The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe you saw the video of over a hundred newscasters who work for Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the company that owns a big chunk of all the TV stations in America and wants to buy hundreds more, reading a word-for-word warning to their viewers about fake news. Their chairman of the board, David Smith, when asked about requiring all these independent stations to read from the script, said all stations do this. Meaning, all news stories are submitted to editors. The difference Dave omits, of course, is that those other stations have in-house editors, not Big Brother dropping edicts to its myriad minions.

The other difference Dave misses is that there are news stories and there are opinion pieces and it used to be they were kept separate and made clear one was not the other. Fake news, if you were to ask me and I know you didn’t, is synonymous with Fox News, those fair and balanced folks who wouldn’t know a fact from propaganda if you beat them with a National Enquirer. They blurred the lines intentionally the way Rush Limbaugh can twist the truth into a pretzel with hot mustard and call it a hamburger. Destroy the public’s faith in honest journalism, you can pretty much manipulate truth to your own ends. Donald Trump is living proof.

We tend to believe what we want to believe. With the internet and blogs, we can narrow our media right down to our selective viewpoint, reinforce our beliefs and live merrily in our bubble of ‘facts’. Right and left both. We all know there will be biases in reporting, selective editing that swings in one direction or the other. PBS will pick a story on the plight of immigrants while a Texas television station might highlight the illegal immigrant who killed a woman and got acquitted by a jury. One will cover the effects of global climate change while the other will simply call it a hoax and drag out some scientist in a different field who corroborates it.

There is, however, a huge difference in liberal or conservative bias in a news station and just calling everyone else liars and fake news. One is just human nature and hopefully a good media outlet will attempt to minimize that bias; the other is propaganda intended to mislead an audience. We have a President who attacks the media, sometimes by name and sometimes by individual, and we have a monopolistic broadcast group who is more than happy to help him.

Fair and Balanced? Fake News! Corporate Censorship? Monopoly Media!

These are confused times, amigo, made more so by cynical politicians and corrupt media moguls. If the aim was to sow discontent and anger, they’re doing a great job. Fifty years ago the Jefferson Airplane wrote a little ditty called White Rabbit that perfectly captured those times when the liberals were the ones who were anti-government and maybe captures these times too.

When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she’ll know

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head

Damn good advice. But what are you gonna feed it?

You maybe don’t watch as much Fox News as some sectors of the American Public so it’s altogether possible you missed Sean Hannity ranting and raving about Mueller’s overreach when he confiscated Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen’s personal files. Time to end the investigation! the Fox commentator yowled. Time to lock up the traitor James Comey! he growled. Time to end the Witch Hunt! he hollered.

Funny how things turn out in this Trump era. Up is down. Down is kind of the high point. So when the Trump Team lost its bid to have the Cohen trove kept secret, the name of the client who didn’t want his name revealed to the public was ultimately revealed. Surprise, surprise, as Gomer Pyle used to say. It was our favorite Trump apologist and bromancer, the fair and balanced Sean Hannity. So what does Mr. Hannity say to all this, you ask. He says Mr. Cohen was not his attorney in any legal sense of the term.

Like me you probably find that an odd parsing of words. Not my attorney in any legal sense of the word? Just an attorney in what sense, then. A fixer? An unpaid attorney? A pal? Methinks something here is amiss. You know, and I do too, the best is yet to come. Mr. Cohen knows where the bodies are buried, where the women have been paid their hush money are, who set up the meetings in Prague, why the President is jittery about Russia. If this were a made for TV series — and trust me, it will be if it isn’t actually one already — Monsieur Cohen would turn up dead in Episode 23. Can’t have him turning State’s witness. Add to that those tapes he liked to record, god only knows what jewels lay waiting in those ready to be uncovered.

Trump Fawlty Towers. It’s going to make Watergate look like a one season flop. This one’s got it all. Foreign intrigue, mob bosses, porn stars, Playboy models knocked up and paid to have an abortion, political gamesmanship, lies and more lies, one great big soap opera full of twists and turns, pathos and comedy. American Entertainment! Start stocking the popcorn, we ain’t seen nothin yet.

If I was writing this series, Sean Hannity would commit suicide before the rest of Cohen’s dossier comes out. Just a suggestion, of course, but he and the Fox Friends will probably see if they can weather the investigations. Good luck, Sean, and Good Night.

Pity the poor Republicans. They stand stoic behind their President, grim smiles frozen on their faces as the cameras capture another of their profiles in courage, and you know they’re thinking, how did this happen to us? How did we elect a playboy reality TV star to be our Leader? A man so bereft of morals and decency, a president who we will soon be asked to impeach.

At a news conference with the purported purpose of discussing the American response to the Syrian nerve gas attacks, the Fearless Leader went ballistic instead about the FBI raids on his personal attorney’s office and home. Veep Pence and newly installed Pompeo sat stone-faced while Trump ranted and raved, castigating the FBI, Jim Comey, Hillary Clinton, Jeff Sessions, just about everybody but Assad. You know what they were thinking. Same as Rex Tillerson at the Boy Scout’s speech: here’s a fucking moron.

