"Sorry"

“Sorry”, and a shrug of his shoulders.   That was Donald Trump’s pathetic apology to Megan Kelly when she confronted him with her anger about his sexist comments during her moderator debate duties.  She crossed him and he accused her of being on her period.

Trump is the ultimate result of the swing to the right wing that has been going on in the Republican Party for years; and this is fueled ultimately in the age old stimulus of hate and racism. 

You see America did a very bad thing, it elected an African American President.  And that was against the old guard, white supremacy standard  that have plagued this country for over three hundred years. 

I think President Obama and all of us underestimated this.  Certainly “Black Lives Matter” has not.  They see it everyday, as more people of color are gunned down, or jailed for having a broken tail light.

For years conservatives have patiently worked to create this climate of fear and racial hatred.  It has been toward one end, eliminating democracy behind a fascist dictator.

And in Trump, an unlikely candidate to be sure, they have found their man.  Violence and hatred personifies his campaign.  His rallies usually deteriorate into slugfests, with an outnumbered person of color (always outnumbered, white supremacists are too chicken shit to ever act without a huge numerical advantage) getting the crap beaten out of them.

But there is more.  I have a friend who works for a Tea Party Republican in the California legislature.  His Facebook posts are constantly laced with well “researched” attacks on Democrats, but more, on government itself.

For some idiotic reason, Tea Party Republicans think no government is best government:  Not local government, or smaller government, NO government. 

Just a passing understanding of the Weimar Republic failure in the 1920s in Germany will cause alarm here.  It is exactly the same technique Hitler used to destroy democracy in Germany, attacking government itself especially democratic institutions that were depicted as constantly failing.

That is echoed in Trump’s constant charges that America is in decline, that government doesn’t work anymore.

Government doesn’t work?  What political party has blocked every piece of legislation that the African American President has offered.  This always had as its aim, the destruction of the legitimacy of the President and more, the destruction of faith in the democratic process; especially when a person of color is involved.

And they succeeded.  A majority of Americans today feel the country is going in the wrong direction even with record job creation and a recovery from the worse conservative caused recession since the Great Depression.

By doing what the then minority leader of the Senate said right after Obama was elected, blocking everything the President tried to do, the public has been fooled into believing the non action of the government is the President’s fault, not the blockading Republican Party.

And a by-product of this, conveniently, is the destruction of faith in democracy itself,  opening the door for the election of an authoritarian dictator:  Donald Trump.

Conservatives have been working on this for over forty years: beginning with the Prop 13 “Revolution” and culminating in Donald Trump.  It all has been planned by super rich right wing fanatics (the Koch Brothers) and others who will do anything to protect their super rich status; including the destruction of our democracy.

And my friend, whose present cause is slyly using public pension funding woes (caused by the conservative recession of 2008) to defeat a tax measure in Redding that would fund police and fire protection.  He is using the same old bait and switch tactic that Prop 13 used, creating anger in the public at “spendthrift Democratic programs that actually help society” by cutting funding and dramatically reducing their effectiveness.

Prop 13 was so successful in doing this to public education; Prop 13 destroyed the K-16 free public education system in California so effectively that now Charter Schools, Corporate run in an undemocratic way, are wrongly seen as the salvation of public education.  What they are is a mean spirited form of re-segregating the schools, again white supremacy wins out.

So, the trick is, con the public into mis-trusting public institution’s by cutting funding through tax cuts, then inserting private alternatives (private prisons come to mind here) that are run by profit making corporations that use social need to make profits and greatly decline the public trust, safety and confidence in their government.

Conservatives depict themselves as “muckrakers” who are just trying to save public money.   They depict themselves as heroes, working for the betterment of all, saving the public’s money against greedy teacher’s unions and liberal fanatics. In truth, they are working toward a common goal, ending democracy and establishing a totalitarian fascist dictatorship.

If you think I am exaggerating, go to a Trump rally!  Watch and listen to the cues.  American is half an inch from fascism. 

The Fairness Doctrine

“In response, the FCC began to reconsider the rule in the mid-80s, and ultimately revoked it in 1987, after Congress passed a resolution instructing the commission to study the issue. The decision has been credited with the explosion of conservative talk radio in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. While the FCC has not enforced the rule in nearly a quarter century, it remains technically on the books. As a part of the Obama administration’s broader efforts to overhaul federal regulation, the FCC is finally scrapping the rule once and for all.”

