ABOUT THIS SURREAL PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

I can't say the name of the focus of this post myself, but I wanted to pass on this brilliant post from dianeravitch.net.  The original Esquire article is linked here.

Charles Pierce is a thoughtful blogger for Esquire. On everything having to do with education, he is on target. He is on target on politics too.

In this post, he exposes Donald Trump as a major teller of tales, a fabulist, in short, a liar. Trump said in the aftermath of the Dallas disaster that 11 cities were in a state of upheaval and that there were people calling for “a moment of silence” for the killer of the five police officers. None of that was true.

Trump says whatever he wants and contradicts himself a day later, and no one seems to mind. 

He regularly plays to his base, which is angry white men who feel left out and resent those “others.”

Charles Pierce writes:

Damn the delegates who will vote for this man. Damn the professional politicians who will fall in line behind him or, worse, will sit back and hope this all blows over so the Republican Party once again will be able to relegate the poison this man has unleashed to the backwaters of the modern conservative intellectual mainstream, which is where it has been useful for over four decades. Damn the four hopeless sycophants who want to share a stage with him for four months. Damn all the people who will come here and speak on his behalf. Damn all the thoughtful folk who plumb his natural appeal for anything deeper than pure hatred.

Damn all the people who will vote for him, and damn any progressives who sit this one out because Hillary Rodham Clinton is wrong on this issue or that one. Damn all the people who are suggesting they do that. And damn all members of the media who treat this dangerous fluke of a campaign as being in any way business as usual. Any support for He, Trump is, at this point, an act of moral cowardice. Anyone who supports him, or runs with him, or enables his victory, or even speaks well of him, is a traitor to the American idea…..

Here is the truth. Nobody called for a moment of silence for Micah Johnson. Eleven U.S. cities are not on the brink of racial violence. He, Trump just made that shit up so his followers can stay afraid and angry at the people he wants them to fear and hate. This lie was a marching order and the Party of Lincoln is right in step with him, straight into the burning Reichstag of this man’s mind.

Welcome to the 2016 Republican convention: a four-day celebration of the ritual suicide of American democracy.

With balloons.