Tom Toles for December 14, 2016

In the country with a severe case of “short attention span theater”, that forgets his statements on a three second delay.

…and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs — to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record.

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. 1984

RICK PERRY at ENERGY {a limerick}

Trumpism gives us a feel

for the odd nay bizarrely surreal.

Energy’s Perry

raises this query:

Will Trump ALL sanity repeal?

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AH, FASCISM {a limerick}

We will discredit the press.

Social-media will finesse

our dissemblings of facts

and distortions of acts.

Ah, Fascism: yes, Yes, YES.

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@emptc12 and @Old_Curmudgeon

I would like to add my thanks as well. Given a lot of the vitriol I see almost everywhere, your poetry is a diversion I look forward to.

Collectively,journalists did more to elect Trumph than anything else.The more Hate and disinformation they produced,the more people understood how to win over the great machine.Even stupid people realize that any publicity is helpful.

Trumpers asked for it… now you’re going to get it.

This new president is acting like a dictator… someone should back-up the data before our new president deletes it all and feeds us more of his BS lies. Trump has brought us into a post-factual world, and is determined to destroy all of the evidence.

Republicans and Democrats see the news differently…

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“…

[] Three-quarters of Americans think that news organizations keep political leaders in check – preventing them from doing things that they shouldn’t be doing.

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[] But about the same portion (74%) say that news organizations tend to favor one side – including 75% of those who say the media prevents leaders from doing things they shouldn’t..

[] Political differences emerge here with conservative Republicans most likely to think that news organizations are one-sided..

[] This ideological difference is reinforced by earlier research that asked about trust of individual news organizations. Of the 36 sources asked about in our 2014 survey, 28 of them were trusted more than distrusted by respondents who expressed consistently liberal political views across a range of questions about political values; 24 of them were distrusted more than trusted by consistent conservatives.

…”

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http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/trust-and-accuracy/

You mean CNN people didn’t really give questions to Hillary’s people before their debate?

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That Glenn Thrush really didn’t send articles to Podesta for “fact-checking”? (Got a cushy NYT job for that.)

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Politico’s Ken Vogel really didn’t send an article on Clinton’s fundraising to the DNC for “review”?

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CNN’s Maria Cardona didn’t really ask DNC people how to write a “good” op-ed piece?

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If the major media are biased to the right, their people sure don’t show it. Keep drinkin’.

Interesting fact ijustfakedup: Mr. Trump’s initial campaign was intended as an extended SNL skit to be aired after the Republican conventions when Trump lost ignominiously, a hilarious parody of the political process gone bad but eventually triumphing.

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However, things got out of control when people starting taking Trump seriously. No matter how bizarre he acted, more and more ordinary people actually liked his circus geek show performance and eventually he was nominated. Everyone involved in the scheme was surprised, especially Mr. Trump. His Bizarro World act at the debates didn’t work either. And so he vented spleen at the SNL crew for their incompetence. Can you blame Donald? (He has nothing in writing to prove this; after all, it was done on a handshake-and-wink basis.) He now stood potentially to lose mucho dollars in his business empire, plus become tied down to the funky Oval Office (He hates ovals — ovals are just lazy zeroes to him).

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Can you blame SNL for continuing with the ruse? Why waste a good idea even though it had gone amazingly awry. So SNL continued, because no WAY could Trump actually get elected. In desperation, Trump decided he would eat a Muslim-Mexican baby on live TV if that’s what it took to botch his chances.

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At the last minute, the baby’s parents balked, and a substitute couldn’t be found. Lo and behold, Trump WAS elected. SNL doesn’t care, because now there’s four years of Trump skits that will practically write themselves. And although Trump had planned gather a consortium to buy NBC and cancel the show in revenge, he can’t do that now. Oh, what a tangled web we weave…

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And that’s the truth, so help me Baal.

About textbooks: I’ve often thought that “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong” should be in every classroom. About Trump: he should be in the corner of his own classroom, wearing a dunce’s cap.