Jumping aboard the crazy wagon ...

Democrats say the nuttiest things, even in normal times. 

But as 2020 looms they are practically running over each other to jump aboard the crazy wagon.  There seems to be a contest – especially among Presidential wannabes – to see who can out-crazy the other with the most outrageous claims and promises.

Republicans have their fair share of loonies as well, yet none of them can even come close to the madhouse ravers on the Democrat side. 

You have to give Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez credit for some of this. The stuff she routinely says is so hilarious she should have people rolling in the aisles laughing uncontrollably. However, she’s so sincere, so earnest in her silliness, some must feel compelled to take her seriously. 

I don’t know why they would, or should, but they do.  I suppose it might be because Democrats are so bereft of ideas, except for hating Trump, even crazy stuff sounds better than nothing.

Since the millennials in the Democrat base have no sense of history or remember anything beyond the Pop-Tart they ate in their mom’s basement this morning, even old crazy stuff like socialism and a guaranteed annual income for all sounds brand new to them. And good. 

These millennials and their slacker pals also love hearing the word “free”; who doesn’t like free? Most of them have never had to pay for anything themselves so far, anyway. They are accustomed to stealing copyrighted music online, stealing movies from illegal streaming sites, and having their parents foot the bill for everything, including college and their healthcare. 

Democrats, especially the dinosaurs in Congress, are frankly terrified of offending the younger elements of their party.  They’re afraid these 20-somethings will think Democrats aren’t cool, hip or whatever enough these days. Democrat leaders are desperate to make the millennials know they are paying attention to them.  Indulging them. Catering to their whims. 

Trying to prove they are just like them, only 40-50 years older.  They don’t mind pandering and looking like out-of-touch fools in the process.  Shortly after AOC was “inaugurated” (in her words), Dem leaders asked her to teach them how to effectively use social media like Twitter – although I suspect they called it “the Twitter.” I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer told some interviewer how much they like rap.  Or see Steny Hoyer doing the floss.   

They are desperate to be one of the cool kids. Part of the new generation.  Not realizing, apparently, that trying to be cool and young is the surest way to demonstrate you’re neither.       

It’s pathetic.

The newer generation is driving the crazy bus. For some reason, older Democrats feel the need to jump on board.  I’m sure they can’t believe most of what the newbies want is remotely possible.  At least I hope that’s the case; if not, we have some seriously crazy folks in Congress.

Nowhere is the desire to be on the crazy bus more apparent than among the 2020 Presidential contenders.  It’s almost as if they think beating Trump in 2020 is such a foregone conclusion, they just need to convince enough Democrats to nominate them for the walkover.  They clearly don’t think anyone will hold them to facts in the primaries and then the Presidential debates.  Maybe they believe Trump will be forced from office before they have to face him.

I honestly don’t have a clue.  I’m not sure they do, either.    

I’m just baffled by the nonsense they say every day.  Worse, when one starts down some crazy rabbit hole to nowhere, the others eagerly jump down the same hole.  I don’t get it. 

Instead of separating from each other, they coalesce around the same warped and false premise, or pile on a promise they must know they can never keep. As soon as one of them says something crazy, each one of the others appears to double or triple down on crazy. 

Free Medicare for all becomes single-payer free healthcare for all and the end of all private health insurers.  Student college debt relief becomes free college tuition for all.  Late-term abortion on demand becomes abortion on demand even after a live baby is delivered. Tighter controls on emissions to slow climate change becomes eliminating airplanes, retrofitting every building in the US, and eliminating fossil fuel use in 10 years.  Minimizing income inequality becomes tax rates of 70% or more on the rich and a guaranteed annual income for everyone – whether they work or don’t want to work. 

And let's not forget reparations, to both African Americans and Native Americans.     

Ummm, this is all crazy stuff.  But this is where Democrats are headed. 

The crazy bus is filling up.  

The incessant drumbeat of propaganda …

Sadly, most of what the media reports these days is propaganda.  

That’s news with a specific agenda: to persuade, not inform.  To foster that agenda the media is willing to ignore what’s really happened in favor of reporting what they want you to believe. 

That’s the media’s right.  They have the microphone. And we have laws to protect freedom of the press and free speech. The media are perfectly within their rights to report whatever and however they wish. The only limit on the media’s freedom is they aren’t allowed to publish something they know to be false and with malice aforethought – both of which are hard to prove. 

The media know that.  They also know there’s almost no chance they’ll ever be held accountable for intentionally spreading false information or publishing something intended to harm another. It’s practically impossible to prove someone’s “intent”; they can always claim they were working with the info they had and just reported what they were told. 

