

UPDATED:  Per The Hill, this batshitery from Rick Santorum:

Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) suggested that students should take CPR classes and take steps to prepare for active shooter situations instead of holding protests calling for new gun laws.

By some estimates, the turn out for yesterday's "March for Our Lives" in Washington, D.C., was the largest protest march ever in the city's history (the crowd's certainly dwarfed the turn out for Der Trumpenführer's low attendance inauguration).  And that doesn't count those who turned out at sister marches in other major cities.  Having been a teen in the 1960's and college student in the early 1970's I identify with the idealism of the Parkland students and those they have inspired.  Things can change if enough pressure is applied, especially at the ballot box.  My generation saw the Vietnam War ended and Nixon removed from the White House. This new generation of youth have that advantage of the Internet and social media that allows them to organize and apply pressure in ways my generation only dreamed of.  What's interesting is watching the reactions of those most in the pocket of the gun lobby.  Most Republicans have remained silent and others have attacked the student activists.  The NRA increased its ad buys 600% since the Parkland massacre as noted by the Chicago Tribune:

Within four days, though, the NRA had returned in force, increasing its advertising aggressively on Facebook, and spending so widely and indiscriminately that its ads on YouTube showed up on videos for school-age kids. According to a previously unpublished review by Pathmatics, a company that scrapes data from online ads, the NRA spent more than six times as much on digital ads after the Parkland shooting than it did in the weeks before it. Its average daily spending in the 24 days before Parkland was $11,300, according to Pathmatics. In the 24 days after its silent period, that average jumped to $47,300.

Disgustingly, NRATV has mocked the students and shown, in my view, the growing depravity and moral bankruptcy of "conservatives" in general.  This from the Washington Post:

The latest attack came from Colion Noir, a host on NRATV who took to the airwaves on the eve of the Parkland teens-led March on Washington, telling them: “No one would know your names” if a student gunman hadn’t stormed into their school and killed three staff members and 14 students. . . . . Colion Noir is a pseudonym for Collins Iyare Idehen Jr., a lawyer and gun rights activist from Houston who has nearly 650,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Fox News, it typical form, has lied and mislead its gullible viewers on the positions of the activist students and, as noted before, helped spread the false meme that they were hired actors.  Anything rather than face the reality that people are fed up with what falsely styled "conservatives" and Republicans are doing to the country. 

I sincerely hope that Millennials and those attaining voting age in time for the 2018 midterm elections will take the message of the Parkland activists and register to vote and get out to the polls and take out their anger on pro-gun candidates.  Here's a look at that message: 

During today’s March For Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., one of the Parkland students who has become an outspoken advocate for gun control spoke. And he used the speech to warn pro-gun politicians that the voters are coming for them.

Cameron Kasky began his address by telling the hundreds of thousands gathered “welcome to the revolution.” Stating that he’s been asked if he believes that “any change is going to come” following the tragic Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting, he told the crowd to “look around” because “we are the change.”

“We must educate ourselves and start conversations that keep our country moving forward, and we will,” Kasky exclaimed to cheers. “We hereby promise to fix the broken system we’ve been forced into and create a better world for the generations to come. Don’t worry, we’ve got this.”

Kasky went on to state that the people of the country now “see past the lies” and the “corrupt aren’t controlling our story.”

“Politicians either represent the people or get out,” the young student declared. “The people demand a law banning the sale of assault weapons. The people demand that we prohibit the sale of high capacity magazines. The people demand universal background checks. Stand for us or beware. The voters are coming.”

After listing off the names of the victims of the Parkland shooting, Kasky noted that the march isn’t the “climax of this movement — it is the beginning.”

Let us hope this is truly a beginning of real change and the beginning of the end of Trump - who remained silent about the march - and today's GOP.

FBI Is Investigating Whether Far-Right Sites Helped Russians

Another day and yet more news that ought to make sane Americans more upset with Republicans who are trying to cover up for Der Trumpenführer and his toxic regime.  As McClatchy reports, the FBI is investigating whether far-right "news" sites aided Russian efforts to throw the 2016 presidential election to Trump.   Given the insanity of some of these sites on a good day, there truly is no telling what these purveyors of lies and deranged conspiracy theories might have done.  The same holds true for their loyal followers.  Here are story highlights:

Federal investigators are examining whether far-right news sites played any role last year in a Russian cyber operation that dramatically widened the reach of news stories — some fictional — that favored Donald Trump’s presidential bid, two people familiar with the inquiry say.

