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They do not care. Rude tweets and racism are worse than institutionalized mass murder for them, because they have to look at one but not the other.
2. It shows that Trump-era Democrats are Bush-era Republicans.The problem is that Bush and Cheney's operatives, speechwriters, policy advisers, propagandistas and top aides are the close friends and colleagues of media liberals and DC Democrats and their beloved pundits, so they have to whitewash Bush's evil to justify themselves: https://t.co/Z1C3CB7JQn
Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 3, 2020
"Dems have no choice but to rehabilitate George Bush because their core narrative is the US was a fundamentally good and decent land before Trump vandalized it," journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted in response to Democrats' fawning over Bush, adding, "How do you join with Bill Kristol, Nicole Wallace, Rick Wilson, David Frum and the CIA without whitewashing Bush's crimes?"
Indeed, Bush-era neocons have been able to fully ingratiate themselves to and integrate themselves with Democrats in the age of Trump by posing as moral opposition longing for a more civilized time when presidents would politely butcher humans by the hundreds of thousands without using offensive language like "sh*t hole." A gentlemanly time for gentlemanly presidents to unfold gentlemanly Orwellian surveillance measures all around the world without posting rude tweets about celebrities they don't like.
Trump-era Democrats are Bush-era Republicans. That's how far to the authoritarian right the party has moved in the last few years on important matters like foreign policy. You can see this by the shrieking, hysterical response they had to Tulsi Gabbard calling for what more or less amounted to a simple reversion back to pre-9/11 US foreign policy. It has been necessary for Democrats to gaslight themselves into this position because for three presidential campaigns in a row -- Obama 2012, Clinton 2016, and now Biden 2020 -- they've had to find ways of convincing themselves that a politician who has facilitated Bush's foreign policy agendas would make a good commander-in-chief.
3. It shows how the amnesia-inducing effects of the mass media news churn make it difficult to retain perspective.The News Churn Memory Hole: How The MSM Lies Even When Telling The Truth
"It's not enough to simply expose the truth. You must also fully, repeatedly and consistently expose the ones who are telling lies."https://t.co/OSW6eFQVAn
Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) December 18, 2019
Mass media propagandists are able to distort perception even while telling the truth using the news churn memory hole. Even when forced to report on uncomfortable truths like not finding any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the fact that the occupation of Afghanistan has been justified by an entire generation of lies, the memory of that reporting can be made to fade into the background by frantically reporting on what's happening right now without referring back to the previous revelations.
Russia-gate alone did so much to distort people's perceptions in mainstream liberal circles. Having the baseless narrative breathlessly promoted year after year after year that the Kremlin had literally seized control of the highest levels of the US government left rank-and-file Democrats who subscribed to it without any sense of scale or proportion, because they were constantly being told that the Most Important Thing Ever was about to happen. How can you hold perspective on a million dead Iraqis when you're being told day after day, year after year in myriad ways that Russian Hitler was controlling your country but Super Mueller is going to swoop in to the rescue any minute now? It would be very difficult.
4. It shows the glaring difference between fact and narrative.
Most of the mass media reporting on Trump has been factual, it's just had a ton of narrative spin attached to the facts. It is a fact that Trump frequently says and does dumb, obnoxious and horrible things. It is a fact that many racists think he's the cat's pajamas. It is a fact that there was an impeachment and a collusion investigation. But the narrative overlay that has been heaped upon those facts while they're being reported -- the urgency, the alarmism, the hyperbole -- leaves viewers with the distinct impression that this US president is awful in a way that is unique and historically unprecedented, and he simply isn't.
Trump is not worse than Bush, the mass media just yell about him a lot more. If the narratives matched the facts, mass media consumers would be aware that nothing Trump has done is as evil as Bush's invasion of Iraq alone. In reality Trump didn't wind up being another Hitler, he wound up being another Obama (not a compliment). And if the narrative spin matched the factual reality, people would understand that.
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