I’ve noted before in this space that we get three newspapers daily. Since the election I have hardly glanced at them, know what I was going to see, but my New Years Resolution is to force myself to do so.
So today, the front page news in all three papers involved the House Republicans backing away (I’m sure temporarily) from gutting the House Office of Congressional Ethics. My guess is that they figured since we’d just elected a kleptocrat in chief that they should be able to commit crimes with impunity as well.
Well, the New York Times and the Boston Globe both ascribed the backdown to the public’s pushback. But the New London Day? No, the day chose to push the meme that an “angry tweet” from the already most corrupt president in history had caused the retreat. Yet another example of the Donald taking credit for something in which he had no involvement, like those 5000 Sprint jobs he allegedly brought to the States, though the decision was made without his input before his rigged election.
The title of this post refers to normalization, but it’s more than that. The press, with the Day doing so more out of ignorance than anything else, will indeed normalize the fact that we have a fascist in the White House. But my sad prediction is that they will fall in line quite soon with his narcissism. If he says he’s the greatest, they will soon report that as fact. That fellow in North Korea will have nothing on the Donald. We saw a similar process, albeit at a far lesser magnitude, with W after 9/11. For quite a while he was the fearless leader, by dint, oddly enough, of doing nothing after receiving a warning that a terrorist attack was imminent. The Republicans have a tendency to deify their leaders, with Fox leading the charge. True, once that leader, like W, is in the trash can of history, they are more than willing to blame their failures on him, but while he occupies the Oval Office he can do no wrong, and anyone who disagrees is a traitor. So Trump’s coming deification is normal operating procedure, when Republicans are in office.
Whoever writes the headlines for the Day is definitely a right winger, as they always give a Republican spin to the syndicated stories they pass on. For instance, if the story is a negative one, the action is ascribed to Obama; if positive, it is ascribed to the U.S. But I’ve never noticed before that their choice of syndicated story to run had a right wing bias. In the case of the House ethics story, it certainly looks that way. They could easily have chosen the stories that ran in the Times or the Globe, or some other fact based account. Characterizing Trump’s tweet as “angry”, as the Day’s headline writer did, is laughable. Here’s a guy who has basically said that the rules of ethics don’t apply to him, that by definition he can’t have a conflict of interest, and to prove it he has strong armed foreign governments into lining his pockets, not to mention made money charging admission (all proceeds to him) to a New Year’s Eve party that amounted to nothing less than access buying. At least Hillary Clinton had to give a speech to get that Wall Street money. Trump’s tweet was not “angry”, it was cynical. He saw which way the wind was blowing and got out in front so he’d look good. The Day bought his act hook, line and sinker.
I wonder when Dave Collins will write his first column telling us he had it all wrong about Dear Leader?