Operatives for Russia appear to have strategically timed the computer commands, known as “bots,” to blitz social media with links to the pro-Trump stories at times when the billionaire businessman was on the defensive in his race against Democrat Hillary Clinton, these sources said.

The bots’ end products were largely millions of Twitter and Facebook posts carrying links to stories on conservative internet sites such as Breitbart News and InfoWars, as well as on the Kremlin-backed RT News and Sputnik News, the sources said. Some of the stories were false or mixed fact and fiction, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the bot attacks are part of an FBI-led investigation into a multifaceted Russian operation to influence last year’s elections.

Investigators examining the bot attacks are exploring whether the far-right news operations took any actions to assist Russia’s operatives.

Russia-generated bots are one piece of a cyber puzzle that counterintelligence agents have sought to solve for nearly a year to determine the extent of the Moscow government’s electronic broadside.

“This may be one of the most highly impactful information operations in the history of intelligence,” said one former U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Bureau director James Comey confirmed Monday at a House Intelligence Committee hearing what long has been reported: that the FBI is investigating possible links between individuals in the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian campaign to influence the election and whether there was any coordination between the two.

As for the bots, they carried links not only to news stories but also to Democratic emails posted on WikiLeaks, especially those hacked from Podesta and made public in October, said Philip Howard, a professor at the Oxford University Internet Institute who has researched the bot attacks.

Russia also used “trolls,” hundreds of computer operatives who pretended to be Trump supporters and posted stories or comments on the internet complimentary to Trump or disparaging to Clinton. Sources close to the inquiry said those operatives likely worked from a facility in St. Petersburg, Russia, dedicated to that tactic.

“Russian bots and internet trolls sought to propagate stories underground,” said Mike Carpenter, a former senior Pentagon official during the Obama administration whose job focused on Russia. “Those stories got amplified by fringe elements of our media like Breitbart.”

“They very carefully timed release of information to shift the news cycle away from stories that clearly hurt Mr. Trump, such as his inappropriate conduct over the years,” he said, referring to the October release of a video in which Trump bragged about grabbing women’s genitals. That event corresponded with a surge in bot-related traffic spreading anti-Clinton stories.

Breitbart’s chief executive officer, Larry Solov, did not respond to phone and email requests seeking comment.

Bannon and Gorka have controversial profiles. Bannon has been accused of taking anti-immigrant and racist positions. Last week, the Jewish newspaper Forward reported that Gorka had taken a lifelong loyalty oath to a Hungarian far-right group that for decades was allied with the Nazi Party. 

The White House declined to respond to questions about Gorka.

At least one of the congressional committees investigating the Russian meddling is looking into the bots.  The Senate Intelligence Committee “intends to look actively at ‘fake’ news and the ways that Russian bots and trolls were used to influence the election,” said Rachel Cohen, a spokeswoman for Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the panel’s ranking Democrat.

The Right Wing Media Swamp is Killing the GOP

It is not just the base of the Republican Party that is hastening the demise of the party.  Aiding and abetting the ugliness and overall misogyny of the GOP is the right wing media swamp - or perhaps toxic bubble is a better term - that churns out lies and misinformation and helps maintain the fantasy world that so many in the GOP seem to live in.  When one lives in a world where most of the "news" one hears comes from right wing outlets sooner or later (i) you become detached from objective reality, and (ii) have bigoted and ignorant views/beliefs reinforced.  Should Donald Trump lose  - and hopefully, lose badly - on November 8th, any effort to reform the GOP and make it competitive again in presidential elections must address the disservice done by the right wing media that is playing to a shrinking audience even as it pretends to represent the dominant view.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the problem.  Here are highlights:

No doubt, should this expected defeat [of Donald Trump] come to pass, Republican leadership will try to regroup and figure out what went wrong.

As in the last “autopsy,” the GOP establishment will probably conclude that it needs to broaden its appeal to demographics beyond older white men; that what prevented this more widespread appeal in 2016 was having a boorish, sexist, race-baiting, egomaniacal, undisciplined nominee; that if only it fielded a more genteel version of Trump, someone who espoused essentially the same fiscal and social policies but with more empathy, they’d have won the White House, and will win it once again.

