War damage in Mosul, Iraq. Photo by Levi Meir Clancy, Unsplash
War damage in Mosul, Iraq. Photo by Levi Meir Clancy, Unsplash
If our corporate media follow their past efforts to “sanewash” Trump and whitewash previous Republican wars-for-politics, things could get quite grim for the future of American democracy.
Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann
Trump thought his “firehose of lies” strategy would work Tuesday night. It’s called the Gish Gallop: Throw so many lies out all at once in a single sentence that your opponent is forced to spend all of their allotted minute or two rebutting your lies and never gets to her own issues.
While many of his lies went unrebutted, and the moderators kept giving him the last word in violation of the rules (he took 42 minutes versus her 37), it still didn’t work out for him last night.
In prepping for the debate, Trump apparently embraced Bill Clinton’s comment that:
”When people are feeling insecure, they’d rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right.”
In that, Trump and his advisors miscalculated. Trying to project strength, he merely came across as rattled, angry, and weird.
Similarly, he thought it would make him look strong to brag about his great love for Vladimir Putin and other dictators; that didn’t work out so well, either.
Finally, in last night’s debate, Trump repeatedly presented himself as the “peace candidate.” It was the perfect lie to precede today’s anniversary of 9/11.
In reality, Trump supports Putin’s destruction if Ukraine, the kidnapping of over 100,000 Ukrainian children and their deportation to one of the few nations on Earth where child porn is legal (and a major underground industry for Russia), and the militaristic fantasies of pretty much every major world dictator and corrupt wannabee dictator from Kim to Xi to Netanyahu.
Trump claims that there were no terrorist attacks or war deaths when he was president. Like most of what he asserts, it’s a baldfaced lie. While only 16 American soldiers have died during President Biden’s tenure, 65 died under Trump.
The majority (13) of Biden’s 16 military members died, as Vice President Harris pointed out, because Trump cut a deal with the Taliban to release 5000 of their fighters and suicide bombers—the guy currently running Afghanistan was one of the criminals Trump let out of prison—and then gifted the Taliban by shutting down 10 of our Air Force bases, forcing Biden to pull everybody out through a single chokepoint in Kabul.
That made our troops—memorialized by House Republicans yesterday in an effort to change the topic from Trump’s disgusting Arlington stunt—sitting ducks for suicide bomber Abdul Rehman Al-Loghri, who was let out of prison just days earlier as a result of Trump’s deal with the Taliban.
Nonetheless, struthious Republicans are trying as hard as they can to ignore their own past behavior while they blame President Biden for the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal that Trump negotiated, and then argue that Democrats are war-hawk neocons like Bush and Cheney.
Tulsi Gabbard, for example, just said:
“A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for Dick Cheney, the architect of everything that has gone wrong in the Middle East for the last few decades.”
Putin’s best friend Tucker Carlson piled on as well, arguing that Kamala Harris—now that she’s been endorsed by Dick Cheney—has “everything in common” with Cheney’s war policies. He said:
“They are both neocons. It tells you what a lie this race and gender stuff is. That’s not the divide. The divide is in your heart, and if you think it’s okay to kill people in order to get rich, then you are on their side, and if you don’t, you’re on our side.”
While Democrats did successfully fight and win both World Wars I and II, and kicked off the disastrous Vietnam War, it was Reagan who invaded Grenada as a stunt to get re-elected, followed by GHW Bush doing the same with Kuwait the year before his 1992 re-election effort.
Bush’s son, George W, acknowledged his father’s motivation, saying that if he was elected president then he’d definitely have a longer and better war to get himself re-elected.
In 1999, when George W. Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his family hired Mickey Herskowitz to write the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge To Keep.
Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam war and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded from watching his father’s “little 3-day war” with Iraq that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected (if you did it right) and thus get a two-term presidency.
“I’ll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004.
“One of the things [Bush] said to me,” Herskowitz said, “is: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.
“[Bush] said, ‘If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.’”
The 9/11 attacks—which happened after Bush ignored warnings from the CIA—gave him and Cheney their chance and, even though the Taliban offered to arrest Bin Laden for them (Bush refused the offer), he first attacked Afghanistan and then lied us into a second disastrous war with Iraq.
Those wars did get Bush re-elected, though, just as he’d predicted they would back in 1999.
Thus, Trump and the entire GOP are now furiously trying to rewrite their party’s history of using unnecessary wars to get re-elected. And, according to opinion polls, it’s working because America’s corporate media pretty much refuses to point out Republican perfidy in any regard.
Consider these indictments of our media failures. Polls show:
- 52% trust Trump more compared to 37% for Harris on inflation (even though America has the lowest inflation rate in the developed world because of Biden’s policies)
- 51% trust Trump vs. 43% for Harris on handling the economy (even though Biden’s economy beats Trump’s by every metric, even pre-Covid)
- 54% trust Trump more on border security compared to 36% for Harris (even though border crossings are at historically low levels now, lower than any time during Trump’s non-Covid presidency)
- 53% trust Trump vs. 40% for Harris on immigration (even though Trump wants to build concentration camps, go door-to-door arresting Hispanics, and again tear children from their mother’s arms)
- 51% trust Trump vs. 41% for Harris to stand up to China, even though Trump got millions in bribes from them for his daughter
- And on crime and public safety, 48% trust Trump versus 42% for Harris, even though crime levels today are lower than any time during Trump’s presidency
None of these numbers would be where they are if our news organizations had accurately reported the facts.
The next few days will tell us how America’s corporate media decides to handle the firehose of lies Trump sprayed at us last night, including his peacenik claims. Already, Trump and Vance are preparing to repeat Reagan, Bush, and Bush’s “little wars” for political purposes.
Trump and Vance both support Netanyahu’s destruction of Gaza, for example, with Trump saying the Israeli prime minister should “finish what they started” and “get it over with fast”: Perhaps Jared is planning to build oceanside condos when GAZA is completely reduced to rubble?
And JD Vance, not to be outdone, recently proclaimed:
“A lot of people recognize that we need to do something with Iran—but not these weak little bombing runs. If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard.”
Peace candidates, indeed.
If our corporate media follow their past efforts to “sanewash” Trump and whitewash previous Republican wars-for-politics, though, the coverage may be quite grim for the future of American democracy.
Leaving it to us to share the truth with America. Tag, we’re it!
Thom Hartmann, one of America’s leading public intellectuals and the country’s #1 progressive talk show host, writes fresh content six days a week. The Monday-Friday “Daily Take” articles are free to all, while paid subscribers receive a Saturday summary of the week’s news and, on Sunday, a chapter excerpt from one of his books.
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