Saturday, April 15, 2017

The Television Presidency: Shallow, Deceitful

While Kennedy was the first to benefit from the reality of television (he looked a helluvalot better on the tube than Nixon did), Trump may be the first President to use television to its fullest propaganda-maximizing capacity.

Then he went completely illegal and un-Constitutional. 

But the show he put on for Joe Sixpack here was just a commercial compared to the full-bore Barnum/Bailey he put on on Syria.  Here he showed pictures of children who (we are told) were bombed by Assad.  For Tehran, Istanbul, and Pyongyang (not to mention Moscow, Peking, and Riyadh) he had other pictures:  a semi-destroyed airbase and a REALLY destroyed tunnel-and-cave system in Afghanistan.

Makes for great TV.  Even better than boardroom-ringmaster stuff.  And it gives "You're Fired" a whole new meaning!

Too bad that the "gas attack" was not Sarin, eh?  Too bad that 60% of the Tomahawks never made it to Syria, eh?  All that counts was that Joe Sixpack believed the big lie(s) and that the others saw what Trump will do, Constitutional or not.




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