2017 Feb 24^th

More new from the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) whose members have been doing a lot of listening. Yesterday I wrote about what I saw as a form of parallel play between Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon as they sat together on the CPAC stage. I wrote then that I had not watched all of their performance, so today I saw some fragments that I had missed yesterday. They did acknowledge each other but their remarks were directed to the audience rather than to each other. At one point the camera caught a brief but fascinating interaction: Bannon, seated next to Priebus, reached over and put his hand on Priebus’ knee. Priebus immediately picked up the hand, very delicately, as if it were a turd, and sent it back to its owner. The gesture was not repeated. As to its meaning; I’ll borrow a famous Fox phrase, “I report; you decide.”

Subsequently, Bannon went to some length to describe the new regime’s purpose in governing; it is “the deconstruction of the State.” Whoa! What does that mean? To deconstruct is to take apart. Bannon said nothing about putting the state back together after it he had deconstructed it, so I’m not sure how his plan differs from the plans of the bomb throwing anarchists in the 1920s.

The Priebus-Bannon act was followed by Trump himself who spoke to wild applause. If Bannon had bothered to deconstruct Trump’s speech he would have found not one new thought inside.  He didn’t of course; instead he continued railing about the press. He could be setting the stage for some kind of suppression, a form of which is in effect as I write this. Certain members of the press have been banned from White House briefings: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, CNN and Politico are out just now. Mayne they’ll shape up and provide their readers with sugar-coated reports about President Trump. Wanna bet?

After Trump’s hissy fit, the Associated Press and Time magazine withdrew their reporters in protest. I wonder what would happen if Sean Spicer showed up for a press briefing and no one else came. Whatever would they do without “fake news” to whine about?

There are many parallels between Germany in 1933 and the rise of Trump today. In 1933 newspapers were owned by political parties and when the Nazis came to power these parties were outlawed and their newspapers were seized. The only news outlets left were those approved by the Nazi party.  Hitler made sure he had a target at which to direct German fear; it was the communists. Trump directs his fan’s anger at the media and “fake news”…read any unfavorable information about Donald Trump. He also includes Muslims and “illegal aliens.”

Trump complained that he could not find a single country with which we had a trade surplus, not even one! We have so many bad deals he says. Naturally, he will fix that. There are at least 15 countries with which we have a trade surplus: Here are the top five and the amount of the surplus in billions of dollars for two of them, Hong Kong 29.5 billion, Netherlands, UAE, Belgium and Australia, 12.7 billion. With all of our nation’s resources at his disposal Trump cannot find even one of these fifteen countries? It amazes me that the man can find the White House.