Senator Rand Paul, This Week's King of Idiot America and Why Republicans Hate the Press

One of the positive things to come out of the Trump years was that much of the mainstream media found a backbone when it came to covering the President and his constant lying. Let's hope it's not a temporary phenomenon. Republicans of course are not happy about journalists practicing journalism instead of just providing a microphone for lies and disproven conspiracy theories, now that Republicans make their own reality and rely on "alternative facts". As Stephen Colbert once observed, it seems reality has a well-known liberal bias.

This week Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos of ABC. It did not go well. This exchange between the two regarding the 2020 election speaks volumes about what's wrong with this country:
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STEPHANOPOULOS: The Department of Justice led by William Barr said there's no widespread evidence of fraud. Can’t you just say the words, this election --

PAUL: No.

STEPHANOPOULOS: -- was not stolen?

PAUL: Well, what I would suggest is -- what I would suggest is that if we want greater confidence in our elections, and 75 percent of Republicans agree with me, is that we do need to look at election integrity and we need to see if we can restore confidence in the elections.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, 75 percent of Republicans agree with you because they were fed a big lie by President Trump and his supporters to say the election was stolen. Why can't you say --

PAUL: Well, I think --

STEPHANOPOULOS: -- President Biden won a legitimate, fair election --

PAUL: -- I think where you make a mistake in -- hey, George. George. George, where you make a mistake is that people coming from the liberal side like you, you immediately say everything's a lie instead of saying there are two sides to everything.

Historically what would happen is if said that I thought that there was fraud, you would interview someone else who said there wasn’t.
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Let me first offer some very on-point commentary on the above from Steve Bennen of MSNBC:

"After a contentious back and forth, Stephanopoulos eventually reminded his guest, "I'm standing by facts. There are not two sides to facts.... It is a lie to say it was stolen."

It was an enlightening exchange because it shed light on a pernicious strategy. Rand Paul wants not only to peddle nonsense, he also wants independent news organizations to present his nonsense to the public as if it has merit.

In the Republican's vision, journalists have a responsibility to present the public with both lies and facts. Media professionals who alert the electorate to the truth, in Paul's vision, are doing the public a disservice. Real journalism, according to the hapless senator, means giving equal weight to garbage and reality.

Only "the liberal side" disagrees.

To be sure, in more instances than anyone could possibly count, this both-sides approach was -- and in some circles, is -- a popular approach to reporting the news. But thankfully, Rand Paul is not a news director or an editor, and responsible media professionals are telling the public the truth: the election was not stolen. The Republicans' Big Lie has no basis in fact."

I'm reminded of the excellent 2009 book from journalist Charles P. Pierce entitled, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. Pierce looked at recent events in America, such as the Terri Schiavo debacle, the opening of the Creationist Museum in Kentucky, and most of the work of the George W. Bush administration, and determined that that in the U.S., "fact" is merely what enough people believe, and "truth" lies only in how fervently they believe it. 

According to Pierce, "The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites...although both of these things are part of it. The rise of idiot America reflects -for profit, mainly, but also, more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power- the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know best what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.  

This is how idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of the Church of Christ's Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an "expert" and, therefore, an "elitist.""

Conservatives of course hated real jounalism a long time before the rise of Idiot America. Richard Nixon famously went to war with the press just because he didn't like the way they covered him. From John Avlon of The Daily Beast:

"The heated domestic debates over Vietnam had overturned decades of deference in press coverage of the president. The new technology of television broke down barriers that brought the reality of war into America’s living rooms, upending their assumption that journalists would almost uncritically support the president in times of war.

In the legion of great newspaper reporters who earned their stripes covering the war in Vietnam – David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Marguerite Higgins and Sydney Schanberg among them – the White House recognized that television correspondents had disproportionate power in the fight for hearts and minds at home."

Nixon would have loved Twitter and other social media vehicles for the same reason that Trump loved them: Twitter allowed Trump to deliver his message to his audience without a filter, without any fact-checking, without any follow-up questions and without any commentary.

How Republicans would like the mainstream media to function was summarized neatly by Sharron Angle, the GOP's 2010 nominee for Senate in Nevada. From Eric Kleefeld of Business Insider:

"Nevada senate candidate Sharron Angle has further expounded on her strategy of courting conservative media and avoiding more mainstream sources -- it's not just about money, as she's said before, but also about only being asked the questions she wants.

"We needed to have the press be our friend," Angle said in an interview that aired on Fox over the weekend.

"Wait a minute. Hold on a second. To be your friend?" said a disbelieving Carl Cameron. Before Angle could fully answer, he added: "That sounds naive." Apparently this was too much for even him.

"Well, no," said Angle. "We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported."

Angle continued: "And when I get on a show, and I say, 'Send money to SharronAngle.com,' so that your listeners will know that if they want to support me they need to go to SharronAngle.com.""

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'The Producers' Presidency: Trump Wanted to Lose in 2016. But Not in 2020.

