I hate to say it, but if there’s one good thing that’s come out of the Israel – Hamas mess, it’s the degree to which the Fake News has finally stopped slobbering over Donald Shithead Trump and to a certain degree, the GOP has stopped kissing his fat ass as well.
Until about a week ago, no matter how crazy or stupid were the statements that came out of Shithead’s mouth, the noise was immediately reported or mentioned by the Fake News and the alt-right echo chamber which together kept Shithead front and center in our daily attempts to keep up with what’s going on.
So, yesterday I tuned into both the morning and afternoon AM shock-jock shows, and neither of those loudmouths mentioned Trump in their opening segments at all, not even once! The morning guy did a thing on how liberal TV newscasters get away with all kinds of false reporting, the afternoon guy – Howie Carr – did a totally boring interview with some alt-right guy who is mixed up in some kind of financial flim-flam or other.
Then today I started off the way I always start off, by scrolling down through the news feed from Google, and I had to get past all the top stories and down into the postings aggregated specifically for me before there was one mention of Trump-o, having to do with the White House calling his comments about Hamas being ‘dangerous and unhinged.’
These comments were made before a crowd of some two hundred people who came together under the auspices of something called Club 47, which is a group of Palm Beach residents who supported Trump beginning in 2015 and have been at it ever since. They claim to hold monthly meetings at the Palm Beach Convention Center and are the largest ‘club’ in the United States, whatever that means.
Meanwhile, what this group of wealthy, Palm Beach white people don’t mention is that what got Trump’s comments about Hamas onto the national media screen was not so much the reaction of the White House, but a critical response from several other GOP 2024 wannabees – for the first time! The sharpest rebuke came from Nikki Haley, who described Trump-o’s comments as reflecting “the negativity, the chaos and the baggage of the past."
I have to assume that Trump now understands that the only way he can break into the media coverage about the Near East, particularly as Israel prepares for an all-out ground campaign against Hamas, is to say something so loony and so extreme that at least he’ll get a sound bite or a one-line mention in a news report.
Or maybe, just maybe he knows something that everyone else still hasn’t figured out, which is that it doesn’t really matter how often you get mentioned by the Fake News, as long as the competition isn’t getting any more space than the Fake News gives to you! And if the situation in the Near East has done one thing to the media industry, it’s given the industry something to focus on besides such critical issues as the next tropical storm, or some pileup of cars on the Interstate, or how a whole neighborhood in some Pennsylvania town is worried because a convicted murderer figured out how to jump over some fence and escape from jail.
That’s right. These were the big stories on the national news until Hamas launched their assault on a rock concert which was taking place on a kibbutz located two miles away from the fence which keeps the Palestinians out of Israel and keeps Israelis from freely entering the Gaza Strip. What genius planned to put a rock concert down there?
So much for how Israel has dealt with the terrorist problem since Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon in 1978, except by the time the IDF got 10 kilometers beyond the border, the PLO leadership had already flown the coop. Worse, this invasion became the impetus for the appearance of Hezbollah, the other so-called Palestinian terrorist group, which is just as dangerous, if not more dangerous than Hamas.
Remember the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon? That little exercise only killed more than 200 U.S. Marines. The picture above is from that assault which resulted in nearly ten times the number of Americans lost in that episode than what has happened in Israel and Gaza over the past week.
The worst thing which can happen to the Fake News is when there isn’t any news. But when the happens, they can always roll things back a bit and carry another loony statement from Orange Shithead Trump.
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