So the Fairness Doctrine finally died, and with it democracy itself.

The Fairness Doctrine was an attempt to regulate political speech on radio and T.V.  

It did not apply to newspapers or magazines.

And conservatives hated it.  

Their excuse for screwing up the country every time they got control was the liberal media.  You can hear echoes of that in Trump’s rants about the unfair media.

What we don’t hear about is the fact that corporations own the media.  And corporations are no friend of liberal democrats.

In fact, the Trump phenomenon is a product of the Fairness Doctrine being gutted.  

We had an example of it yesterday.  Trump, who was sagging in the polls, decided to try a Hail Mary and take the foolish offer of a meeting from a politically crippled Mexican President.  So off he flew to Mexico to act Presidential.  Meanwhile Hillary Clinton was meeting with the American Legion,  a tradition that both Presidential candidates do every election.  Usually the American Legion speech is well covered by the media, since it is a major foreign policy speech.

We didn’t hear hardly a thing about Hillary’s speech; which was surprising well received by the American Legion.  

What we saw was a corporate media cover the Trump circus all the way to Mexico and back.  Meanwhile not ONE new policy change was forthcoming from Trump.  He went to Mexico, lied as usual to the sucker President (claiming they did not talk about the wall while the President of Mexico tweeted that they did and Mexico was NOT paying for it).  Then Trump turned right around, after sounding almost diplomatic in Mexico, and fed red meat to his racist rabid supporters.  

In short, he got a full day of “breathless coverage” blocked Hillary from any publicity at all, and “won the news cycle”.  We got absolutely nothing new policy wise from Trump…It was an enormous con!

He also has not bought any real political advertisements to speak of. Why is that?   

Usually this would be a death knell, but without any shred of the Fairness Doctrine left, there is no regulation of balanced and fair coverage of the Presidential candidates.  Trump, an entertainer, figured out a long time ago, that he could dominate the daily news cycle in the absence of any Fairness Doctrine with his lies and bullshit.

And there is nothing any of us can do about it, except turn off the T.V.  

I have a good friend who is a Democrat text me last night asking, “Do you have MSNBC on?”

The reason was Trump was making his Immigration Announcement, which as it turns out was the SAME policies he has been spewing out for over a year…no change, nothing.

It was all a con!    

Meanwhile Hillary goes to the American Legion, makes a major foreign policy address and receives practically no coverage at all.

Look, Trump won the primary doing the same thing.  He is using the huge hole conservatives put in any kind of fairness in political coverage, with greedy media giant corporations, some who are very conservative (Fox and Disney come to mind), who are working openly to elect Trump.  

Democracy requires that all sides can communicate their positions to the public.  Currently the media is fixed to only carry the most conservative messages.  It took a Trump to figure out that he doesn’t even have to buy political advertisements, all he has to do is be a showman, drive up cable T.V. ratings, and even MSNBC carries him 24-7.

And sure enough, the polls are tightening as we hear nothing but about Hillary’s emails and the Clinton Foundation and Trump, Trump, Trump.

The problem is this:  One sided news coverage prompted by political agendas that drowns out the opposition can lead to dictatorships.  That’s right, fascist dictatorships.

How do we know?  Look at Nazi Germany.  The first thing Hitler did when he took power was to get the Reichstag to pass a law making negative press coverage of his actions a CAPITAL offense; that’s right the death penalty.   The second thing Hitler did was burn down the Reichstag, ending even the sham of democracy.

The first thing Trump has done, as he demands that Hillary have a press conference (knowing full well the email faux “controversy” will be brought up by Fox and Friends) is to exclude certain newspapers from even his rallies that don’t follow his party line.   His “Fairness Doctrine” is to exclude those medias that don’t pay him blind attention:  like Fox News.   

With the Fairness Doctrine he could not have done that.   The Fairness Doctrine demanded equal time for example if one political candidate attacked the other.  There was a rebuttal time, similar to what you see when the President gives the State of the Union (by the way there is NO requirement that happen anymore because the Fairness Doctrine is totally gone). 

What we have  now is publicity control by those who seek to destroy our democracy.  We have lost the principle of equal time for opposing viewpoints.  

So as you drone away watching Fox, or even MSNBC, you are watching political whores, who will sell out democracy for a ratings uptick.

And we have nothing to protect us from this; we allowed the Fairness Doctrine to die, and our way of life will die with it.

The Reckoning!