"It's absolutely amazing. But under the right circumstances, a producer could make more money with a flop than he could with a hit." - Milo Bloom, The Producers

A business case: A man realizes he can scheme to enrich himself and his friends through an otherwise failed enterprise. No one will notice the dishonesty and criminality involved, because no one pays attention to an enterprise that failed. Then the scheme backfires: the enterprise accidentally becomes a success.

The above case describes the plot of the 1967 Mel Brook movie The Producers, in which the characters Max Bailystock and Milo Bloom plan to raise, and keep, a great deal of money by producing an flop Broadway musical only to have the scheme unravel when the musical becomes a success.

It also describes Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. That scheme went like this: Donald Trump wanted to prove to doubters that he could get the Republican nomination for President. He wanted to make a lot of money and become an even bigger TV star than the already was. At the same time his friends and family would ride his coattails to success. So, lose the Presidential election by a narrow margin, claim the election was stolen, raise a lot of money from supporters and clean up as the number one critic of the new Democratic administration on mass media.

And I suppose the funniest part of the whole thing is that I can compare the Trump campaign to The Producers without even alluding to the fact that The Producers was also about a Broadway musical called Springtime for Hitler. But I digress. And I must confess that the comparison between the Trump campaign and the Mel Brooks comedy is not my own.

From an article by journalist Michael Wolff, author of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House:

Certain that they would lose the election, "As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. His ultimate goal, after all, had never been to win. "I can be the most famous man in the world," he had told his aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the race. His longtime friend Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News, liked to say that if you want a career in television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future. He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities.

"This is bigger than I ever dreamed of," he told Ailes a week before the election. I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.""

"Most presidential candidates spend their entire careers, if not their lives from adolescence, preparing for the role. They rise up the ladder of elected offices, perfect a public face, and prepare themselves to win and to govern. The Trump calculation, quite a conscious one, was different. The candidate and his top lieutenants believed they could get all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change their behavior or their worldview one whit."

"From the moment of victory, the Trump administration became a looking-glass presidency: Every inverse assumption about how to assemble and run a White House was enacted and compounded, many times over. The decisions that Trump and his top advisers made in those first few months — from the slapdash transition to the disarray in the West Wing — set the stage for the chaos and dysfunction that have persisted throughout his first year in office. This was a real-life version of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, where the mistaken outcome trusted by everyone in Trump’s inner circle — that they would lose the election — wound up exposing them for who they really were."


"Now let's see, two thousand dollars. That isn't much.  I'm sure I can hide it somewhere.  After all, the department of internal revenue isn't interested in a show that flopped." - Milo Bloom, The Producers

A second comparison between Trump and the team of Bailystock and Bloom. Both assumed that their sure-to-fail enterprises would allow them to benefit from obscurity, drawing no attention to their breathtaking criminality. From the same article linked above:

"Almost everybody on the Trump team, in fact, came with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a president once he was in office. Michael Flynn, the retired general who served as Trump’s opening act at campaign rallies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. "Well, it would only be a problem if we won," ­Flynn assured them."

This brings us to 2020, a different election altogether in that it's clear that this time, Trump very much wanted to win. Why? First and foremost I think, because the President of the United States is immune to prosecution while in office.

From Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, written just before the November election: "No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense. But, as Donald Trump fights to hold on to the White House, he and those around him surely know that if he loses—an outcome that nobody should count on—the presumption of immunity that attends the Presidency will vanish. Given that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Nixon. The Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said of Trump, "If he loses, you have a situation that’s not dissimilar to that of Nixon when he resigned. Nixon spoke of the cell door clanging shut." Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. Few people have evaded consequences more cunningly. That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if he loses to Joe Biden. Even if Trump wins, grave legal and financial threats will loom over his second term."

Second, Trump seems to think he can establish a political dynasty. Just two examples: there's talk his daughter Ivanka might run for Senate in Florida, and/or his daughter in law Lara running for Senate in North Carolina.

Unfortunately for them as Meridith McGraw and Nancy Cook of Politico observed on election day: "But if Trump loses, a family brand built on "winning" will be dealt an embarrassing defeat after years of successfully side-stepping creditors, bankruptcies and cultural comeuppance. Republicans might turn on the Trumps. MAGA politics may fade. And the Trumps likely can’t retreat back into the glitzy world of New York galas. Nor do they want to. Instead, they’ll try to do what they always do, according to over a dozen current and former senior administration officials and close associates of the Trump family: Keep the Trump brand alive. Expand the family business. Export it when possible."


"We're trapped. It's either the show or us.  There's no way out.  What can we do, blow up the theatre?" - Max Bailystock, The Producers


In the conclusion of the Producers, Bailystock and Bloom dynamite the theater where Springtime for Hitler is playing, only to be caught and imprisoned. Once in prison, their scheme begins all over again. Well, we've already seen Trump try to stop Joe Biden from becoming President by asking his supporters to storm the Capitol. Will we also see him try to stage a political comeback, running for office again, (hopefully) from prison? Actually, I'd love to see Trump as the nominee for the MAGA party he's been threatening to create, running for President from a cell in Sing Sing.

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