In response to an FT article by Gideon Rachman on 10th October 2016, entitled ‘Donald Trump and the declining prestige of US democracy’
Prologue:
In an attempt to demonstrate his moral outrage at the depths to which western democracy has sunk, Mr Rachman's article illustrates how blind the media has become to its culpability in that decline, and the role it is now playing in digging a deeper hole: – in a battle between an enraged baboon and a snake…neither of whom are ‘fit’ to be POTUS…instead of investigating what this contest symbolizes…the fall of a corrupt system…the FT has chosen to cheer for the snake.
Mr Rachman, as usual, misdiagnoses the disease, blames the symptoms, and then washes his hands of any role in the epidemic. After reading it, I chose to pick up on one aspect of the 'point missing' and hypocrisy – Mr Rachman’s use of Richard Nixon to demonstrate Donald Trump’s unfitness to be president.
I follow my own piece with a superb contribution from a fellow commentator ‘M’. Whereas I have picked on one aspect and used sarcasm, he has attacked the whole charade and gone ‘full frontal’. I only wish I had written it myself :-)
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‘Of course US politics has thrown up villains and melodrama before. The first great US political scandal that I followed as a child was Watergate — which also featured a “bad guy” making scandalous remarks on a secret recording. The Watergate tapes introduced the American public to the phrase “expletive deleted”’ - Gideon Rachman
I have a slightly different recollection to you Mr. Rachman. The 'scandalous' remarks I remember were the ones pertaining to the President committing a felony. The bad language wasn't really the problem to anyone concerned with the 'ethics' of the presidency. Nixon's crime was seeking to rig an election by undermining his opposition. His hubris was that he thought he was above the law...surely in this day and age no politician would do such a thing or have such self-importance...
Alas, poor Tricky Dickey...for all his 'experience and intelligence’, he didn't think of deleting the incriminating evidence the day after the Congress asked for it. Whatever else you say about Hillary Clinton, and I notice that the FT says hardly anything...she learned much from Tricky's mistakes. Clearly Trump didn't get the memo.
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Reader ‘M’
Gideon writes: "One of the strengths of the western democratic system is that a free press and open debate are meant to expose falsehoods."
Then why does this "free press" accept and relay the falsehoods of the government stenographically, always echoing and never challenging: not in Iraq, not Libya, not Syria, not Afghanistan, not Ukraine, nor cyber attacks nor rants against the International Demon of the Day? Why do the opinions and editorials, the columns and the articles of the "free press" agree so completely with the policies of the government?
On a minor but telling scale, it's interesting to note that the choral monotone is so complete that if one questions and opposes those policies in the social media, the response is never discussion but lame and desiccated accusations of being in the employ of foreign governments in the best narrow and ignorant McCarthy-ite tradition which bears no opposition and which is returning in full force.