Also – since 1964 and the Times v. Sullivan case – it’s virtually impossible in the US to sue anyone in the media successfully for defamation or libel if the victim is a “public figure.” So politicians, celebrities, performers and others are all fair game.

None of that makes what our media are doing every day right.  Much less ethical. 

The purpose of protecting a free press in America was to insure the media always had the power to expose government corruption, malfeasance by politicians, and bad acts by rapacious corporations without fear of legal or financial retribution.

In short, it was to protect us from the powerful by holding them accountable – bringing misdeeds and dirty dealing from the shadows into the light for all to see. 

All fine and good.

But what happens when the media abuse their power?  What happens when the vast majority of the media feel accountable only to themselves? What happens when they decide to wield their power unevenly and choose sides? What happens when they use their power to protect themselves and their like-minded friends at our expense?

In the sage words of the long-dead Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Now, some will claim the media don’t have absolute power; there are other information sources such as Fox, conservative talk radio and the WSJ to offer alternative interpretations of the news.  Yet in reality those are outliers dwarfed by a more homogenous and pervasive media that dominate what most people hear and see.

The overwhelming majority of our “mainstream” media – excluding the outliers like Fox and WSJ, of course – have a single point of view and approach; the American public is carpet-bombed with that point of view. Whether it’s newspapers, most cable news, online extensions of ABC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN – what’s reported (and not reported) is eerily similar.  Sometimes downright identical. The net effect is that this wall of information from multiple sources makes it appear that it must be true. Everybody is saying the same thing, after all.

That’s intentional.  That’s what the media want the public to believe.  By closing ranks and insuring that the majority of Americans only hear one side of a story, they control perception.  That’s how propaganda works; the theory is that if you tell a story – even a false one – long enough and consistently enough it becomes “true” in the minds of most people.     

Only a handful of alternative media outlets present a different view.  It’s easy for the unified media to use their superior numbers and reach to dismiss those as irrelevant radical nutjobs.  If they all stick together, which they usually do, who are you going to believe? The majority of nearly identical reports you see from a variety of sources, or a couple of reports that are different?      

Some media apologists claim there’s absolutely no bias among the biggest media players. Nor any coordination.  And if there is it’s unintentional.  That’s simply bullshit.

Of course there’s bias.  There’s always bias in how news is reported.  That’s unavoidable as long as humans are involved.  Any first-year J-school student knows some bias is inevitable; still, news professionals are expected to minimize bias whenever possible.   

What’s different now is that bias in a certain direction is not just tolerated but encouraged and applauded.  And anyone who doesn’t support that bias is vilified. 

And in terms of coordination, if more than 90% of the bigger media outlets report the exact same story the exact same way, often using the exact same words, there’s obvious coordination.  It’s not a coincidence, especially when the narrative is almost word for word from the talking points of left-leaning Democrats, public-service and teacher union officials, the ACLU and the SPLC.      

That’s a dangerous trend. That’s not objective reporting; that’s propaganda.   

The mainstream media are still upset that despite their best efforts to prop up Hillary – and dismiss Trump as a ridiculous buffoon – Trump was still elected President. That result challenged their belief they could control what ordinary Americans believe. 

They are determined not to let that happen again.  While they continue to pummel Trump at every opportunity, they have their sights set on 2020 and the candidate they want this time.

Watch carefully and see what they are doing. They are destroying every candidate, by innuendo and slanted reporting, who might compete with their chosen victor. 

Bernie Sanders – old news.  Elizabeth Warren – seriously? Howard Schultz – a billionaire capitalist, not “woke” enough.  Amy Klobuchar – too moderate; too establishment.  Mike Bloomberg – rich guy, also too moderate.  Joe Biden – too old.  Hillary – not again, and too old.

And it's just starting.  

They’ll keep savaging all the contenders until only one is left standing – the one they want. 

Kamala Harris.  She’s their dream candidate.  The Trump slayer. 

They are all gushy over her. You won’t see them dredge up the dirt on her, and there’s plenty of it, the way they will on everybody else who might challenge her.  Anyone who questions her will be a racist, sexist, anti-woman, and worse. That's the playbook. Count on it.  

They’ll sweep her dirt under the rug. Because she’s who they want.   

Just watch. See how they'll manipulate the facts. You'll see.   

And remember, it’s not news; it’s just more propaganda. And it will be wall to wall.

They've had a lot of experience at this.  

Proudly and passionately ignorant ...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an idiot. 

The only reason the media and Democrats keep pushing her in our faces is because she’s passionate about the nonsense she believes. They think she connects with millennials. 

But if you listen to her for more than a minute it’s apparent she doesn’t understand what she’s talking about. No matter what the subject is. No matter how she presents it. 

