Alternate Realities

     Americans have seemed to be in what Alasdair MacIntyre would call an "epistemological crisis;"  a new situation causes people to confuse "seems" with "is."  This goes back at least as far as the Obama birth certificate controversy.   Then came Sandy Hook.   Next came "Pervy Ted," and the idea that Rafael Cruz shot Kennedy.   This was followed by rewriting history to make Robert Mueller and John McCain less than the heroes they are.   Recently Moonbat Taylor-Green claimed that the July 4th Highland Park shooting was a "false flag. "

     And then there's the 800 pound gorilla in the room;  the Save America Riot,  which Orange Blatherskite's apologists have sought to justify while denying their culpability in.   Some of these people still talk about mules and a stolen election. 

     This week's search warrant served on Orange Blatherskite's mansion led Fox to spout vituperation against the FBI along the lines of "they hate Trump, and they've coming for you next!"  This sort of overheated,  hyperbolic rhetoric led a MAGA freak to shoot up an FBI office in Cincinnati. 

     Fox's dishonesty was such that last night (Aug. 12) Fox pretended that the motives of the Cincinnati gunman were unknown.   Just as with January 6, Fox conveniently forgot how much incitement they created for a criminal attack on our government. 

     It is difficult to decide whether the Trump movement's alternate reality is genuine epistemic confusion,  or just a strategy of politics based on prevarication.  The danger is,  of course,  is that this is typically fascist or totalitarian behavior.  The Nazis completely rewrote history to make Germans natives of the Himalayas.   They claimed that Germany had lost WW I although they won every battle.  And,  of course,  their Thule Society worldview made Jews Germany's natural enemies.   This was all rank nonsense,  but the Nazi regime needed it to exist. 

     RINO has gone from meaning a liberal Republican to meaning anyone who rejects this alternate reality.   It doesn't help a bit that Democrats have undermined same Republicans like Peter Meijer by buying ad time for their alternate reality opponents.   Note well that Illinois Democrats intentionally dissolved Adam Kinzinger's district for their own advantage.   Obviously,  Democrats don't see Trump epistemic confusion as a fascist threat,  but as a good opportunity for themselves. 

Sympathy for the Devil

Looking at monetary cost instead of human rights or freedom is what passes for Republican foreign policy now. 

     Estase feels real nostalgia for the days when Republicans were strong on foreign policy and tough on Communism.  The viruses of isolationism and Jacksonian Nationalism are now combined with a ridiculous urge to blame the behavior of a foreign despot on Joe Biden. 

     Moonbat Taylor-Greene responded to Putin's disgusting invasion of Ukraine by tweeting that it was terrific that the Communist dictator was "standing up " to the U.S.  She then addressed obscenities to NATO, our State Department,  and our Department of Defense. 

     Such amazing foreign policy wisdom and patriotism is not limited to Orange Blatherskite,  Tucker Carlson,  or the mentally diminished representative from Georgia.  Fox News has invited on numerous ersatz foreign policy experts like Fred Fleitz and Christian Whiton.  On his March 7th broadcast,  Jesse Watters (whose first response to the invasion was a craven worry that Ukrainian refugees might be resettled in the U.S.), made a disgusting display of blaming the U.S. for the war.  Watters,  a lame Bill O'Reilly wannabe,  always had a Colbert Report feel to him.   If Orange Blatherskite were caught with a big stash of kiddie porn,  Jesse Watters would have claimed it was for research into the imaginary Deep State conspiracy to protect an underground network of pedophile Democrats.  Apparently Watters agrees with Josh Hawley that we should have agreed to Putin's demand that Ukraine never be allowed to join NATO,  because Watters basically accused our government of goading Putin into this war.  He prefaced a video of H-> on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow show by saying that Democrats intended to turn Ukraine into a "killing ground ."  Not unpredictably,  that wasn't really what Hillary Clinton said. 

      Estase understands that Fox News exists to blame everything on Joe Biden.   On the other hand,  it should be ashamed to remove the locus of responsibility for the war in Ukraine from Vladimir Putin.   There is no way around the fact that Tucker Carlson and Jesse Watters are offering sympathy to evil war criminal Vladimir Putin. 

