It’s quite common for my left-leaning brethren to wonder aloud how members of the current maladministration can just say whatever they want to say without regard to the fact that video and audio recordings exist of the same people saying the opposite in some other setting.  As it happens, the answer is simple: they aren’t talking to you.

When our national embarrassment steps up and claims he’s signed more bills into law than any other president in history, he may or may not know that isn’t true.  There’s no telling what he actually knows.  Thinking people know it’s not true.  It’s what is known as a demonstrable fact.  That is, it can be proven using evidence.  The thing is, he doesn’t care.  All he’s doing is providing fodder for the conservative bubble – and those people will believe anything.

Now, I know that, say, Breitbart doesn’t need any actual language from the White House in order to make up a story any more than the Weekly World News has to catch an actual alien to pretend they’re invading.  But it does help.  If they can run a little carefully edited video along with their story it gives the story “credibility.”

If you’re paying attention, you know that Trump watches a LOT of television – but claims otherwise.  Trump plays a LOT of golf – but claims otherwise.  Trump may be the laziest President ever to afflict the oval office but his base doesn’t know it.  They don’t even really care.  So long as what he’s doing irritates liberals, they’re happy.  (Presumably, their carefully cultivated ignorance will somehow protect them from the ravages of the conservative fever dream…)

Now conservatives are coming for Time Magazine.  Yes, the very self-same Time Magazine that Trump thinks he’s been on the cover of more than anyone else.  (He hasn’t.)  That’s sad, really, although I don’t think Time has been exactly…relevant in years.  There was a time when Time was a quality news magazine.  It was a staple of the house I grew up in and, for years, in my own house, too.  But, like so many print publications in the US, Time fell victim to our culture wars and tried to please the pseudo-outraged right.  Much of the hard news fell by the wayside – at least in the US versions.  (Overseas, Time still prints actual news.  Here, in the US, we get cover stories of celebrities…)

I think it will mark the end of Time Magazine.  Conservatives have been conditioned to believe that Time is a “liberal rag” and they won’t want it.  People who used to trust Time will know that it’s been infected and degraded by conservative dogma and THEY’LL stop buying it, as well.  But – perhaps because Time was a staple of my childhood home – it is a bit of a sad metaphor for me.

Huge swaths of this once-great nation have fallen victim to the conservative bubble.  In large part, it was voluntary.  One had to actually turn on Fox “News” to get all the misinformation fit to rot one’s brain.  But conservative media has been spreading like cancer.  (Not just in the US, either.  They’re using their techniques overseas with increasing effectiveness.)  Fox owns affiliates all over the country.  Since most of the country won’t tune in to Fox “News”, Fox just inserts it’s propaganda into local programs.  Sinclair Broadcast Group has added their conservative voice to radio and television as well.  Now this Meredith Group seeks to destroy Time Magazine with a little help from the Koch Bros.

It was a good plan and it worked.  If one can’t win with facts, simply strangle the life out of journalism by buying as many outlets as possible – and these are billionaires – and replace actual facts with preferred “alternative facts.”  Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”  It’s a good quote – inspirational, even.

But I’ll tell you this: if you can fool enough of the people enough of the time, you can destroy a country…

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