This conclusion would be wrong.

The sickness in today’s Republican Party is not confined to its current standard-bearer. It is therefore not curable by merely disavowing, however belatedly, the soon-to-be-defeated nominee. The sickness has taken over the Republican base, and there’s only one antidote.

If Republicans truly want to save the Republican Party, they need to go to war with right-wing media. That is, they need to dismantle the media machine persuading their base to believe completely bonkers, bigoted garbage.

It is, after all, the right-wing radio, TV and Internet fever swamps that have gotten them into this mess, that have led to massive misinformation, disinformation and cynicism among Republican voters. And draining those fever swamps is the only way to get them out of it.

For a sense of just how misinformed Republican voters have become, consider a few of the provably wrong things many believe.

Seven in 10 Republicans either doubt or completely disbelieve that President Obama was born in the United States. Six in 10 think he’s a secret Muslim. Half believe global warming is possibly or definitely a myth concocted by scientists.

Among just Trump voters, 7 in 10 believe government economic data are fabricated.

Republicans and Trump backers didn’t come to these conclusions independently. They learned them from the influential TV, radio and Web outfits whose imprimaturs Republican politicians desperately seek, and whose more troubling content these politicians have been reluctant to criticize.

When it comes to the paranoid, destructive excesses of right-wing media — not just Fox News’s headliners such as Sean Hannity, but also Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones — Republican leaders have been somewhat more reluctant to condemn or even gently critique.

That’s presumably because many of the crazy conspiracy theories circulated by these outlets served the party’s political interests. At least in the short term.

Birtherism, which Republican leaders were painfully slow to renounce, helped delegitimize the popular mandate of our first black president, even as it legitimized widespread racial resentment.

Trump is not some black swan, whose unique cocktail of charisma, telegenicism and political fluidity landed him the nomination. His nomination is the product of years of race-baiting, conspiracy-theorizing,expert-delegitimizing right-wing media nonsense, which Republican politicians aided and abetted because it seemed politically expedient at the time. They helped the alt-right create the alternate reality that made a Trump nomination inevitable.

And unless the party establishment grapples with its own complicity in misinforming, misleading and frightening the masses, it’s doomed to field more Donald Trumps in the future.

The Right Wing Media's Civil War

In the past the right wing media from Fox News to blogs like Red State have provided a monolithic noise machine attacking Democrats and progressive policies while basically brainwashing its listeners.  It one of the reasons that much of the Republican Party base is so ill informed on so many issues even as the base reacts to the propaganda like Pavlov's dog.  Now, Donald Trump has thrown a wrench in the smooth running operation as some on the right find it impossible to support a serial liar and con-artist who is utterly unprepared and unfit to occupy the White House.  True, most of the right wing media continue to spin lies, but the cracks in the facade are growing as a piece in Salon examines.  Long term, this could be a very good thing for America.  Here are some column highlights:

What good is having a right-wing echo chamber if it’s not cranked up and blaring out a disciplined message during the presidential campaign? The conservative movement continues to grapple with that propaganda question in the wake of Donald Trump clinching the nomination, which has created deep fissures within the right-wing media and its historically united front.

For decades, conservatives have taken pride in their media bubble that not only keeps Republican fans selectively informed about breaking news, but also bashes away at all political foes. In full-fledged campaign mode, the right-wing media can effectively serve as a battering ram that Republicans use to attack their enemies or fend off in-coming volleys.

But Trump has scrambled that long-held equation. Embracing positions that often fall outside the orthodoxy of modern-day conservatism, while simultaneously rolling out non-stop insults, Trump has presented conservative pundits with a monumental headache: How do you defend a creation like Trump? Or as one National Review Trump headline lamented last month, “What’s a Conservative to Do?” 

That riddle is especially tricky when Trump puts would-be allies in the uncomfortable position of having to defend the truly indefensible, like the widening scandal surrounding Trump University, the presumptive nominee’s former real estate seminar business. Over the years the dubious venture has been the subject of several ongoing fraud investigations and lawsuits, including one by the state of New York on behalf of 5,000 alleged victims.
 The strange part? Some key conservative voices agree with the Democrat’s legal assessment. That’s why back in February, a National Review writer denounced the Trump seminars as “a massive scam.” And last month,The Weekly Standard warned that Trump U. represented a “political time bomb” that could doom the candidate’s November chances: “Democrats will see to that.” 

