Re: [blind-democracy] Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Trump

I can always count on Matt Taiddi being a serious minded entertainer.
While I truly enjoyed this article, I totally disagree with Mister
Taiddi's claim that George Bush the Lessor, was the actual beginning
of the end. No, I don't put Donald Trump's name up for that grand
award, either. The fact is, we've had a pretty fair share of Flat
Headers in the Oval Office since early in our Exceptional History as
the True Democracy of the People. Still, we once seemed to learn from
our errors in judgement, and from time to time we actually sent some
pretty decent men to the White House.
But that cannot happen any longer. Not since our Controllers, the
Ruling Class, figured out how to control the mass media and use it,
along with mass advertising, to their advantage. By conditioning the
minds of Working Class Americans to long for all of the symbols that
seemed to indicate owning a piece of the Great American Dream, a job;
a home; a family. And a flat screen TV. Things have replaced ideas.
Like the pretty shiny beads and bobbles our Fore Fathers dangled
before the eyes of the Natives, we give up our principles and grab for
the Fool's Gold, thinking, as we've been conditioned to believe, that
this ownership means we have arrived as full Americans. We no longer
care about the well being of our fellow citizens. If we succeed it is
because we have outwitted all of the fools around us. If we fail it
is because the Fools around us ganged up, forming Unions or becoming
Socialists.
We no longer have the ability to use long term thinking and planning.
Like a Sit Com, our problems are solved at the end of the half hour,
including commercials.
No, George Bush the Lessor did not begin this slide down the razor
blade of life. He, like Donald Trump are products of the very system
that evolved in order to keep the Ruling Class in power. Well my dear
Ruling Class, you created them and you are stuck with them.

Carl Jarvis
On 3/2/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Taibbi writes: "Donald Trump isn't the beginning of the end. George W. Bush
> was. The amazing anti-miracle of the Bush presidency is what makes today's
> nightmare possible."
>
> GOP insiders are now frantic at the prospect of an uncultured ignoramus
> winning the presidency. (photo: Aude Guerrucci/Getty Images)
>
>
> Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Trump
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 01 March 16
>
> Bush was just an appetizer - Trump would be the main course
>
> To hear GOP insiders tell it, Doomsday is here. If Donald Trump scores huge
> on tonight and seizes control of the nomination in the Super Tuesday
> primaries, it will mark the beginning of the end of the Republican Party,
> and perhaps the presidency.
> But Trump isn't the beginning of the end. George W. Bush was. The amazing
> anti-miracle of the Bush presidency is what makes today's nightmare
> possible.
> People forget what an extraordinary thing it was that Bush was president.
> Dubya wasn't merely ignorant when compared with other politicians or other
> famous people. No, he would have stood out as dumb in just about any
> setting.
> If you could somehow run simulations where Bush was repeatedly shipwrecked
> on a desert island with 20 other adults chosen at random, he would be the
> last person listened to by the group every single time. He knew absolutely
> nothing about anything. He wouldn't have been able to make fire, find
> water,
> build shelter or raise morale. It would have taken him days to get over the
> shock of no room service.
> Bush went to the best schools but was totally ignorant of history,
> philosophy, science, geography, languages and the arts. He once had to read
> War and Peace. His take? There were "thousands of characters" in it.
> "I guess it had an influence because it was a discipline," he said. "It was
> more that than remembering anything in it."
> So Bush's main takeaway from reading one of the greatest books ever written
> was that it contained many things to memorize. But he couldn't remember any
> of those things.
> Bush showed no interest in learning and angrily rejected the idea that a
> president ought to be able to think his way through problems. As Mark
> Crispin Miller wrote in The Bush Dyslexicon, Bush's main rhetorical tool
> was
> the tautology - i.e., saying the same thing, only twice.
> "It's very important for folks to understand that when there's more trade,
> there's more commerce" was a classic Bush formulation. "Our nation must
> come
> together to unite" was another. One of my favorites was: "I understand that
> the unrest in the Middle East creates unrest throughout the region."
> Academics and political junkies alike giddily compiled these "Bushisms"
> along with others that were funny for different reasons ("I'm doing what I
> think what's wrong," for instance).
> But Bush's tautologies weren't gaffes or verbal slips. They just
> represented
> the limits of his reasoning powers: A = A. There are educational apps that
> use groups of images to teach two-year-olds to recognize that an orange is
> like an orange while a banana is a banana. Bush was stalled at that
> developmental moment. And we elected him president.
> Bush's eight years were like the reigns of a thousand overwhelmed
> congenital
> monarchs from centuries past. While the prince rode horses, romped with
> governesses and blew the national treasure on britches or hedge-mazes, the
> state was run by Svengalis and Rasputins who dealt with what Bush once
> derisively described as "what's happening in the world."
