There's been another shooting, this time 17 dead teenagers in Florida, and that's playing out as all the rest before it have. By summer I think we'll have worn out our current mass shooting response down to a couple hours and then we'll have to come up with a brand new script or else the whole performance will just get stale. The more likely way I see this going is the whole national crying game will finally come to an end, having served its purpose to drill into the national psyche that nothing will be done about this and to just move along and maybe donate to a Kickstarter or GoFundMe when the parents are looking for help to pay the medical bills if they're lucky or pitch in for some nice flowers or a casket for the ones who aren't.
At this point I'm just waiting for the consulting company staffed by ex-military, feds, and cops to spring up and start a YouTube channel offering sample lectures on how to react in a mass shooting and how your business, school, movie theater, softball game, or music festival can have a comprehensive security package prepared just for them. Hell, with a premium service, they'll even screen your employees for the ones most optimal to be covert security- secret guards given full weapons and crisis management training that spring into action when the need arises. Soon they'll have sister architectural companies who design public and private spaces with an emphasis on easy evacuation and accommodating a tactical response. Taking away such a lucrative entrepreneurial opportunities from those bold enough to claim is just down right un-American.
Luckily, we have a president who does his damnedest to at least bring some razzle-dazzle to the death spirals around him, even if all he can usually do is cough up some spittle. For an irrelevant yet illustrative example, we have the whole Stormy Daniels brouhaha. Trump's scandals, or more specifically, their cover-ups, typically follow the pattern of "Complete Denial-Partial Denial-Partial but unincriminating Admission-Full Disclosure Proving Original Claim" Right now, his "I payed porn star hush money" saga is currently in the Partial, yet unincriminating Admission. Trump's lawyer Micheal Cohen issued a statement saying while, yes, there was a payment to Ms. Daniels to keep her quiet regarding her affair with Trump, the money used to make that payment came out of his personal account and not from the Trump campaign.
If that seems like an incredibly specific denial to throw in it's because Cohen presumably doesn't want his client to be indicted like John Edwards was when his whole love child mishap came to light. The core legal issue is that if Cohen is telling the truth- that he paid Daniels to keep quiet and avoid further scandal for then-candidate Trump, then that would qualify as an undisclosed campaign donation, which is sort of illegal. The full legal breakdown and exploration of possible outcomes can be found at The Harvard Law Review and it's a fascinating read; one of the things the author mentions is that things are actually a little easier for Trump if the money came directly from him.
It'd still be a campaign contribution, sure, but if the money was Trump's it'd be easier to say that he was trying to spare himself the personal hassle of this controversy first rather with the political implications has a secondary consequence. The governments case against Edwards fell apart under similar lines, so what makes this doubly hilarious to me is that Cohen taking the fall for this is unnecessary and also not all that helpful since it doesn't really make any sense for a lawyer to cough up $130k to stop an old mistress from talking to the press two weeks before said client is up for election for nothing but pure, personal reasons. It just amazes me how willingly people will throw themselves under the bus for a guy who will crack a joke at the skid marks they leave behind or turn tail and run if they ever needed him to repay them in kind. Some people can't lose weight, others dedicate their lives to garbage people born richer than they were. We all have crosses to bear.
Which should come as no comfort to Mike Pence, stuck as he is in South Korea for the Winter Olympics. Since he can't dramatically walk out because the athletes want nothing to do with him, he just has to sit there and be miserable. Then, to top it all off, he gets upstaged by Kim Yo-jong, sister of North Korean dictator King Jong-Un. To the bewilderment of many, Yo-jong got pretty favorable headlines over her "humility" and she was "stealing the show." This isn't too far out of character for the American media, though, since our press corps loves to normalize autocratic or dictatorial behaviors of pretty much everyone so they don't have to reckon with their actions. They did with W. Bush and his terrible paintings, they did it with Obama and his ability to engage in pop culture, and they've tried so, so hard to do it for Trump.
