I’m not suggesting, of course, not following the news.
There are some excellent sources of news out there, of course. For business news I watch CNBC, there are a few blogs on the left and right that I follow, and there are some interesting international web sites such as 38 North which follows developments with North Korea, or South China Morning Post to follow developments in China. Even major media outlets provide good reporting if you filter for it: Reuters provides decent general world coverage, as does the BBC, so long as you’re willing to filter out the anti-Trump slant expressed by many world leaders with an agenda.
But some news outlets such as the New York Times, the signal to noise ratio has gotten pretty bad.
And this seems by design.
Suppose the NYT editorial suggesting the invocation of the 25th amendment and the exaggerated theatrics of the Kavanaugh hearing are part of a media strategy — let’s call it purposeful madness — deliberately designed to counter the Trumpian messaging innovation.
Trump has succeeded in part by disrupting the MSM’s narrative. He simply refused to play by their rules and they had no counter, until now. Cory Booker may have given the briefing away by admitting his job is jam the jammer.
The new liberal strategy is not to argue but to confuse. Create phantom objects, devise imaginary plots, sow intrigue, all with the view of giving Trump “a taste of his own medicine”. They reckon that by reducing the battle to pure noise output the Mighty Wurlitzer will win.
The problem with this approach is that it multiplies chaos and essentially fries the normal comm channels. Nobody gets the “word” because there is no word, unless that word is Noooooooo!!!
There is a second component to the liberal strategy: a deliberate attempt to be unpleasant, increase anxiety and induce an atmosphere of crisis. The goal is to inflict deliberate pain, a pain that will only go away if you give them what they want.
The Constitutional Crisis will not go away, indeed it will get intolerably worse until they get what they want. A judge once asked Charlie Sheen asked him why a man like him would pay for sex, he replied: “I don’t pay them for sex. I pay them to leave”.
In other words, the deliberate strategy is to piss you off–make you uncomfortable, make you mad, obfuscate policy arguments, engage in ad-hominem attacks–until the Left get what it wants.
We are not a country on the edge of a constitutional crisis. There are no matches waiting to burn the Reichtag down, the current administration is not waiting to “disappear” opponents or “suspend” democracy. There are no “enabling acts” waiting to be passed.
If you ignore President Trump’s twitter feed (which seems to be a direct line to Trump’s id), the current Administration seems to be respectful of constitutional limits: punting back contentious issues (such as DACA which is arguably an unconstitutional presidential executive order) back to Congress for proper handling (passing the DREAM act, which is a congressionally passed DACA that Congress has thus far failed to pass). Aside from a relentless attempt at turning back Obama-era executive orders and Obama-era laws, and ignoring the relentless posturing by the Left (who has its own barely hidden agenda of forcing Socialism down our throats), the Trump Administration has been a fairly middling-to-conservative administration that has, in some corners, embraced more liberal policies (such as advocating for more liberal paid family leave policies than those that currently exist).
What we’re experiencing is not a constitutional crisis. We’re not seeing the collapse of the country–the DOW is up to record levels, job growth is great, average salaries (a trailing indicator) is up nearly 3% in the last report, a survey of CEOs suggest we are in the best economic environment in over a decade. Crime continues a general downward trend, infrastructure is being worked on, police officers still respond to 911 calls, legal immigrants are still legally immigrating.
If you ignore the constant drumbeat about the horrors of Trump, the wave of Left-wing protesters who have taken to the streets in their perpetual Two Minute Hate, and the insistence that things are going into the shitter by opinion piece writers who ignore the statistics being published by the BEA or the BLS, frankly things are going pretty good for the average American.
No, what we’re experiencing is the Left having a massive political temper tantrum.
And like a 3 year old child, it ain’t going to shut up until the Left gets what it wants, or until the rest of us learn to ignore it.
It’s not to say there aren’t problems, of course.
China is on the edge of an economic meltdown which, combined with its desires to expand Chinese influence around the world is a recipe for massive disaster.
Germany and the Eurozone is going through a political phase in part driven by the Syrian disaspora, driven by Obama era foreign policy failures, which threatens the stability of the European Union.
Britain still faces massive problems thanks to Brexit and the failure of British politicians to negotiate a successful exit.
Syria may go through a second humanitarian disaster, with the use of weapons of mass destruction (chemical weapons) on rebel targets.
Turkey continues its slide into anti-democratic authoritarianism as former party leaders of opposition parties are being arrested and jailed on terrorism charges.
A presidential candidate in Brazil was stabbed.
An earthquake in Japan knocked out power to 5.3 million people.
The world’s economy remains soft–and if you ignore the economic growth in the United States, things around the world are getting slowly poorer and meaner.
But you wouldn’t know this if you followed most news outlets.
Fuzzy little things that I find interesting. 