Thursday, April 02, 2020

Who Knows South Korea Better Than Anybody?

Who knows South Korea better than anybody? If you're scratching your head at that question, here's an easier one - who would say, "I know South Korea better than anybody."

Yeah - that guy, the guy who goes on to state with authority that 38 million people live in Seoul.

10 million people live in Seoul.

It isn't what you say it's how you say it - which is part of the reason why some people think this bullying fool is trustworthy.




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It is and was all a lie.

Stuart Stevens is one of the most successful GOP operatives of his generation having helped dozens of Republicans be elected to office. He is now the author of the book due to come out in September, "It Was All A Lie - How The Republican Party Became Donald Trump".

According to the publishers website, Stevens, "helped to create the modern party that kneels before a morally bankrupt con man and now he wants nothing more than to see what it has become burned to the ground."




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Stevens isn't the first to stray from the herd.

Justin Amash showed his courage earlier this year and the GOP abandoned him for speaking truth. Mitt Romney had the courage to be the only Republican senator to vote for one of the articles of impeachment. You can see what the people who own; the GOP, it's politicians, and state run TV - thought about that by looking at the headlines created by Fox News.

For anyone willing to listen, conservatives have been warning us for years that the Republican party has been becoming more and more radical. Norm Orenstein is just one example. He is the co-author of the book It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism. In the book and in this WaPo Op-ed from eight years ago, Orenstein and his co-author Thomas Mann make this point,
"The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges."
I bolded that last sentence because we are seeing in life and death terms how true it was - as the Covid-19 pandemic spreads throughout the United States without adequate testing, critical medical supplies or any semblance of organization in (or from) the federal government.

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Decades ago David Brock was a right-wing propagandist for the Republican party. He had a change of heart and created Media Matters for America and wrote a variety of books critical of the Republican party including;

Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative

The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy

The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine

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People who survive trying times do so in part by not having false hope.

Creating false hope can break our hearts and our spirits when our hopes and dreams collide with painful reality. James Stockdale says it better than I can. When asked who didn't make it out of the POW camp he was confined in he answers,
"Oh, that's easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, 'We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart."
Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot by James Stockdale.