> In Bush's case he had Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove thinking out the problem of
> how to get re-elected, while Dick "Vice" Cheney, Donald "Rummy" Rumsfeld
> and
> Andrew "Tangent Man" Card took care of the day-to-day affairs of the
> country
> (part of Card's responsibilities involved telling Bush what was in the
> newspapers he refused to read).
> It took hundreds of millions of dollars and huge armies of such
> behind-the-throne puppet-masters to twice (well, maybe twice) sell a voting
> majority on the delusion of George Bush, president. Though people might
> quibble with the results, the scale of this as a purely political
> achievement was awesome and heroic, comparable to a moon landing or the
> splitting of the atom.
> Guiding Bush the younger through eight years of public appearances was
> surely the greatest coaching job in history. It was like teaching a donkey
> to play the Waldstein Sonata. It's breathtaking to think about now.
> But one part of it backfired. Instead of using an actor like Reagan to sell
> policies to the public, the Svengalis behind Bush sold him as an authentic
> man of the people, the guy you'd want to have an O'Doul's with.
> Rove correctly guessed that a generation of watching TV and Hollywood
> movies
> left huge blocs of Americans convinced that people who read books, looked
> at
> paintings and cared about spelling were either serial killers or scheming
> to
> steal bearer bonds from the Nakatomi building. (Even knowing what a bearer
> bond is was villainous).
> The hero in American culture, meanwhile, was always a moron with a big gun
> who learned everything he needed to know from cowboy movies. The climax of
> pretty much every action movie from the mid-eighties on involved
> shotgunning
> the smarty-pants villain in the face before he could finish some fruity
> speech about whatever.
> Rove sold Bush as that hero. He didn't know anything, but dammit, he was
> sure about what he didn't know. He was John McClane, and Al Gore was Hans
> Gruber. GOP flacks like Rove rallied the whole press corps around that
> narrative, to the point where anytime Gore tried to nail Bush down on a
> point of policy, pundits blasted him for being a smug know-it-all using
> wonk-ese to talk over our heads - as Cokie Roberts put it once, "this guy
> from Washington doing Washington-speak."
> This is like the scene from the increasingly prophetic Idiocracy where no
> one can understand Luke Wilson, a person of average intelligence rocketed
> 500 years into America's idiot future, because whenever he tries to reason
> with people, they think he's talking "like a fag."
> The Roves of the world used Bush's simplicity to win the White House. Once
> they got there, they used the levers of power to pillage and scheme like
> every other gang of rapacious politicians ever. But the plan was never to
> make ignorance a political principle. It was just a ruse to win office.
> Now the situation is the opposite. Now GOP insiders are frantic at the
> prospect of an uncultured ignoramus winning the presidency. A group of
> major
> donors and GOP strategists even wrote out a memo outlining why a super PAC
> dedicated to stopping Trump was needed.
> "We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval
> Office,
> with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips," they
> wrote. Virginia Republican congressman Scott Ringell wrote an open letter
> to
> fellow Republicans arguing that a Trump presidency would be "reckless,
> embarrassing and ultimately dangerous."
> Hold on. It wasn't scary to imagine George "Is our children learning?" Bush
> with the "responsibilities for worldwide confrontation" at his fingertips?
> It wasn't embarrassing to have a president represent the U.S. on the
> diplomatic stage who called people from Kosovo "Kosovians" and people from
> Greece "Grecians?"
> It was way worse. Compared to Bush, Donald Trump is a Rutherford or an
> Einstein. In the same shipwreck scenario, Trump would have all sorts of
> ideas - all wrong, but at least he'd think of something, instead of staring
> at the sand waiting for a hotel phone to rise out of it.
> Of course, Trump's ignorance level, considering his Wharton education, is
> nearly as awesome as what Bush accomplished in spite of Yale. In fact,
> unlike Bush, who had the decency to not even try to understand the news,
> Trump reads all sorts of crazy things and believes them all. From theories
> about vaccines causing autism to conspiratorial questions about the pillow
> on Antonin Scalia's face to Internet legends about Americans using bullets
> dipped in pigs' blood to shoot Muslims, there isn't any absurd idea Donald
> Trump isn't willing to entertain, so long as it fits in with his worldview.
> But Washington is freaking out about Trump in a way they never did about
> Bush. Why? Because Bush was their moron, while Trump is his own moron.
> That's really what it comes down to.
> And all of the Beltway's hooting and hollering about how "embarrassing" and
> "dangerous" Trump is will fall on deaf ears, because as gullible as
> Americans can be, they're smart enough to remember being told that it was
> OK
> to vote for George Bush, a man capable of losing at tic-tac-toe.
