June 28, 2018

There were 2 posts published on June 28, 2018 (this is page 1 of 1).

The peddlers of fear and outrage

Trash your TV

Two things took place during my hospital visits with my Dad this week. One was becoming captivated with an unlikely Trump voter. The other was gaining some insight into how he got that way.

I visited my Dad when the nightly news was on. Our local ABC affiliate, WTVD, was ticking through its top stories from around the country. Dad soon changed the channel and offhandedly stated his reasoning.

It was all about crime. Robberies, murders, carjackings, shootings. For some reason, our local affiliate thought it important to alarm us with news of misfortunes that took place hundreds, or in some cases, thousands of miles away, far from any possibility of them affecting us.

Why was the news doing this? Was it just laziness, being that chasing a cop or an ambulance is an easy way to a story? If there was airtime to fill, why weren’t there more local stories to fill it? Why fill viewers’ heads with stories that have no practical value?

Unless the point is to … stoke fear?

I’d been thinking lately that many Trump voters seem to be under some sort of spell. That’s one way I can account for the cognitive dissonance. Why do these folks seem so fearful all the time, thinking the boogeyman is at their door?

The answer was staring me in the face. It’s the television coverage.
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Bernie bashers, let it go

With yesterday’s announcement of the retirement of Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy, some Hillary Clinton supporters are trotting out the tired old blame game, saying this is the fault of voters who thought Hillary wasn’t progressive enough. Bernie Sanders supporters, in other words.

These people blaming Bernie can kindly fuck right off.

Clinton was a hugely flawed candidate. She managed to lose the biggest shoo-in election in history. Aside than that, she’s a big girl who is fully capable of accepting responsibility for her own loss. Indeed, accountability is one of the key parts of the job of being President. To point fingers anywhere else is shirking responsibility. As the great Democrat Harry S. Truman said, as President the buck stops here.

As this week’s encounter with a Trump supporter showed me, the Democratic Party has a lot of work to do to bridge the gap between it and working voters. Trump offers us a silver-platter opportunity but we will absolutely fuck this up if we continue to highlight differences in our own party rather than those in the opposition’s party.

Don’t be a fool like Trump. Let go of the last election. The only one that ever matters is the next one.