Note to Journalists

"I always deprecate the style of journalism,  more popular in older days than now[ed.-1929], of dragging into the chronicle of events the narrowness,  the bitterness,  sometimes the want of candour which are incident to partisan warfare.   A journalist becomes,  in my opinion,  not merely untrustworthy,  but dull and uninteresting,  who makes all swans of his geese, and all geese of the swans of other people. "  

Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian Vol. 1, (p.285)

Belial/Moloch 2020

      The White House has been won by President Belial, God of Rape, and Vice-president Moloch,  Devourer of Children.   These pro-abortion Jacobins may talk about representing all Americans,  but will actually restart Barack Obama's reign of terror against pro-lifers. 

      They will be abetted by the dominant media,  hysterical about Vladimir Putin,  while oblivious to the fact that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has the same ideology.   Fully expect Jeffrey Toobin to rejoin CNN as their resident expert on onanism.

      Orange Blatherskite was a man of many faults,  and the myriad of whores in the "conservative "media who allowed him to win the 2016 primary should never be forgiven.   That doesn't mean that the leftist magazines weren't also responsible for Trump.   When the leftist media called conservatives white trash,  that empowered Trump.   When "The Atlantic " called pro-lifers racist,  that empowered Trump.   When a liberal journalist called John McCain voters "NASCAR retards," that paved the way for Trump.  The same liberal media that now invokes St. John McCain were happy to call his backers every name in the book in 2008.  Similarly,  they called Mitt Romney a racist before considering him the conscience of the Republican party .

Media Mediocrity

Legendary football coach Mike Ditka once remarked that "media" is the plural of "mediocrity."  Never has there been a better example than the two town halls the other night;  Joe Biden had a kindly chat with Mr. Rogers,  while Trump was pummeled with loaded questions.

       Recently, there was an Ozzy Osbourne documentary on A&E.  When A&E showed Ozzy singing the famous last line of "Paranoid," their closed captioning claimed such was "I tell you to enjoy life/I wish I could, but it's too late."  Of course,  a network so scared of Black Lives Matter that it canned its highest rated show can't handle "I tell you to end your life/I wish I could, but it's too late."

       Last but not least are the AM radio whores.  Since 2016, Estase has come to recognize talk radio consists of followers, not leaders.  One disadvantage Jeb Bush had in primary season was conspiracy theories about Goldman Sachs and Henry Paulson.  These were cooked up by the same ideological cranks who called George W. Bush a "fiscal Marxist" over the 2008 response to the housing crisis.  I'm sure these AM talkers aren't giving Orange Blatherskite the same grief over our multi-trillion Dollar coronavirus stimulus programs.

The Great Pretenders

       Last week there was a kerfuffle over a segment on Don Lemon's show on CNN where Rick Wilson and another panelist ridiculed Trump voters as illiterate hicks.  (This, of course, plays perfectly into the hands of Trump, who has always depicted the "they-took-our-jobs!" set as being reviled by the Deep State, the GOP "establishment," and media elites.)
       This blogpost isn't about the uneducated riff-raff that backs Trump.  It's about the college-educated professionals who tell them Trump does no wrong.  These people have no excuse for not knowing this presidency is hot garbage.  Fox News has soft-pedaled the Impeachment, acting as though the President did nothing to frustrate Congress' attempts to repel the invasion of Ukraine.   Fox conveniently neglected to inform their viewers that Trump made the Ukrainians promise to keep their Javelin anti-tank missiles in parts of the Ukraine not under invasion.  It is as though FDR provided Britain with Lend-Lease on the condition that none of the ships provided left harbor.
        Back in the day (pre-2016), National Review had a story on their website about William F. Buckley's low estimation of Donald Trump.  When this story came up in Memories on my Facebook feed, Rich Lowry (now a Trumphumper) made sure the story was no longer available.
       Of course, Mark Levin is by far the worst offender.  A lawyer who fancies himself an expert on the Constitution, once targeted by Roger Stone and the alt-right cockroaches, Mr. Levin at one time promised to never support Donald Trump.  Of course, bucking the opinions of the Trumphumpers would mean no sweet radio gig, and no books sold.  Thus, Levin joins the ranks of college-educated professional "conservatives" who defend someone they know in their hearts is an incompetent con man for the almighty Dollar.
       Years ago, Estase compared the President to Cody Jarrett, the psychotic gangster in White Heat who destroyed all of his partners to save himself.  John Bolton, once the patron saint for the tough-on-Iran crowd, is now a pariah to the right.  Unsurprisingly, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will pimp his mother to avoid a similar fate.

