Language and Propaganda - an example

What in the hell do you suppose has surrounded and protected our curent President for the past eight years and others of his ilk before him? The MSM has been serving precisely as a "surround sound superstructure" for Progressives & Democrats for the past five decades.

But as we've clarified before on numerous occasions, george, while I do and have been for a long while attending to a broad range of media sources including many right wing sources, you do not. You're not a student of media. You have opinions, but they aren't grounded in study.

Do you appreciate just how stupid this sounds??? Your conceits and blindness astound me.

[As I've said, feel free to ignore anything I contribute here. I'm not going to engage in pissing matches so I'll respond to you where I deem you've added something interesting.

Now the high-flying song and dance man, of manic energy and ravenous narcissism and colossal neediness, will take the oath as our forty-fifth president. The lobbyists are gathering, the would-be courtiers, the place-servers, for his campaign was a ragged pickup team, a tenth the size of Clinton’s, and he was spurned by much of the Republican establishment that would normally stand eager to staff the government—though some of them now are showing themselves eager enough to join. The grasping after emoluments is a great story, Washington in the dawning of the Trump Age a picaresque novel in the making. Even as we watch, political outsiders are rushing in from the wilderness, eager to turn his fantasies, from immigration to trade to national security, into reality, a reality in which swastikas and hate crimes are popping up around the country, and local politicians are talking darkly of “sanctuary cities.”

And yet in a real sense the principal story worth telling is still him. We are now all in the prey of that aberrant personality, of that vast and never-to-be satisfied need. “Everywhere Donald Trump turns, he sees Donald Trump,” said Mark Singer, as quoted by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher in Trump Revealed.

Quote:

He doesn’t see the other guy much. It becomes really hard to distinguish [how much] of the promotion and publicity…is good for business and how much of it is to fill that hollowness inside of him.

Now filling that hollowness is our job. No surprise that the president-elect, faced with selecting four thousand reasonably qualified people to fill the government and developing a policy or two that stands a chance of being enacted, has talked about undertaking a “victory tour,” revisiting the states he won, once again surfing those screaming crowds that plainly offer him the real-time affirmation he craves.

The ironic reversal of roles hardly needs to be noted. However the Trump Presidency turns out—whether it veers toward autocracy, devolves into kleptocracy, or takes some unheard-of new form—America has, for the time being, abdicated the role of the world’s moral leader, to the extent that it ever played that part convincingly. “Make America Great Again” is one of Trump’s many linguistic contortions: in fact, one of his core messages is that America should no longer bother with being great, that it should retreat from international commitments, that it should make itself small and mean.

Megyn Kelly said the responsibility for a deluge of threats faced by her and her family lies with President-elect Donald Trump, and his social media director, Dan Scavino.

“The vast majority of Donald Trump supporters are not at all this way,” Kelly said of the online hate and abuse she had faced during the campaign, The Guardian reported. Kelly was speaking at a Monday night event at Politics and Prose, a Washington, D.C., bookstore.

“It’s that far corner of the internet that really enjoys nastiness and threats and unfortunately there is a man who works for Donald Trump whose job it is to stir these people up and that man needs to stop doing that. His name is Dan Scavino.”

It’s no mystery why Trump chose Flynn for this position. Trump is simultaneously contemptuous of military leaders (you’ll recall how often he said during the campaign that he knew more than them) and enamored of them; his Cabinet is likely to contain multiple retired generals. Early on, Flynn was one of the only former military leaders who endorsed Trump and campaigned with him. He quickly became Trump’s closest adviser on national security.

But to put it plainly, Michael Flynn is a crackpot.

Let’s do a quick rundown. Flynn, who was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was fired by President Obama for a number of reasons, including mismanagement. His staff got so used to him believing things that were obviously false that they began referring to them as “Flynn Facts.” Nevertheless, he had a complete certainty in his own rightness. At one meeting, “Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his.” Furthermore, “Some also described him as a Captain Queeg-like character, paranoid that his staff members were undercutting him and credulous of conspiracy theories.”

You can see it in his statements and writings since his retirement. Flynn believes that Islam is “a malignant cancer” that is actually “a political ideology” that “hides behind this notion of it being a religion.” He has tweeted that “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL” while posting an anti-Islamic video and asking people to “please forward this to others.” On his Twitter feed, he has a propensity for spreading fake news stories from the right-wing fever swamps. As Bryan Bender and Andrew Hanna report:

But Flynn himself has used social media to promote a series of outrageous conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton, President Barack Obama and their inner circles in recent months — pushing dubious factoids at least 16 times since Aug. 9, according to a POLITICO review of his Twitter posts.

Flynn, who has 106,000 Twitter followers, has used the platform to retweet accusations that Clinton is involved with child sex trafficking and has “secretly waged war” on the Catholic Church, as well as charges that Obama is a “jihadi” who “laundered” money for Muslim terrorists...