 [W]atching the conservative media this campaign season: It’s been completely knocked off its game. Known for its regimented messaging and willingness to almost robotically defend any Republican front-runner and nominee, Trump is finding only a smattering of defenders when it comes to damning allegations about his scam seminars.

And when Trump recently escalated the Trump U. story by attacking Judge Gonzalo Curiel and insisted he couldn’t be impartial because of his “Mexican heritage,” the presumptive nominee found himself even further isolated within the conservative movement.
 As The Atlantic noted after reviewing previously secret training materials for Trump U., “the playbook focuses on the seminars’ real purpose: to browbeat attendees into purchasing expensive Trump University course packages.” According to an affidavit from former student Richard Hewson, he and his wife “concluded that we had paid over $20,000 for nothing, based on our belief in Donald Trump and the promises made at the free seminar and three-day workshop.” . . . . The con appeared to touch every aspect of the real estate selling events. 

Even Trump’s fiercest media defender, Breitbart.com, has taken a timid approach to the Trump U. fraud story, with the site refusing to offer up a full-throated defense of the alleged scam.

The ferocious conservative echo chamber isn’t built for nuance and it’s not designed for internal debate. But by sparking so much general dissention and by putting conservatives in the position of having to defend something as noxious as Trump U., the nominee is helping to mute the right-wing media voice this campaign season.

Bush Foundation Accepted Foreign Donations Too - Where's the Media?

The right wing slime machine has had near orgasms and provided breathless reports about the Clinton Foundation accepting donations from billionaires and foreigners.  As past posts have noted, despite all of the hoopla and hysteria, no "smoking gun" of wrong doing has been revealed.  What the right wing media is ignoring is the fact that the Bush Foundations have likewise accepted money from big donors and even foreign governments no doubt seeking influence.  Occupy Democrats notes in part as follows:

As the conservative media networks drive themselves into a muckraking feeding frenzy over the prospect of the upcoming work of fiction titled Clinton Cash, written by a professional right-wing conspiracy theorist and political hitman, the rest of America has picked up the question of foundation accountability out of curiosity and the tempting allure of scandal. But, in one of the countless hypocritical reversals that are all too common in modern American politics, it turns out that the Bush family foundations have been acting like they have something to hide, while the Clintons have publicly released key information about all their donors, such as identity and approximate amount donated. In typical Republican fashion, they are projecting their own corruption onto Democrats and accusing the transparent Clinton Foundation of accepting the same kinds of secret bribes that the Bush Foundation has been taking for years.

Nonprofits are not obligated to reveal their sources, but the Clinton Foundation has been revealing their donors since 2008, ever since Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State, to avoid the very allegations her campaign is now being falsely smeared with. Foreign governments could have donated to her foundation in secret, as the “investigative author” fictitious propaganda writer Peter Schweizer has alleged- but the donor list, made public in a searchable database, reveals that the foundation is clean. Tom Watson of Forbes even wrote that “in truth, the Clinton Foundation is among the most forthcoming of major charities and nonprofit foundations—especially those headed by public figures.”

On the other hand, the George Bush Foundation raised $361.8 million dollars between 2010-2013 with no attempt at accountability or transparency.

David Corn of Mother Jones puts it in perspective: “Anyone who wanted to gain favor with the Bush clan while George W. Bush was president could have anonymously donated an unlimited amount of money to his father’s foundation, and now that Jeb Bush is in the hunt, anyone looking to fashion a relationship with the Bushes can contribute millions to either of these Bush foundations and keep that connection a secret.”

Similarly, the George Bush Presidential Library has assets of $47 million and receives $3 million a year from undisclosed donations, functioning as yet another vehicle to funnel campaign and influence money through with no record or transparency, and was accepting donations all throughout George W. Bush’s presidency- another way for the millionaires of America to buy power and favors while trampling over the American democracy.

It’s worth repeating; the Clinton Foundation publicly releases the names of every donor and the amount of each donation, while the Bush Foundations accepted secret, anonymous donations of undisclosed quantities.