New Republic Conservatives

   When Estase was an undergraduate, he noticed a difference in the attitude of the Nation and New Republic towards President Clinton.  Nation saw Clinton as an unprincipled opportunist--someone who couldn't be trusted to stand on principle for anything.  Clinton's iffy environmental record and support for DOMA bear out the Nation's view of Clinton.  New Republic had the Tabitha Soren view of the Clintons.  Assuming that the antiwar generation was infallible, New Republic happily overlooked Whitewater and other signs of the Clintons' dishonesty.  Blind adulation was the New Republic's attitude toward Team Billary.
       If anyone wants to see what he Republican version of New Republic looks like, they need look no further than AM radio, Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News.  Loathe to say anything critical of Orange Blatherskite, these news sources come up with tu quoque on a scale never formerly thought possible.  Trump's inability to pick staff who hold their post for more than a year is of no concern.  While O.B. is in trouble for seeking dirt on Joe Biden from Ukraine, the oblivious Trump doubles down by repeating his impropriety with China!  The response of the New Republic right is to act as though Biden's potential abuses of power absolve Trump from misusing Executive power!
     Never before have Republicans had so low a bar for their office-holders.  Pointing to Democratic malfeasance is now a cover for open defiance of the public trust. 
       While it may be proper to pressure foreign governments for information about terrorists, this is of use of Executive power for public protection.  What O.B. is doing with Ukraine and China is entirely different.  This is use of Executive power for Trump's PERSONAL BENEFIT.
       By this time, the response of the right-wing Outrage Machine against the legitimate qualms of Mitt Romney (whose conservative bona fides go further back than 2015) are a sadly predictable response.  As are the memes claiming that attacks on our lawless president are attacks on conservative America.  This is just how much of a stranglehold New Republic Republicans have over the conservative movement.

Animo et Facto

       Francis Bacon said we believe nothing so much as that which we wish to believe.  After eight years of Oh Blah Blah, Estase yearned for a president who didn't make extensive use of executive orders and presidential fiat.  He thought Glenn Beck was like him in wanting a Frodo president--someone who would take the Ring of excessive presidential power created by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and then expanded by FDR, and throw it in a volcano.  To keep the business of the Dittohead Right, Glenn Beck now sings the praises of a Gollum president--someone who sits in a darkened cave where he sees only the shadows of his imagined success, clinging to Imperial power, repeating the words, "My precious!"

       Thus, the chasm between intention and reality becomes apparent.  Republicans thought they were electing a conservative super-patriot, and have actually empowered a statist who is less conservative than George W. Bush.  But you would never know this from the corrupt conservative media;  too afraid to tell the Right the truth for fear of losing listeners or viewers, they heap adulation on the same kind of autocrat they just spent eight years condemning.

Low Testosterone Conservatism

       Machissimo is one of the defining characteristics of the post-Trump right.  Would-be tough guys like Mark Levin and Sean Hannity act like thirteen-year-old boys in a locker room.  Their George S. Patton posturing gets mighty old.  The Alt Right likes to dismiss their opponents as "low-T conservatives."  I guess that the people I grew up venerating like William F. Buckley and George F. Will look like nervous old ladies to those who learned their principles from shock jocks like Michael Savage.
        The granddaddy of conservative thought in the English-speaking world is Edmund Burke, who like his similar American counterpart, John Adams, was a learned gentleman.  Isaac Kramnick's 70s biography called Burke a homosexual;  how do you get more low-T than that?  Burkean conservatism is something that very few wave the flag for, and none of those people are on Fox News.

Umlaut and U

       Estase has been annoyed to hear Fox News personalities mispronounce the name of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller.  He chalked it up to the stupidity of the Fox personalities, until he watched CNN and saw them do the same thing.
        The umlaut is a piece of German punctuation (ȕ) that essentially means that the character is given extra depth.  An umlaut u is pronounced "ooh" rather than just "uh".  Since English doesn't use umlauts, Mȕller is rendered the other way, with an e after the u.  (Mueller)  Similarly, in the original German, Ferris Bueller would be Ferris Bȕller.  Bueller?  Bueller?
        So for the love of pete, stop pronouncing the Special Prosecutor's name "mull-er," and pronounce it "mew-ler."  Otherwise, you are demonstrating you aren't aware of the special relationship between umlaut and u.