The GOP Spent Decades Making Sure Critical Thinking Wasn't Part Of Public Education-- Ergo: Trump

Not Just Trump-- Moron True Believers Like Boebert & Traitor Greene

In a post about the deceptive nature of Bloomberg News, John Pilger noted that “Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow deeply examined the process of human decision-making. His research provided evidence that, by nature, people prefer to avoid using the brain resources to the full, solving problems in an automatic subconscious mode. Our mind starts digging into accumulated life experience in search of similar situations or familiar names in order not to think for a long time. This is a well-known truth for marketers around the world. It's much easier to sell brand items than unknown items, even if they are of high quality.”

If Trump is a master at something, it’s always been a genre of marketing built on deceit, manipulation and projection. He’s combined the three to persuade a majority of Americans, according to a new CNN poll, to believe that Biden was involved in Hunter’s shady business dealings in Ukraine and China while he was vice president. CNN reported that “A majority, 61%, say they think that Biden had at least some involvement in Hunter Biden’s business dealings, with 42% saying they think he acted illegally, and 18% saying that his actions were unethical but not illegal. Another 38% say they don’t believe Joe Biden had any involvement in his son’s business dealings during his vice presidency. Just 1% believe Biden was involved, but did not do anything wrong. A 55% majority of the public says the president has acted inappropriately regarding the investigation into Hunter Biden over potential crimes, while 44% say that he has acted appropriately.”

Trump is the most corrupt occupant of the White House in history… so he uses his propaganda networks to assert that Biden is. The Trump Crime family is notorious for taking bribes and for grifting, so Trump attributes that to a Biden Crime Family.

Yesterday, Isaac Arnsdorf noted that Señor Trumpanzee has been escalating false attacks on Biden as some Republicans push toward impeachment. He reported that in campaign speeches the most dishonest person to ever step foot in the Oval Office “repeatedly exaggerates and misrepresents claims about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. ‘Manchurian candidate.’ ‘Stone-cold thief.’ ‘Dumb son of a bitch.’ Trump is by his own admission, attacking President Biden in increasingly vicious terms. The attacks on Biden center on allegations that are exaggerated or unfounded, frequently drawing on right-wing media reports about the foreign business dealings of Biden’s son Hunter Biden. The president has denied any involvement in his son’s affairs, and no evidence has emerged proving otherwise.”

The attacks offer a glimpse of potential 2024 battle lines and follow a well-established pattern for Trump of trying to delegitimize his political opponents. During the 2012 election, Trump became the leading promoter of the racist and unfounded conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born outside the United States. In 2016, Trump pledged to prosecute Hillary Clinton and encouraged his supporters’ chants of “Lock her up!”

Now, Trump is explicitly trying the same tack against Biden, announcing in April that he would “retire” the “Crooked” nickname for Clinton and start using it for Biden. “There’s never been anyone in the history of American politics so crooked or dishonest as Joe Biden,” he said at the time, during a campaign stop in Manchester, N.H.

The current onslaught from Trump coincides with a broader effort, as House Republicans have supplied a steady drumbeat of disclosures about Hunter Biden, with hard-liners pushing Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) toward opening an impeachment inquiry against the president, though they have not specified what it would focus on. Some House Republicans acknowledge the current evidence doesn’t implicate the elder Biden.

“Right now, I’m not convinced that that evidence exists,” Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) said Wednesday on CNN.

Buck is very extreme right— and a member of the neo-fascist House “Freedom” Caucus. If he’s saying that the whole impeachment thing is bullshit, what about the more mainstream conservatives who try to pass themselves off as moderates? I haven’t heard much from Tom Kean (R-NJ), Mike Lawler (R-NY), Michelle Steel (R-CA), Maria Salazar (R-FL), Don Bacon (R-NE), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), John Duarte (R-CA), Anthony D’Esposito (R-NY), Tony Gonzales (R-TX), Mike Turner (R-OH), Young Kim (R-CA), John James (R-MI), Bryan Steil (R-WI), Marc Molinaro (R-NY), Nick LaLota (R-NY), David Valadao (R-CA), Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), Dan Newhouse (R-WA), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA), Laurel Lee (R-FL), David Joyce (R-OH), Bill Huizenga (R-MI), Mike Garcia (R-CA), Mike Gallagher (R-WI), Juan Ciscomani (R-AZ) Andrew Garbarino (R-NY), Lori Chavez-DeReemer (R-OR), Aaron Bean (R-FL), Jay Obernolte (R-CA), Dusty Johnson (R-SD), Stephanie Bice (R-OK), Brandon Williams (R-NY)… These fake moderates could put an end to this immediately but just saying that they’re not voting to open an impeachment inquiry (and, while they’re at it, not voting to shut down the government). Trump is demanding both for the simple reason that he believes they’ll help his campaign.

Yesterday, The Hill reported that McCarthy has suggested that the House could hold a vote to launch an impeachment inquiry as soon as this month, despite hesitation from some moderates. Despite the graphic above, there are no Republican moderate (with the possible exception of Brian Fitzpatrick and, on no-abortion matters, Chris Smith (NJ). There are neo-fascists and mainstream conservatives, not moderates. And, generally, the mainstream moderates go along with the neo-facsists on almost everything.

