The Trump Presidency Delivers Its Craziest 24 Hours Yet as America Heads Down the Tubes

[catbyte]

This nation is being cheapened, weakened, destroyed. They don’t know, or don’t care.

Michael Tomasky

Updated Jan. 16, 2020 10:51AM ET

Can we try to take stock of these insane last 24 hours?

snip [detailing all of the Ukraine revelations]

Is that everything? Oh, wait. For good measure, we learned that the president of the United States is a little foggy on what happened at Pearl Harbor. How foggy, I’m not sure. It turns out that back in 2018, he did, in his usual thuggish way, threaten his supposed buddy Shinzo Abe with the words “I remember Pearl Harbor.” Which of course he does not, strictly speaking, “remember,” since he was born in 1946.

Now. Imagine that instead of the United States, all this were unfolding in a country where we were accustomed to seeing strongmen who perverted the government so that it was little more than an extension of their piggish and corrupt personalities, enriching themselves by the billions (or at least multi-millions) in the process. Where the strongman’s political party consisted of nothing but a collection of oleaginous yes-men and contemptible toadies. Where he drove crowds to frenzy railing against liberals and cosmopolitans and their, their, their liberal and cosmopolitan dishwashers, which failed the noble herrenvolk in just the same effete way their meddling laws did.

Where the strongman, his henchmen, and the majority-party politicians placed the rule of law and democratic norms under constant attack. Where they constantly pulled the old time-honored trick of accusing the opposition party of doing exactly what they did to muddy things up and confuse people. And finally, where the state-owned propaganda network drove home, daily and incessantly, a reality that was the exact opposite of the truth.

Oh, those crazy people in those unsophisticated countries, we’d cluck.

Well folks, we are those people. We are that country.

Speaking of those countries, I just pulled up out of curiosity Freedom House’s world freedom rankings, which they issue every year. You can look at the map. Green countries are free, yellow are so-so, blue are in trouble. The United States is still green, which is a relief. But we score 86 out of 100, which is worse than Canada (99), Australia (98), Spain (94), Chile (94), the UK (93), and a bunch of other places, and about on par with Mongolia (85) and Ghana (83).

snip

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-trump-presidency-delivers-its-craziest-24-hours-yet-as-america-heads-down-the-tubes

[duforsure]

1. Just wait

He'll create another distraction , maybe something very extreme to change the headlines this time, but he always does it, so expect something crazy to happen soon from him very soon. Often he takes what he's doing then projects that onto others he opposes, and accuses them with it.