Remember how after the election and in early 2017 there was all that commentary about how the demands and rigors of the job would smooth out Trump's edges and make him more Presidential? Or how after that disastrous raid in Yemen and Van Jones said "[h]e became President of the United States in that moment, period" when he said some nice words about the soldier who died because of his orders? That's what a dedicated effort not to be confrontational or upsetting looks like. The whole thing came crashing down in the wake of Charlottesville because there's just nothing you can do to spin away a president defending Neo-Nazis not once but twice. So when a photogenic propaganda official from a brutal authoritarian regime showed up, it's not all that surprising that the press was positively giddy to exercise those muscles again. The rebuttals for why no one should be doing any of this are already coming in, but, seriously, that they even have to be written is embarrassing all on its own.
Personally, I think if Trump wasn't such a baby and didn't insist on acting like he was pus seeping out of an infection, the press would trip over themselves saying that his "controversial and confrontational" style was just a different direction for the country to go in. They'd even do it now if someone just took Trump's phone away and kept a muzzle on him at all times so he could only speak during scripted events. The headlines would go something like "Radical Approach as Trump Works to Limit Distractions, Stay On Message." Ah the Fourth Estate, what pitiful things you've become. Again, it makes sense when you think about it- media companies need eyeballs now more than ever, and the daily meltdown of the Trump administration is the best thing to happen to televised news media in years. So a vain and insecure president constantly lashes out at the world which deservedly mocks and belittles him, and allowing the media to sit back, shake the can a little harder, and then huff the fumes of higher ratings and advertising dollars until the next time Trump opens his mouth or tweets something stupid.
And of course we can't talk about cyclical black holes without including Russia, which has moved back to it's indictment phase. The 37-page indictment lays out how Russian operatives working under a company called Internet Research Agency stole the identities of U.S. citizens, maintained several social media accounts to disparage Hillary Clinton and promote Donald Trump, and how they evaded federal officials by lying about their intentions to work as unregistered agents of a foreign government. Basically, reading over the indictment is just seeing social engineering done by government actors, every government does it, but there's a reason it's illegal and every government should protect themselves against it. Couple things I want to make clear before we go forward: The only mention of the Trump campaign in the indictment is how the defendants contacted unwitting individuals connected with the campaign. So, no bombshells there, for now. This doesn't mean that this indictment vindicates or clears Trump or anyone associated with his campaign, so, make sure you don't fall for that, either. Oh, also, the indictment makes it clear that the company and its agents where up and running in early 2014, a full year before Trump even declared his intention to run. So while these people ended up operating with a pro-Trump agenda, they weren't created to do that specifically.
All that out of the way, the main thing I want to talk about here is how much of the work these people allegedly did was straight up plagiarism. The indictment includes excerpts from some of the ads the company bought, the most illustrative to me were "Donald wants to defeat terrorism . . . Hillary wants to sponsor it" from May 10th, 2016, "Vote Republican, vote Trump, and support the Second Amendment" from May 19th, "Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote" from May 24th, "Among all the candidates Donald Trump is the one and only who can defend the police from terrorists" from October 14th and finally, "Hillary is a Satan, and her crimes and lies had proved just how evil she is" from October 19th. If you've spent any time around right wing media like Fox News, Alex Jones, or anything published by the NRA, you've heard these arguments before. The foundation of the Blue Lives Matter movement is that Black Lives Matter (BLM) is made up of criminals and thugs who would stop getting killed if they stopped being criminals and anyone who stands by BLM is complicit or an active accessory to their crimes. The trope that Hillary and the Democrats are enslaving black America through welfare and affirmative action is decades old, and the whole "Hillary is a Satan" thing is Alex Jones almost verbatim.
I don't bring this up to say that all of these people have been infiltrated by Russian agents or have been co-opted by the Kremlin to further their villainous plans of villainy; rather, I point them out because for all the scare-mongering and flag-thumping liberals and others do when we talk about the Russia investigation is that at most, Russian agents are just reaping from the culture of ignorance we sowed ourselves. It's not an accident that most of the groups activity targeted the conservative side of the country; Trump supporters consume and share fake news more than any other segment of the population. Should that be surprising to us? Well, no. Remember, these are the same people who primarily get their news from Fox News, a demographic who consistently proves it knows less about the world than people who get their news from anywhere else. I'm just going to steal from a guy named William Poundstone who broke down Fox's oeuvre this way:
Except, it appears, when they get similar talking points from Russian agents. When that happens it's a subversion of our national integrity, on our democracy, on our grip of reality itself. So yeah, sure, get rid of them. Lock them away so they can't manage their dozens of social media accounts. Pretend that our failings are solely the result of foreign meddling and that they aren't doing anything other than jumping on bandwagons we constructed. I'm sure everything will turn out well in the end. Until the next turn comes, at least.