The House Republicans aren’t about to say that they’re doing this because Trump is demanding it. Instead, according to The Messenger, they’re coalescing around a bullshit bribery charge. “After nearly a year of investigation, House Republicans have decided to try to make bribery the downfall of President Joe Biden as they prepare to open an impeachment inquiry, according to interviews with top House conservatives and four senior aides. Key Republicans tell The Messenger they are honing in on what they say is a ‘pay-to-play’ bribery scheme involving first son Hunter Biden's business dealings when he worked for a Ukrainian energy company and his father served as vice president… Boebert (R-CO), who sits on the House Oversight Committee, told The Messenger that when House Republicans return to Congress next week from their summer recess, Biden ‘should be impeached.’ Why? ‘For his role in the Biden Crime Family’s acceptance of tens of millions of dollars in bribes from foreign countries,’ she said… No evidence has surfaced, however, that shows President Biden received any of the funds that flowed to his son. And plenty of moderate and establishment Republicans worry impeachment will backfire on the party. ‘It’s stupid. It’s completely made up. They don’t have anything,’ longtime Republican strategist Susan Del Percio, who served in the administration of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, told The Messenger. ‘This is not about impeachment for cause. This is a political stunt. And I have a feeling it’s going to go very badly for Republicans.’ Calls for impeachment have grown louder since Donald Trump's third and fourth indictments, which include charges that the ex-president sought to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump himself has called on the House to ‘either impeach the bum, or fade into oblivion.’”

Let me go back to Arnsdorf’s piece from yesterday: “In Trump’s hands, the allegations against Hunter Biden have morphed into ‘absolute proof that Biden’s being paid off by China, Ukraine and many other countries,’ as the former president put it during a July speech in Iowa. Congressional Republicans have obtained thousands of pages of financial records and presented no evidence implicating President Biden in his son’s dealings. They also called witnesses who worked with Hunter Biden and testified that President Biden was not involved. Trump’s claim that the FBI has ‘explosive evidence that Joe Biden took bribes from Ukraine’ arose from a tip that was investigated and found to be unsubstantiated during Trump’s administration. In a campaign video posted to social media in August, Trump falsely claimed, ‘It is now 100% proven that the Biden Crime Family received more than $20 million from foreign countries while Crooked Joe was vice president.’ That allegation comes from a House Oversight Committee Republican staff report detailing payments from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine to Hunter Biden and his associates. Only about $7 million of the total was attributable to Hunter Biden, and none to Joe Biden. Elsewhere, Trump falsely alleged that ‘at least nine Biden family members were paid vast sums of money through 20 different shell companies for no legitimate reason at all.’ The source of the claim is another House Oversight Republican staff report, which found payments to Hunter Biden and two relatives, not nine family members and not including Joe Biden. The companies were operating businesses, not shells. Trump has tried to tie President Biden to his son’s dealings through instances in which Hunter Biden referenced their relationship. In one example, Hunter Biden sent a text message to a Chinese investor saying he was in the room with his father and expected payment immediately. Hunter Biden’s lawyer has said he was not in fact with his father that day, and there is no evidence that the elder Biden benefited from the transaction. Trump has also accused Biden of being paid off by China through his center affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania. In a July rally, Trump put the figure at ‘almost $100 million.’ But a Penn spokesperson told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the center received no gifts from Chinese or other foreign donors.”

From the unsubstantiated premise that Biden has taken bribes, Trump goes on to allege foreign blackmail caused Biden to take certain actions. However, those actions never occurred. He accused Biden of supporting the Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion because of being bribed. “Not a single American life should be put at risk because Crooked Joe Biden has been illegally paid off,” Trump said at a rally in July. Biden has expanded the U.S. military presence in Europe but ruled out deploying ground troops to Ukraine. In the August campaign video, Trump accused Biden of doing nothing while China “took over the Panama Canal,” mischaracterizing Chinese infrastructure investments in a bridge and port in the canal zone.

The frequently false claims the former president is making intersect with another argument that is central to his candidacy: He has suggested that the crimes he accuses Biden of committing are the reason he is being prosecuted. Trump is fighting four separate criminal indictments: in New York for a 2016 hush money scheme; in Florida for allegedly mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House; in Washington for attempting to overturn the 2020 election; and in Georgia for allegedly interfering in that state’s results. The New York and Georgia cases are run by local prosecutors. The federal cases are brought by special counsel Jack Smith, acting independently of the White House.

Biden has said he never suggested to the Justice Department whether federal prosecutors should or shouldn’t charge a case.

But in Trump’s telling, all the cases are coordinated and timed to distract from Biden’s own scandals. “Joe Biden and the radical left can take foreign bribes and be totally protected,” Trump said without evidence during a June speech at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club, on the night of his arraignment in the Florida documents case.

At a July rally in South Carolina, he added, without evidence: “Joe Biden used the DOJ to cover up his own crimes. He ordered his top political opponent, me, arrested.”

During Trump’s first court appearance in Washington, his campaign distributed fliers drawing connections between the timing of revelations about Hunter Biden’s business dealings and charges against Trump. “When Biden corruption is exposed, the government targets Trump,” the flier said in all caps. “This is the Biden playbook.”

If elected, Trump has vowed to take revenge on Biden through a special prosecutor.

“From my first day in office, I will appoint a special prosecutor to study each and every one of the many claims being brought forth by Congress,” he said at the New Hampshire campaign stop, “concerning all of the crooked acts, including bribes from China and many other countries, all these foreign countries sending money into the coffers of the Biden crime family.”

And speaking of Arnsdorf’s reporting, at the end of July, he noted that Trump was telling his allies in Congress to make aid to Ukraine conditional on opening a Biden impeachment inquiry. Quintessential Trump— and so frustrating that half the country is too stupid to see through it. He wrote that Trump “called on congressional Republicans to withhold military support for Ukraine until the Biden administration cooperates with their investigations into the president and his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings. ‘Congress should refuse to authorize a single additional shipment of our depleted weapons stockpiles … to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden Crime Family’s corrupt business dealings,’ Trump said at the rally. He added that any Republican lawmakers who didn’t join the effort should face primary challenges, a tactic he used last year to unseat Republicans who voted to impeach him for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.”