A cross between Huey Long, Pinochet, David Hasselhoff"?

I forget if this one has been posted. I know another one was posted, but was this one? Lots of good quotes, as per usual, by Taibbi. Taibbi writes about the corporate media as much as Trump and the alt-rights.

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Trump’s Appetite for Destruction: How Disastrous Convention Doomed GOP

Republican National Convention made a joke of American democracy
Matt Taibbi
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/trumps-appetite-for-destruction-how-disastrous-convention-doomed-gop-w430546

…see link…

….That the press seemed let down by the lack of turmoil on the streets was odd, given that the Trump convention itself was, after all, a historic revolt.

Thirteen million and three hundred thousand Republican voters had defied the will of their party and soundly rejected hundred-million-dollar insider favorites like Jeb Bush to re-seize control of their own political destiny. That they made perhaps the most ridiculous choice in the history of democracy was really a secondary issue.

It was a tremendous accomplishment that real-life conservative voters did what progressives could not quite do in the Democratic primaries. Republican voters penetrated the many layers of money and political connections and corporate media policing that, like the labyrinth of barricades around the Q, are designed to keep the riffraff from getting their mitts on the political process.

But it wasn’t covered that way. What started a year ago as an amusing story about a clown car full of bumbling primary hopefuls was about to be described to the world not as a groundbreaking act of defiance, but as a spectacular failure of democracy.

The once-divided media class now came together to gang-troll flyover America for its preposterous decision, turning the coverage of the convention into a parable on the evil of letting voters make up their own dumb minds. This was the Fatal Attraction of political coverage, a warning disguised as a story: Look what happens, you rubes, when you step outside the lines.

One of the great propaganda successes of the past few decades has been the myth of the liberal media. The idea that a monolithic herd of leftist snobs somehow controlled the news spread in part because of a seemingly key but really irrelevant demographic truth, i.e., that most individual reporters lean blue in their personal politics.

Moreover, from All the President’s Men to The Insider to Good Night, and Good Luck to Spotlight, Hollywood portrayals of the media always involve prudish conservative villains upended by chain-smoking/disheveled/wisecracking lefty heroes, Robert Redford’s amusingly hunky representation of then-Republican Bob Woodward notwithstanding.

But whatever their personal leanings, influential reporters mostly work in nihilistic corporations, to whom the news is a non-ideological commodity, to be sold the same way we hawk cheeseburgers or Marlboro Lights. Wars, scandals and racial conflicts sell, while poverty and inequality do not. So reporters chase one and not the other. It’s just business.

Previously, at conventions like this, pundits always played up the differences between Republicans and Democrats (abortion, religion, immigration), while ignoring the many areas of consensus (trade, military spending, surveillance, the Drug War, non-enforcement of financial crime, corporate tax holidays, etc.).

Any halfway decent boxing promoter will tell you the public must be made to believe the fighters hate each other in order to sell the fight. The fighters also must be hyped as both having a good shot to win. Otherwise, why watch?

The same principle applies in politics. Or at least it did, until Donald Trump arrived in Cleveland….

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…By the time Cruz’s speech was done, it felt as though an improbable collection of America’s most obnoxious, vapid, mean-spirited creeps had somehow been talked into assembling at the Q for the sheer novelty of it (“like X-Men, but for assholes” is how one reporter put it).

As for the subsequent speech by VP hopeful Mike Pence, there’s little to report beyond that it happened and he’ll someday regret it. Pence redefines boring. He makes Al Gore seem like the Wu-Tang Clan. His one desperate attempt at a Hillary takedown – calling her “the secretary of the Status Quo” – was so painful that people visibly winced in the stands. And when it was all over, he left Trump hanging for an excruciating unexecuted air kiss that immediately became the most mocked thing on Twitter since anything ever. It was a mathematically inexpressible level of Awkward….

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…The buzz in the hall on the final night was that Trump might screw things up – how could he not? On the primary trail we had never seen anything like him: impulsive, lewd, grandiose, disgusting, horrible, narcissistic and dangerous, but also usually unscripted and 10 seconds ahead of the news cycle.

We could never quite tell what he was: possibly the American Hitler, but just as possibly punking the whole world in the most ambitious prank/PR stunt of all time. Or maybe he was on the level, birthing a weird new rightist/populist movement, a cross of Huey Long, Pinochet and David Hasselhoff. He was probably a monster, but whatever he was, he was original.

Then came Thursday night. … see link
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