Time Magazine recently took a different path, choosing women who had been sexually abused as its "Person of the Year". Absent a serial sex abuser in the White House, this would never have happened. Trump defenders point the finger at Bill Clinton, without noting that only our current President of the United States proudly declares that he "grabs them by the pussy".
We've never had a year like this; a president who presides over the White House like a feudal chief, pitting top advisors against each other, flaunting the accessories of authoritarian rule; vain, untruthful, and erratic. So upside down is Washington, DC that the party of anti-Soviet hardliners -- that would be the GOP -- turned into a Putin patsy.
The most discernible achievement of the Trump administration has been through appointments of right-wing federal judges, voted by the GOP Senate that obstructed Obama's choices, and adoption of the goal of polluters to dismantle "the administrative state"; a determined effort to upset a half century of protections of the public from toxics and a safe environment. That dismal outcome is playing out big time in Florida through Gov. Rick Scott and the state Republican Party (more, later).
None of this would have been possible without an online media strategy that left the Democrats gasping. Essentially, the Trump campaign succeeded in proving that billions of campaign dollars funneled into advertisements geared to television audiences was an obsolete tactic.
People -- especially the base -- get their information and mobilize through Facebook and Twitter. What social media consumers and voters did not realize, and for many it does matter at all, is that any advertiser can use data accumulated by Facebook to target messages to based on individual preferences.
Moreover, we learned in 2017 that in 2016 the Trump campaign had significant supportive messaging -- if not direct exchange of data on voters -- with a hostile foreign power, Russia, whose tactics using Facebook and Twitter paralleled Trump's. In ordinary times, this tango with Putin would have been an instant challenge by Congress -- starting with the House of Representatives and impeachment hearings.
We learned in 2017 that key Republican leaders in Congress, like representatives Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy who chair important investigation committees, had been coopted by Trump and possibly by Russia. They are propping up a corrupt regime as thoroughly as any Stalinist apparatchik in the 1950's which is, it happens, the same era Trump aims to return the United States: a racist, intolerant time when the John Birch Society was still a fringe movement and Norman Vincent Peale put the patina of Jesus' teachings to the business of wealth creation.
The sad truth is that a majority of members of Congress not only have a fifth grade understanding how Facebook algorithms work, they are willfully ignorant because the outcomes accrue to the benefit of their biggest campaign contributors. Only the money matters in American politics. That will be the case until Citizens United is overturned by Congress.
Since the dark money barons who dominate elections across the American landscape are unchallenged by law, it is hard to see any productive reform until voters take the helm away from them; the polluters, the miscreants, and the thieves.
As 2017 comes to a close, Trump's promise to "drain the swamp" turns out to be the most bitter joke of all. The question of silver linings awaits special elections and the November 2018 election cycle.
To summarize, this year cannot fade in the rear view mirror fast enough.
1 comment:
TDS now treated by Obamacare.
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