> We're about to enter a dark period in the history of the American
> experiment. The Founding Fathers never imagined an electorate raised on
> Toddlers and Tiaras and Temptation Island. Remember, just a few decades
> ago,
> shows like Married With Children and Roseanne were satirical parodies. Now
> the audience can't even handle that much irony. A lot of American culture
> is
> just dumb slobs cheering on other dumb slobs. It was inevitable, once we
> broke the seal with Bush, that our politics would become the same thing.
> Madison and Jefferson never foresaw this situation. They knew there was
> danger of demagoguery, but they never imagined presidential candidates
> exchanging "mine's bigger than yours" jokes or doing "let's laugh at the
> disabled" routines. There's no map in the Constitution to tell us how to
> get
> out of where we're going. All we can do now is hold on.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> GOP insiders are now frantic at the prospect of an uncultured ignoramus
> winning the presidency. (photo: Aude Guerrucci/Getty Images)
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/revenge-of-the-simple-how-george-w
> -bush-gave-rise-to-trump-20160301http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/r
> evenge-of-the-simple-how-george-w-bush-gave-rise-to-trump-20160301
> Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Trump
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 01 March 16
> Bush was just an appetizer - Trump would be the main course
> o hear GOP insiders tell it, Doomsday is here. If Donald Trump scores huge
> on tonight and seizes control of the nomination in the Super Tuesday
> primaries, it will mark the beginning of the end of the Republican Party,
> and perhaps the presidency.
> But Trump isn't the beginning of the end. George W. Bush was. The amazing
> anti-miracle of the Bush presidency is what makes today's nightmare
> possible.
> People forget what an extraordinary thing it was that Bush was president.
> Dubya wasn't merely ignorant when compared with other politicians or other
> famous people. No, he would have stood out as dumb in just about any
> setting.
> If you could somehow run simulations where Bush was repeatedly shipwrecked
> on a desert island with 20 other adults chosen at random, he would be the
> last person listened to by the group every single time. He knew absolutely
> nothing about anything. He wouldn't have been able to make fire, find
> water,
> build shelter or raise morale. It would have taken him days to get over the
> shock of no room service.
> Bush went to the best schools but was totally ignorant of history,
> philosophy, science, geography, languages and the arts. He once had to read
> War and Peace. His take? There were "thousands of characters" in it.
> "I guess it had an influence because it was a discipline," he said. "It was
> more that than remembering anything in it."
> So Bush's main takeaway from reading one of the greatest books ever written
> was that it contained many things to memorize. But he couldn't remember any
> of those things.
> Bush showed no interest in learning and angrily rejected the idea that a
> president ought to be able to think his way through problems. As Mark
> Crispin Miller wrote in The Bush Dyslexicon, Bush's main rhetorical tool
> was
> the tautology - i.e., saying the same thing, only twice.
> "It's very important for folks to understand that when there's more trade,
> there's more commerce" was a classic Bush formulation. "Our nation must
> come
> together to unite" was another. One of my favorites was: "I understand that
> the unrest in the Middle East creates unrest throughout the region."
> Academics and political junkies alike giddily compiled these "Bushisms"
> along with others that were funny for different reasons ("I'm doing what I
> think what's wrong," for instance).
> But Bush's tautologies weren't gaffes or verbal slips. They just
> represented
> the limits of his reasoning powers: A = A. There are educational apps that
> use groups of images to teach two-year-olds to recognize that an orange is
> like an orange while a banana is a banana. Bush was stalled at that
> developmental moment. And we elected him president.
> Bush's eight years were like the reigns of a thousand overwhelmed
> congenital
> monarchs from centuries past. While the prince rode horses, romped with
> governesses and blew the national treasure on britches or hedge-mazes, the
> state was run by Svengalis and Rasputins who dealt with what Bush once
> derisively described as "what's happening in the world."
> In Bush's case he had Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove thinking out the problem of
> how to get re-elected, while Dick "Vice" Cheney, Donald "Rummy" Rumsfeld
> and
> Andrew "Tangent Man" Card took care of the day-to-day affairs of the
> country
> (part of Card's responsibilities involved telling Bush what was in the
> newspapers he refused to read).
> It took hundreds of millions of dollars and huge armies of such
> behind-the-throne puppet-masters to twice (well, maybe twice) sell a voting
> majority on the delusion of George Bush, president. Though people might
> quibble with the results, the scale of this as a purely political
> achievement was awesome and heroic, comparable to a moon landing or the
> splitting of the atom.
> Guiding Bush the younger through eight years of public appearances was
> surely the greatest coaching job in history. It was like teaching a donkey
> to play the Waldstein Sonata. It's breathtaking to think about now.