Maybe the same thing Adolph Hitler’s generals thought when Adolph took over the war planning and attacked Russia. Course by then Hitler was already Fuhrer and the machinery of fascism firmly entrenched. We’re not quite there yet, but if the Republican party thinks power matters more than morals, we’re on our merry way.

Paul Ryan just jumped ship. The Speaker of the House, 3rd in line for the Presidency behind Pence, took a curtain call. He didn’t call out the President, but he bailed before the midterms, proud, he said, of what he accomplished. A tax cut for the rich that will drive the deficit into the trillions. Cognitive Dissonance, I think the psychiatrists call it. Silver linings in the thunderheads. Today Trump pardoned Scooter Libby, the aide to Dick Cheney who took the fall for outing a CIA agent, what some would call treason. Even George Bush wouldn’t pardon the guy, but Trump is testing the waters for future pardons, including himself.

The Republicans so far show no shame, no blame for what will be a truly dark chapter in the history of this republic. Get off the boat, I say, leave this sinking ship while you can still pretend you had nothing to do with enabling this slide into totalitarianism. Maybe the rest of us can right the vessel when you’re gone. Take a life preserver, take a lobbying job, but take a swim. Don’t worry about the sharks, they’re you.

I heard today our President planned to order troops down to the border, maybe make a human Wall now that Congress won’t fund a concrete or steel one. Yesterday I heard he wanted to force the Washington Post to register as a lobbying group. Two days ago he started a trade war with China. The day before that he called up the Russian president to congratulate him on his Big Win and maybe have him over for a pow-wow at the White House. The week before … well, the list goes on and on, one outrageous act or tweet or threat at a time, each on the heels of the next.

Try to keep up with this guy. You can’t. He’s up in the pre-dawn hours, fingers flying over his device, threatening, bullying, ranting and raving. One day he’s waging war on California, the next he goes ballistic about immigrants, same afternoon he goes after the mainstream media and fake news, a little later he’s attacking somebody or some company he doesn’t like, give him time to catch his breath he’s calling out some Congressman he’s got a derogatory name for, in between he’s firing another cabinet member. It never slows down. It never stops.

Democracy, in order to function properly, demands a bit of respect for opposing opinions. Demonizing the other side, well, that works for creating a dictatorship or a totalitarian regime. We’re right, the others, lock em up! The news media, fake fake fake! Make em register as lobbyists, shut em down, lock them up too!! The political opposition, liars, crooks, lock em up!! The truth, there is no truth other than ours!

Day after day the foundations of our experiment in democracy are under assault, death by a thousand pinpricks and tweets. We get numb to the outrage, we grow weary of what a year or so ago would seem unbelievable, we close our eyes and our ears, overdosed with all these attacks on our institutions. But the water is growing hotter, we just don’t notice the incremental heat being steadily turned up with every lie, with every affront, with every firing, with every personal attack, with every violation of the norms of decency we no longer expect. By the time it’s too late to jump out of the pot, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves. Dictators don’t always come in with a coup, sometimes they come in with the stew.

Imagine, all you bazillion readers of this incredibly viral blog on your screen right now, that I start asking you for all your preferences, your inner secrets, your friends’ as well, that I need to gather up your nationalities, your gender, your buying history, that I keep track via GPS on your mobile device all the places you go, who you see, where you work, that I have a database that has every e-mail, phone call, credit card purchase you ever made. All that for free so that you don’t have to subscribe to this addictive and incredibly entertaining blog I post every day of your lives!!

And I promise that your information is protected. Ha ha. You and I both know it’s not protected. I’m not a bank. Not at all, but I would sure like to take your personal information and sell it to folks who could help me get to the bank. Folks who could sell you commodities they figure out from that data you want. Or politicians who could sell you Senators and Presidents based on your preferences. Or unscrupulous actors who could convince you to think democracy and liberty are fictions that need to be tossed on the scrap heap of history.

A guy named Max Schrems, an Austrian privacy activist, decided to ask Facebook for an accounting of what they had for information on him. He received 1000 pages!! That’s a lot of data collecting by any standard you can think of. Today my boy Mark Zuckerberg is testifying before Congress, apologetic as a killer on death row, claiming innocence but contrite while he awaits a pardon from the Governor. He’ll probably get that pardon, along with a slap on the hand.

Most of us in this Future Shocked world don’t care if Mark has collected all that information about us. We want that ‘platform’ he’s offered us for free. We want Google and Amazon and instantaneous algorithmic information and we don’t want to pay for it. What’s the harm if those pop-up ads target us? What have I got to hide? Maybe I wanted those hotel rooms in the country I just googled. Big deal. I can take it or leave it. So what if that item I just checked out on Amazon is now offering me a bargain over on the right of my computer screen? I don’t have to buy it.

So when I start dropping news feeds my Russian bot pals want to ‘share’ with you because they got the info that you prefer Fox to MSNBC or you got hot and bothered about pulling down those Confederate Statues or that you bought a subscription to Ammo Guns and Anarchy, you wouldn’t mind, would you? Course not, you’d rather read faux news than news that upsets your worldview. Life is hard enough without complicating things with facts. Naturally, I’m not talking about you and me — I’m worried about those folks who vote different than us, who think different than us, who are gullible and stupid and deplorable. Lock em up if we could. Lock em up!

No, I’m not talking about us.