US Election & Presidency

(10-01-2021 12:26 )Bandwagon Wrote:  You can refer to them as lunatics, but when we witness some of the most shocking stories emerge such as Epstein, then things once considered unbelievable now become the believable. They don't consider themselves lunatics at all, they believe the rest of the world are sleepwalking into the abyss.

I get all this, which is why I mentioned earlier that I’d sooner blame Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerburg than I would the protestors. I really do think that many of the instigators — including those who paid with their lives — felt that they were doing their patriotic duty by storming the Capitol.

But I also believe we are in serious trouble when political leadership abandons its commitment to truth. Being caught in an obvious lie used to be grounds for dismissal by a politician’s own party. But not anymore. Now we accept ‘alternative facts’, we equivocate and deny the obvious, we even shrug off and laugh at the ‘little lies’ that ‘all politicians tell’. And bit by bit — aided by technology and hyper-partisan media on both sides — we’ve conjured a situation in which people can live side-by-side in completely different realities.

Things like coronavirus, climate change, health care, etc. should not be bitterly divisive existential issues. We might disagree on the how, how much and how quickly, but we should be able to agree that a virus is killing people, the climate is changing, and people need affordable access to doctors and drugs.

But we’ve turned politics into existential bloodsport. If you say ‘black’, I have to say ‘white’ ... not because I believe it, but because I can’t let my tribe see that I’m agreeing with yours. Compromise is weakness.

The QAnon theories are absurd paranoid fantasies. The idea that the ‘election was stolen’ was a bald-faced lie and even the people objecting on the Senate floor knew it. It should not be difficult for politicians of all stripes to say that’s simply not true and my re-election be damned. And, yes, I’m sure the conspiracy theories will persist and there will always be people who promote them. But it’s one thing for them to fester in the dark corners of the Internet — it’s another thing to hear them on prime time news or from the White House podium.