> But one part of it backfired. Instead of using an actor like Reagan to sell
> policies to the public, the Svengalis behind Bush sold him as an authentic
> man of the people, the guy you'd want to have an O'Doul's with.
> Rove correctly guessed that a generation of watching TV and Hollywood
> movies
> left huge blocs of Americans convinced that people who read books, looked
> at
> paintings and cared about spelling were either serial killers or scheming
> to
> steal bearer bonds from the Nakatomi building. (Even knowing what a bearer
> bond is was villainous).
> The hero in American culture, meanwhile, was always a moron with a big gun
> who learned everything he needed to know from cowboy movies. The climax of
> pretty much every action movie from the mid-eighties on involved
> shotgunning
> the smarty-pants villain in the face before he could finish some fruity
> speech about whatever.
> Rove sold Bush as that hero. He didn't know anything, but dammit, he was
> sure about what he didn't know. He was John McClane, and Al Gore was Hans
> Gruber. GOP flacks like Rove rallied the whole press corps around that
> narrative, to the point where anytime Gore tried to nail Bush down on a
> point of policy, pundits blasted him for being a smug know-it-all using
> wonk-ese to talk over our heads - as Cokie Roberts put it once, "this guy
> from Washington doing Washington-speak."
> This is like the scene from the increasingly prophetic Idiocracy where no
> one can understand Luke Wilson, a person of average intelligence rocketed
> 500 years into America's idiot future, because whenever he tries to reason
> with people, they think he's talking "like a fag."
> The Roves of the world used Bush's simplicity to win the White House. Once
> they got there, they used the levers of power to pillage and scheme like
> every other gang of rapacious politicians ever. But the plan was never to
> make ignorance a political principle. It was just a ruse to win office.
> Now the situation is the opposite. Now GOP insiders are frantic at the
> prospect of an uncultured ignoramus winning the presidency. A group of
> major
> donors and GOP strategists even wrote out a memo outlining why a super PAC
> dedicated to stopping Trump was needed.
> "We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval
> Office,
> with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips," they
> wrote. Virginia Republican congressman Scott Ringell wrote an open letter
> to
> fellow Republicans arguing that a Trump presidency would be "reckless,
> embarrassing and ultimately dangerous."
> Hold on. It wasn't scary to imagine George "Is our children learning?" Bush
> with the "responsibilities for worldwide confrontation" at his fingertips?
> It wasn't embarrassing to have a president represent the U.S. on the
> diplomatic stage who called people from Kosovo "Kosovians" and people from
> Greece "Grecians?"
> It was way worse. Compared to Bush, Donald Trump is a Rutherford or an
> Einstein. In the same shipwreck scenario, Trump would have all sorts of
> ideas - all wrong, but at least he'd think of something, instead of staring
> at the sand waiting for a hotel phone to rise out of it.
> Of course, Trump's ignorance level, considering his Wharton education, is
> nearly as awesome as what Bush accomplished in spite of Yale. In fact,
> unlike Bush, who had the decency to not even try to understand the news,
> Trump reads all sorts of crazy things and believes them all. From theories
> about vaccines causing autism to conspiratorial questions about the pillow
> on Antonin Scalia's face to Internet legends about Americans using bullets
> dipped in pigs' blood to shoot Muslims, there isn't any absurd idea Donald
> Trump isn't willing to entertain, so long as it fits in with his worldview.
> But Washington is freaking out about Trump in a way they never did about
> Bush. Why? Because Bush was their moron, while Trump is his own moron.
> That's really what it comes down to.
> And all of the Beltway's hooting and hollering about how "embarrassing" and
> "dangerous" Trump is will fall on deaf ears, because as gullible as
> Americans can be, they're smart enough to remember being told that it was
> OK
> to vote for George Bush, a man capable of losing at tic-tac-toe.
> We're about to enter a dark period in the history of the American
> experiment. The Founding Fathers never imagined an electorate raised on
> Toddlers and Tiaras and Temptation Island. Remember, just a few decades
> ago,
> shows like Married With Children and Roseanne were satirical parodies. Now
> the audience can't even handle that much irony. A lot of American culture
> is
> just dumb slobs cheering on other dumb slobs. It was inevitable, once we
> broke the seal with Bush, that our politics would become the same thing.
> Madison and Jefferson never foresaw this situation. They knew there was
> danger of demagoguery, but they never imagined presidential candidates
> exchanging "mine's bigger than yours" jokes or doing "let's laugh at the
> disabled" routines. There's no map in the Constitution to tell us how to
> get
> out of where we're going. All we can do now is hold on.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>