I Can’t Wake Up From This Trumpian Nightmare

I’ve been slapping myself in the face for the past 5 minutes desperately trying to wake up from my Trumpian nightmare. It’s not working and I need an ice pack.

So today’s episode of The Twilight Zone has the CIA releasing the results of an investigation that says Russia was definitely involved in hacking our election to help Donald Trump win. Trump has, of course, dismissed the allegation, as have some GOP members of Congress. Think about it. Reagan called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire,” and who hated the Commies more than the GOP during the past sixty years? Now, Russia has meddled in our election and Republicans are rolling their eyes. “What’s the big deal?”

Jesus H. Christmas. There is no end to the epic hypocrisy and lies of Trump and his supporters. And what’s even worse is that they believe each other’s lies. For some masochistic reason I went to the comment section of an article on Trump, and a person wrote, “Donald Trump has done more in eight weeks than Obama has done in eight years.” That may be true on some other plane of existence, but on this one that is a laughable assertion. All Trump has done is lie his ass off and nominate a horde of ideological reactionaries with fascist leanings to sensitive government posts.

And that’s not all, folks. A report released yesterday by Public Policy Polling finds that Trump supporters have a voracious appetite for fake news, with 14 percent of them believing Hillary Clinton is part of a child sex ring run out of pizza parlors, and 73 percent believing that billionaire George Soros paid anti-Trump protesters. Neither story is even remotely true, but we live in a post-truth world now.

Filmmaker Michael Moore doesn’t think Trump will even make it to his inauguration before he’s arrested or forced to resign, and as bold an assertion as that is, he was right about Trump winning the election. We can hope. In the meantime, the nightmare continues.

The Modern Conservative Movement’s Battle With Reality

The following quote is from one of Trump’s minions on an NPR show a few days ago. It is, of course, a classic example of alt-reality, the belief that reality is actually in the eye of the beholder.

“One thing that’s been interesting this entire campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts. They’re not really facts,” Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes said on “The Diane Rehm Show” on NPR. “It’s kind of like looking at ratings or looking at a glass half-full of water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true. There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.”

The other guests on the NPR show were understandably shocked by the assertion that facts don’t exist anymore, but it is coming from the Trump camp after all. When I first read it I thought something about the quote was familiar. Then I remembered what Karl Rove said shortly after George Bush stole the White House in 2001.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The modern conservative movement does not accept the concept of a shared reality. For people like Rove and Trump, and religious zealots and fascists around the globe, reality is what you say it is. The only facts that count are those that support your views. Hitler created his own reality and convinced a whole lot of people to join him. It only ended after horrific worldwide destruction and bloodshed.

Trump’s alt-reality and that of his supporters will end as well, the only question is how big a price will we all have to pay?

Batty Bachmann Behaving Badly

Minnesota’s favorite loon, Congressperson Michele Bachmann, is facing a congressional ethics probe. The article in today's Daily Beast offers a laundry list of accusations being leveled against Bachmann from people who worked on her recent presidential campaign.

Shit happens when you live in an alternate universe. Confusing right-wing propaganda and slurs with facts, the Tea Party Darling is a living legend when it comes to jaw-dropping misstatements and hallucinatory pronouncements. If you have heard only a fraction of the ludicrous, fact-challenged utterances from Bachmann over the years, you know that she is a proud member of the unreality-based world. So it should come as little surprise that she would ignore the rules and regulations of a reality that she does not acknowledge.

One can only hope she is ultimately saved from herself and admitted to an institution that is equipped to deal with people who are untethered from the existence in which most of us find ourselves. Congress, unfortunately, is filled with far too many enablers.