There’s not a spec of logic or fact behind anything she says. Everything she proposes is obviously completely unworkable. Not because there are entrenched evil forces in the way, but simply because she has no grasp of the Constitution, or how government works.  More laughable is that she doesn’t understand geography, much less basic physics.  

I’m not talking about high-level stuff.  Second graders have more knowledge than her; they at least understand there’s no way to take a train from the US to Hawaii. Maybe in a fairy tale with magic trains and flying carpets, but not in real life.  

The only thing she’s got going for her is her passion. That’s what appeals to millennials – she really believes what she’s saying, fervently. 

That doesn’t make anything she’s saying true.  That doesn’t seem to matter.  The scary part is so many people are willing to accept what she’s saying as possible.  None of it’s even remotely possible no matter how much she wants it to be.    

For the life of me, I don’t understand.  It frightens the hell out of me that anyone with the good sense God gave a sweet potato can listen to this loon prattle on without laughing out loud. It’s not just that she has no idea what she’s talking about, but politicians are lining up to exalt her like she’s the second coming.

She’s not “speaking truth to power”; she’s doing standup comedy. She just doesn’t know it. And Democrats and the media are afraid – for whatever reason – to call her out.  Republicans, as always, are also afraid to take her on, too. 

Why is no one willing to state the obvious – the emperor has no clothes. 

More importantly, she has no brain.  Or any common sense.   

I suspect she’s simply ignorant. She doesn’t know what she doesn’t know.  And she doesn’t care to find out what she should know.  That doesn’t matter to her.  Nor to her like-minded dimwits elected in the midterms.  Nor to politicians who should know better. 

Why else would someone say when questioned how to pay for multitrillion dollar Medicare for all: “you just pay for it.” How could someone with a smidgen of common sense think we should eliminate cows because they fart, or eliminate air travel?  This is crazy stuff. 

The media fact-check and parse every word by Trump, why aren’t they fact-checking this buffoon? Why aren’t they ridiculing her every day? God knows she’s given them a plenty of material to work with. She's a living, breathing SNL skit.   

When anyone dares to call her out on something completely unrealistic she’s proposing she says that it’s more important to have goals and ideals than the means to achieve them.

Lately she’s been pointing to FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society as examples of lofty goals that changed America.  Unfortunately, she knows almost nothing about those – except what she’s been told by liberal historians – so she doesn’t know that both of those were largely failures.

Except for Social Security, the one lasting bright spot, FDR’s policies were generally a mess.  These prolonged the Great Depression and vastly enlarged the scope and cost of government. His policies were also overturned by the Supreme Court at times leading liberal god FDR to try to pack the Court to get decisions he liked, much like today’s authoritarian dictators.

FDR’s dictatorial streak was one reason Congress later enacted Presidential terms limits.   

LBJ’s Great Society was devastating, especially to minorities.  It produced a welfare state that destroyed the basic family unit, encouraged out-of-wedlock births, and removed incentives to work. It helped create a permanent underclass in America almost wholly dependent on government payments.  We’re still trying to recover from ill-conceived Great Society programs.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that she also pointed to America’s space program as a good example.  However, I suspect she’d be opposed to spending anything on a space program, unless it was solar powered and could be used to launch farting cows off the planet.      

She’s the perfect metaphor for today’s culture.  Feelings matter more than facts. 

Celebrities with barely a high-school education preach about the science of climate change and the need to prohibit straws to save sea turtles.  Ultra-rich Hollywood types take private jets to attend global warming meetings.  Some do videos about the link between vaccinations and autism – even though there’s absolutely no proof.  Idiocy is clearly in the ascendency. 

Her appeal to millennials and the far left is predictable.  

They’ve never been fans of facts; they prefer to rely on their feelings. They feel people shouldn’t have to pay for college or pay back loans.  They believe everyone should get a living wage whether they work or choose not to.  They feel there’s an unlimited amount of money government can spend however they like; if they start running out, it’s okay to just print more.

It has all the earmarks of a new religion, based on faith a and feelings. Government is God, and through government all good things flow. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the new high priestess of this religion.  She advocates a better life for everyone here on Earth if you just believe.  In that way she reminds me of the Reverend Ike, who said if you wanted a Cadillac, just pray for it and God would deliver. 

I’m not buying it. Especially from a know-nothing bozo like her, whose only accomplishment in life so far is defeating an incumbent Democrat who didn’t even bother to campaign.  But to listen to her and her followers, that was a watershed event in American history.

As if she actually knew any American history, which, obviously, she doesn’t.

Every time she opens her mouth to pontificate on something, she demonstrates how little she knows. The media and politicians shouldn’t take her seriously, any more than they should some homeless person wearing a tinfoil hat screaming at the sky about cosmic rays.       

I can’t believe she gets away with this nonsense.