The comedians are going to be busy.
He really is a sad little man. He did a White House interview with ABC, and you’ll never guess how it ends…with Trump giving a tour of the collection of photos he has had mounted on the wall that ‘prove’ he had the biggest inauguration crowds ever. The interviewer smiled and failed to mention that the data show he is wrong, that he persists in insisting on this lie after being shown the evidence that his claim was false makes him a liar, and that his obsession in denying his unpopularity as president makes him petty and unfit for office.
But then, the interviewer probably hopes to get invited back, so he was avoiding asking those pointed questions that might annoy the buffoon-in-chief.
Your 4th Estate is sagging.
The American taste for pageantry and bombast really doesn’t help when these people are the ones being shown off to the world. I mean, it seems weird to the rest of us even under normal circumstances – in most countries a new political leader would be elected one week (after a campaigning season lasting no more than a month or two) and then quietly start work the week after. The closest they would get to a parade and a concert is a press conference and a brief photo opportunity.
Also… remind me – is there any public forum in which the political opposition can question and criticise the President on a regular basis? Our Prime Minister has to undergo PMQs weekly, during which she is taken to task in the most robust terms by the leader of the opposition and other MPs. Or is it entirely up to the press to hold politicians accountable over there?
@2. There’s basically none of that. The President can do whatever he wants, supposedly within limits, but those limits are more tradition than law. We have two Parties; the President’s party, which is currently the GOP and has no interest in governing or our country or the people in it, but is unabashedly in the hands of the moneyed elite; the Democrats, which is also in the hands of the Elite but is ashamed enough to throw bones to the hoi polloi. The Democrats are too frightened of alienating white straight cis male voters to actually oppose the GOP, though, preferring to pretend to a “nuanced” and “intellectual” affair which means being steamrolled by the Right Wing who wants the Left Wing’s destruction then throwing up their hands and saying “well we said words what more can ya do? =/” The Democrats calculus is that the people who are really on the Left HAVE to vote for them because the GOP simply wants to kill all of us, while actual opposition will lose them the 5 or 6 white dudes in the middle.
To answer your question more succinctly, we have no political opposition. We have a Party that wants to destroy Americans and a party that doesn’t care as long as it gets its share.
People are laughing. All over the world. if the situation wasn´t that dangerous … I would be laughing too. Watch
http://elu24.postimees.ee/3992897/naera-pisarateni-donald-trumpi-ametisse-astumise-paeevast-valmis-humoorikas-huultelt-lugemise-video
Hmmm, I wonder if he ever fixed the date on that photo. I hope not.
HJ, #5
Oh, that’s just too good!
cartomancer,
The President is more analogous to a monarch than a prime minister (but one with actual political power). Hence all the ceremony.
At least I’ve seen a bunch of other news outlets calling him out on this. I wonder if they figure that since they’re already on Trump’s shit list that they might as well stop trying to humor him?
I liked the 1″ thick lucite/laminate armor around the bigwig booth. Pretty sure that all that was coming through from those shitty performances was BOOM BOOM BOOM WTF BOOM. At least Trump didn’t feel like he had to pretend to be enjoying it.
Toby Keith’s singing about lynching was just so on point. What a carnival of assholes.
Sixteen years ago, I graduated from UW-Milwaukee after seven years of major-hopping with a medicore GPA and a useless degree in Journalism and Mass Communications. I had hoped to make my fortune as a professional writer mainly because I have a buggy brain that thinks I’m more awesome than I really am and to show up my asshole father who told me that “writers starve.” (Today I work as an underpaid, underemployed cubicle rat at a financial services company.)
Anyway, back in the late 90s my instructors talked about Western media and journalism history: the pre-enlightenment Star Chambers and Royal Seals, Jon Stuart Mill, the Revolution, The Jungle, Edward R. Murrow’s TV take-down of McCarthy, Newt Minow’s “vast cultural wasteland speech,” the Pentagon Papers, Woodward & Bernstein, the looming problems of corporate media ownership, etc. In general, journalists were usually portrayed as stalwart defenders of democracy who braved many threats and challenges to get the truth to masses.
Given how much the institution of Journalism has deteriorated since then, I’d love to audit some of my classes to find out what, if anything, they are teaching about the connection between an activist press and a free society.
The b****** is hunting for fake evidence that millions of illegal votes were cast for Hillary.
Next – if nobody stops him – he will be denying the Democrats their democratic right to stand at future elections.
The man is evil. Like Putin is. Period.
The Great Man really is obsessed about how big his party was. He should be challenged to support his claims with evidence, and if he can’t come up with any, then the press should keep reminding him about it.
Voter fraud lost him the popular vote? OK, then: He’ll have to prove that fraud cost him 2.5 million votes and if he can’t prove it, his accusations will come back to haunt him again and again.
He is far from indestructible, and his obsession with popularity may well be his undoing.
Trump starts from the premise that he’s popular and then believes any theory that proves it.
Excerpt:
Cross posted from the Moments of Political Madness thread.
I thought Tony Abbott was bad.
He was and still is— fortunately, without a “Big Red Button” to nuke the world, without a massive economy to bribe the world, and without control of the world’s reserve currency.
@Akira MacKenzie, #10:
I don’t think there is evidence for a major difference between journalism (as a whole) then and now. The yellow press has a long history that starts with the first mass media in the 19th century, and even before that you had printed flyers going around Europe and the US telling all kinds of tall tales, moralizing in ways that weren’t so dissimilar from today. Criticism of journalists being more interested in staying close to power than investigating and controlling go back to the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Importantly, these were usually written by other journalists.
I guess journalism are just more imterested in telling these heroic tales in order to imbue their students with the right ethics.
@Akira MacKenzie, #10:
I don’t think there is evidence for a major difference between journalism (as a whole) then and now. The yellow press has a long history that starts with the first mass media in the 19th century, and even before that you had printed flyers going around Europe and the US telling all kinds of tall tales, moralizing in ways that weren’t so dissimilar from today. Criticism of journalists being more interested in staying close to power than investigating and controlling go back to the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Importantly, these were usually written by other journalists.
I guess journalism profs are just more imterested in telling these heroic tales in order to imbue their students with the right ethics.
Oops, sorry for double post.