Americans suffer from frustratingly short attention spans and even shorter memories. Case in point: Following the dark ride of the George W. Bush years, during which there were two wars, apocalyptic terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, torture as national security policy, warrantless eavesdropping and the most catastrophic economic crash since the Great Depression, I was foolish enough to believe Americans would banish the Republican Party to the hinterlands of our politics for a good long while.
I was horribly wrong. Eight years later, 62 million voters recklessly ignored the lessons of 2001 to 2009 by installing an even more incompetent, dangerous and unstable Republican administration in the White House. Donald Trump’s ascendancy isn’t so much a win for him as much as it’s a win for the propaganda efforts of Fox News, talk radio and Russian internet memes, collectively suckering “conservative” voters by bathing them in enough counterfactual nonsense to “neuralyze” all memories of what happened last time around.
That bottomless slagheap of propaganda convinced Trump’s base that the steadily improving economy of the Barack Obama administration was “American carnage,” requiring a return to the stewardship of Republicans who had been responsible for a $1.4 trillion deficit, the collapse of the stock market, more than 800,000 jobs lost in a single month and the near disintegration of both the housing market and America’s auto industry, to name two sectors.
View the complete August 13 commentary by Bob Cesca from Salon on the AlterNet website here.