If that seems like an incredibly specific denial to throw in it's because Cohen presumably doesn't want his client to be indicted like John Edwards was when his whole love child mishap came to light. The core legal issue is that if Cohen is telling the truth- that he paid Daniels to keep quiet and avoid further scandal for then-candidate Trump, then that would qualify as an undisclosed campaign donation, which is sort of illegal. The full legal breakdown and exploration of possible outcomes can be found at The Harvard Law Review and it's a fascinating read; one of the things the author mentions is that things are actually a little easier for Trump if the money came directly from him.
It'd still be a campaign contribution, sure, but if the money was Trump's it'd be easier to say that he was trying to spare himself the personal hassle of this controversy first rather with the political implications has a secondary consequence. The governments case against Edwards fell apart under similar lines, so what makes this doubly hilarious to me is that Cohen taking the fall for this is unnecessary and also not all that helpful since it doesn't really make any sense for a lawyer to cough up $130k to stop an old mistress from talking to the press two weeks before said client is up for election for nothing but pure, personal reasons. It just amazes me how willingly people will throw themselves under the bus for a guy who will crack a joke at the skid marks they leave behind or turn tail and run if they ever needed him to repay them in kind. Some people can't lose weight, others dedicate their lives to garbage people born richer than they were. We all have crosses to bear.
Which should come as no comfort to Mike Pence, stuck as he is in South Korea for the Winter Olympics. Since he can't dramatically walk out because the athletes want nothing to do with him, he just has to sit there and be miserable. Then, to top it all off, he gets upstaged by Kim Yo-jong, sister of North Korean dictator King Jong-Un. To the bewilderment of many, Yo-jong got pretty favorable headlines over her "humility" and she was "stealing the show." This isn't too far out of character for the American media, though, since our press corps loves to normalize autocratic or dictatorial behaviors of pretty much everyone so they don't have to reckon with their actions. They did with W. Bush and his terrible paintings, they did it with Obama and his ability to engage in pop culture, and they've tried so, so hard to do it for Trump.
Remember how after the election and in early 2017 there was all that commentary about how the demands and rigors of the job would smooth out Trump's edges and make him more Presidential? Or how after that disastrous raid in Yemen and Van Jones said "[h]e became President of the United States in that moment, period" when he said some nice words about the soldier who died because of his orders? That's what a dedicated effort not to be confrontational or upsetting looks like. The whole thing came crashing down in the wake of Charlottesville because there's just nothing you can do to spin away a president defending Neo-Nazis not once but twice. So when a photogenic propaganda official from a brutal authoritarian regime showed up, it's not all that surprising that the press was positively giddy to exercise those muscles again. The rebuttals for why no one should be doing any of this are already coming in, but, seriously, that they even have to be written is embarrassing all on its own.
Personally, I think if Trump wasn't such a baby and didn't insist on acting like he was pus seeping out of an infection, the press would trip over themselves saying that his "controversial and confrontational" style was just a different direction for the country to go in. They'd even do it now if someone just took Trump's phone away and kept a muzzle on him at all times so he could only speak during scripted events. The headlines would go something like "Radical Approach as Trump Works to Limit Distractions, Stay On Message." Ah the Fourth Estate, what pitiful things you've become. Again, it makes sense when you think about it- media companies need eyeballs now more than ever, and the daily meltdown of the Trump administration is the best thing to happen to televised news media in years. So a vain and insecure president constantly lashes out at the world which deservedly mocks and belittles him, and allowing the media to sit back, shake the can a little harder, and then huff the fumes of higher ratings and advertising dollars until the next time Trump opens his mouth or tweets something stupid.