Here are a few highlights of what the Dallas Morning News discovered about Bush Foundation donations:

The secretive nature of high-dollar donations to presidential libraries often raises questions, though legislation to require more transparency has repeatedly fizzled.

Meredith McGehee, policy director for the Campaign Legal Center watchdog group, said the biggest issues are presidents raising money in office and the “pitfalls of access, influence and conflict of interest.”

Unlike political campaigns, presidential library fundraisers can take foreign donations. Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, for instance, each gave the Bush Center $1 million or more after Bush left office.

[A] top Bush Center booster, California investor Elliott Broidy, pleaded guilty in 2009 to a role in a corruption scandal. Another big donor, Dallas oilman and major SMU supporter Edwin L. Cox, had his son pardoned by former President George H.W. Bush.

False Facts and the Conservative Distortion Machine

The "godly Christian" crowd that makes up the core of the Republican Party's ever more putrid party base blather incessantly about "family values" and "biblical values" yet no one lies and distorts the truth more than these people and their allies in the far right media outlets.  Fox News is a prime example, but the pattern of lies, deceptions and deliberate distortions is sadly the norm and not the exception when it comes to the "conservative media."  It's a prime example of the hypocrisy that is a principal characteristic of today's self-styled conservatives, many of whom simple care nothing about the truth even as the congratulated themselves on their supposed piety and righteousness.  A piece in Salon looks at the pattern of the lies and distortions that aim to brainwash and deceive the cretin filled GOP base.  Here are excerpts:

Citizens are misinformed — often badly so. It’s not just that they lack good information — which would merely make them uninformed — they have plenty of bad information that leads them to believe untrue things. Or more likely the other way around: They believe untrue things, and that leads them to collect — even invent — bad information to flesh out what they already believe.

This was vividly illustrated by a 1991 study that found that the more people watched TV during the first Gulf War, the less they knew about fundamental issues and facts, even as they were more likely to support the war. Wanting to believe that the U.S. was involved in a noble cause, for example, only 13 percent knew that when Iraq first threatened to invade Kuwait, the U.S. said it would take no action, while 65 percent falsely “knew” that the U.S. said it would support Kuwait militarily.

But the problem is hardly limited to this one example, or to issues of war and peace more generally. Misinformation in public life isn’t the exception, it’s the rule, and researchers have been grappling with that fact, and its implications, for some time now.

The study, “How Voters Become Misinformed: An Investigation of the Emergence and Consequences of False Factual Beliefs,” found that “voters’ values and partisanship had the strongest associations with distorted beliefs, which then influenced voting choices. Self-reported levels of exposure to media and campaign messages played a surprisingly limited role,” despite the presence of significantly mistaken “facts,” which were used to help construct the knowledge distortion index.

“Political debate and policymaking are hard enough, but if people from opposing ideological camps come in with their own sets of facts, that makes it really tough to have a vibrant debate that leads to good public policy,” Reedy said. “That’s a big part of why we created the knowledge distortion index and have been studying these issues, is to try to help figure out how to combat the problem of ideological distortion of political knowledge.”

“we looked at the connection between people’s distorted factual beliefs and their views on the public policy issues related to those. We ran statistical tests to see the effects of the typical factors on someone’s opinion on a policy issue — things like their demographics and political values — and also the impact of knowledge distortion. We found that knowledge distortion did indeed have an independent effect on one’s policy preferences . . .

“Our strongest results, I think, are just confirming that this values-based political knowledge distortion is happening and it’s having an independent effect on one’s vote choice,” he concluded.
As the study itself said:

Whatever future refinements may be made to the values-based distortion model, the unsettling evidence remains that many voters are systematically misinformed on political issues, and those erroneous factual beliefs appear to influence how they mark their ballot on election day.

This is a disturbingly serious problem for a political system that purports to not only reflect the “will of the people,” but that also respects reality as a basic matter of course. “Facts are stubborn things,” John Adams observed — a true man of the Enlightenment. “Facts are stupid things,” Ronald Reagan famously misquoted him. It’s painfully obvious whose world we’re living in now. It’s a good deal less obvious how to escape. 

Go to the website of any "family values" organization, Townhall.com, or Wing Nut Daily and you will see a deliberate distortion of facts aimed at pushing the ignorant to vote to support the Christofascist/ Tea Party agenda.