File under This will Give You Whiplash, Trump filed suit today against The NY Times for an opinion piece claiming libel and defamation. He didn’t like that the piece pointed out the obvious that his campaign had a quid pro quo with Russia to damage Hillary for Trump’s benefit.  As we are all painfully aware, Trump spews a stream of insults, falsehoods, lies, and defamation in a continuous stream, including public and private figures.  His case will be almost impossible to prove, and this being NY state court, the case will likely be dismissed in short order.  No matter, though, Trump loves to threaten legal action against critics as a tactic to silence them.

This won’t work, but it just shows how far we’ve fallen that the president of the United States is now attempting to use the courts to punish his political critics.

In early 2018 Steve Bannon gave away the entire game plan for Trump in an interview with Michael Lewis of Bloomberg News.  In that interview, Bannon said a lot of things, but summed up his entire strategy in this one sentence:

“The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

That’s it.  That is the entire strategy for TrumpWorld.  Not surprisingly, that’s Vladimir Putin’s strategy, too.  In fact, he’s the guy who perfected it.  In the bad old days of Soviet communism, propaganda was directed in monolithic terms.  The government had it’s own version of truth, and repeated it 24/7.  But that stopped working as the few large media outlets lost the volume battle to alternative sources of “news” and with the rise of social media.  Putin’s strategy now is to confuse and contradict so much that people get numb to it all and start believing that the truth is unknowable.  In his new book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev describes this strategy in the modern Russia which is now completely controlled by Putin.  Putin controls all the mainstream media in the country, and his military hacks into social media around the globe to spread the same misinformation used to control his own people.

The Bannon/Trump strategy keeps Americans off balance by spewing a mountain of bullshit on a daily basis which is why you hear Trump complaining about everything from low water use toilets to windmills killing millions of birds.  He’s done it at least 16,000 times since he became president, and his entire group of enablers from Giuliani to Kellyanne do it in a continuous stream.  There is so much bullshit that people are exhausted trying to keep up, and those he has brainwashed amplify the amount of bullshit circulating television, radio, and social media, repeating said bullshit millions of times.  They did it to Hillary with the debunked uranium story, and they’re trying to do it to Biden right now with the false Ukrainian corruption fiction they’ve whipped up.

The strategy works almost flawlessly.  This is how you get Trumpists, in the face of a tsunami of evidence that Trump illegally extorted Ukraine for his own political benefit, deny he did, and if he did, they say “so what?”    Think about it – what used to be headline news just ten years ago is now just a little dust you brush off your sleeve.  The disinformation is so perfectly delivered and maintained that people actually believe that everyone, including all of the mainstream press, all Democrats, all nonpolitical people, intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and the courts are lying.  The ONLY source of truth is Donald Trump and his talking heads.  Confusion propaganda is designed to sideline the truth and convince otherwise normal people that the only way to get unconfused is to believe only one leader who, in his “great and unmatched wisdom” is the only person to know true truth.

This is how democracy is destroyed.  When the people no longer trust the system, especially when it comes to voting, the news, and the common good, then the bad guys win.  Trump, Bannon, Giuliani, and the rest of the criminals in TrumpWorld want you to be stupid.  And they keep you stupid by feeding you mountains of bullshit. When you believe that bullshit, he’s got you, and you then virtually can’t be saved.

That’s right, folks.  Yesterday, Denver right wing radio screamer, Chuck Bonniwell, said on live radio that the Trump impeachment proceedings were so boring that, “You know, you wish for a nice school shooting to interrupt the monopoly.”  His co-host immediately recoiled at the statement, but it was too late, he’d already said it.  Bonniwell is well known in Colorado for his insulting and boorish behavior on the radio, but this one tops them all. This is how cold and cruel the right wing has become.  Especially in the days of Trump, nothing is too crass or too disgusting as to be off-limits for national television or radio.  Bonniwell actually made light of the epidemic of murderous school shootings to denigrate the constitutional process that is occurring now in DC.

Makes me want to puke.

UPDATE:

Ol’ Chuck was just fired for his comment and being an insensitive jerk.  ‘Bye.

The Russians aren’t backing Trump on his story of getting Al Baghdadi, calling his announcement “propaganda”.  The Russian defense ministry says that Russia was not involved and even doubted that the raid killed the actual Al Baghdadi saying that Syria has claimed several times to have already killed him.  The shifting stories between the Pentagon, the White House, and His Orangeness’ mouth has added a lot of doubt to whether the entire tale is actually true or not.

Typical in Trumpland – nothing is clear, and everything is loud.

You knew it was going to happen – after wrecking millions of Americans’ quiet Sunday morning with an almost hour long display of boasting and lying, the truth about the raid is coming out.  The truth is that the Pentagon has been planning a raid to kill the ISIS leader since last summer after the Kurds had captured one of his wives and a courier who talked.  Those detailed plans were completely disrupted with Trump’s sudden pullout of Kurdish territory allowing Turkey, Russia, and Assad’s forces to rush in.

Rather than wait and risk Trump stupidly pulling everyone else out, a risky night raid by Delta Force was hurriedly put together.  Also, in spite of Trump abandoning the Kurds, they continued to assist US forces prepare for the raid.  They got lucky and got Al Baghdadi in spite of Trump’s incompetence, not because of his leadership.  Oh, and all the dramatic account of hearing Baghdadi’s screaming and crying that he heard on the feed?  That’s a lie, too.  No other person has confirmed that, and, as JJ pointed out, Trump was on the golf course during the raid, not in the situation room.

Are we great yet?

We all remember it – in the sunup to the 2016 Trump lied thousands of times over 6 years that Barack Obama was not born in the US.  The lie was outrageous, silly, and debunked before he spread it, but it didn’t matter to him.  Subscribing to Joseph Goebbel’s philosophy, of “The Big Lie“, Trump repeats his lies in a continuous loop no matter how outrageous, and the list is long; from his lies about immigrants, the border, the economy, environment, nonexistent voter fraud, the Clinton Foundation, and even the weather, no lie is too big for Trump. If it serves his purpose, lying is his first and only offensive tactic.

Carrying that tactic to 2020, you can read the roadmap.  It’s pretty obvious that Biden is the leading and strongest candidate against Trump, and he knows it.  That’s why 14 months out from the election Trump has implemented the strategy of the Big Lie.  And that Big Lie is that Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden engaged in years of corruption and coverup of corruption with the government of Ukraine.  Never mind that there is ZERO evidence of any corruption or scandal; Trump and his henchmen have been prosecuting an offensive and defensive war against Biden, one to smear the Democratic frontrunner, and other to cover up the actual scandal, which is Trump and Giuliani soliciting the assistance of a foreign power to help him defeat an American political opponent.

Trump breathed life into the latest Big Lie today at the UN when he denied any wrongdoing in seeking foreign assistance in the next election by lying about the conversation saying he was withholding aid to Ukraine BECAUSE of the non-existent corruption between Biden and the government of Ukraine.  Did you see it?  Trump brushed aside his actual corruption by spinning the lie that he was actually trying to get Ukraine to stop helping Biden.  The notion of this lie is laughable, but it’s  not.  This is how it starts.  The echo chamber will pick it up, just like they picked up the birther lie, the Benghazi lie, the voter fraud lie, and even the weather lie.  By tomorrow, normal people will be slacked jawed when Trump’s bullshit will transform into an article of faith for his sycophants.

This WILL happen, and Biden’s team needs to be ready to aggressively call Trump’s bullshit uh, bullshit.