And of course we can't talk about cyclical black holes without including Russia, which has moved back to it's indictment phase. The 37-page indictment lays out how Russian operatives working under a company called Internet Research Agency stole the identities of U.S. citizens, maintained several social media accounts to disparage Hillary Clinton and promote Donald Trump, and how they evaded federal officials by lying about their intentions to work as unregistered agents of a foreign government. Basically, reading over the indictment is just seeing social engineering done by government actors, every government does it, but there's a reason it's illegal and every government should protect themselves against it. Couple things I want to make clear before we go forward: The only mention of the Trump campaign in the indictment is how the defendants contacted unwitting individuals connected with the campaign. So, no bombshells there, for now. This doesn't mean that this indictment vindicates or clears Trump or anyone associated with his campaign, so, make sure you don't fall for that, either. Oh, also, the indictment makes it clear that the company and its agents where up and running in early 2014, a full year before Trump even declared his intention to run. So while these people ended up operating with a pro-Trump agenda, they weren't created to do that specifically.
All that out of the way, the main thing I want to talk about here is how much of the work these people allegedly did was straight up plagiarism. The indictment includes excerpts from some of the ads the company bought, the most illustrative to me were "Donald wants to defeat terrorism . . . Hillary wants to sponsor it" from May 10th, 2016, "Vote Republican, vote Trump, and support the Second Amendment" from May 19th, "Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote" from May 24th, "Among all the candidates Donald Trump is the one and only who can defend the police from terrorists" from October 14th and finally, "Hillary is a Satan, and her crimes and lies had proved just how evil she is" from October 19th. If you've spent any time around right wing media like Fox News, Alex Jones, or anything published by the NRA, you've heard these arguments before. The foundation of the Blue Lives Matter movement is that Black Lives Matter (BLM) is made up of criminals and thugs who would stop getting killed if they stopped being criminals and anyone who stands by BLM is complicit or an active accessory to their crimes. The trope that Hillary and the Democrats are enslaving black America through welfare and affirmative action is decades old, and the whole "Hillary is a Satan" thing is Alex Jones almost verbatim.
I don't bring this up to say that all of these people have been infiltrated by Russian agents or have been co-opted by the Kremlin to further their villainous plans of villainy; rather, I point them out because for all the scare-mongering and flag-thumping liberals and others do when we talk about the Russia investigation is that at most, Russian agents are just reaping from the culture of ignorance we sowed ourselves. It's not an accident that most of the groups activity targeted the conservative side of the country; Trump supporters consume and share fake news more than any other segment of the population. Should that be surprising to us? Well, no. Remember, these are the same people who primarily get their news from Fox News, a demographic who consistently proves it knows less about the world than people who get their news from anywhere else. I'm just going to steal from a guy named William Poundstone who broke down Fox's oeuvre this way:
"There's a lot that goes on in the world that doesn't easily fit the Fox template. There are important stories that don't make anyone angry, prove liberals are evil or otherwise carry an emotional punch. Fox viewers get less of them. Fox News is like an all-you-can-eat buffet, serving up red meat."Here's the thing though, an organization that only tells or manipulates stories to fit a narrow political or ideological narrative isn't a news network, it's propaganda. Instead of saying that and dealing with the implications of millions of people weaning themselves into the information age on deliberate ignorance and lies, we just said "Well, people are going to agree to disagree." When we're talking about things like "Islam is a fundamentally violent religion whose true adherents are all terrorists," or, "Climate Change is an Al Gore hoax meant to increase government taxation," or, "The Iraq War was a successful endeavor (which later morphed into it was an honest mistake based on bad intelligence)" we should be a little firmer in holding people accountable for being wrong. But no, pointing out that nothing someone said is true in any way shape or form is rude and we shouldn't judge people based on their willingness to wholeheartedly believe things that are demonstrably untrue.
Except, it appears, when they get similar talking points from Russian agents. When that happens it's a subversion of our national integrity, on our democracy, on our grip of reality itself. So yeah, sure, get rid of them. Lock them away so they can't manage their dozens of social media accounts. Pretend that our failings are solely the result of foreign meddling and that they aren't doing anything other than jumping on bandwagons we constructed. I'm sure everything will turn out well in the end. Until the next turn comes, at least.
