Fake Massacres, Smokescreens & MAGA

Kellyanne Conway peddles fabricated facts

Well it's the first Friday of February and we've reached inauguration-plus two weeks.

So how's that whole "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan-thing shaping up?

If repeating fake information and blatantly lying to the press is any measure of the success of this administration then they're doing a bang-up job.

As illustrated by White House spokesperson Kellyanne Conway citing a totally fabricated "Bowling Green Massacre" that never actually took place during an MSNBC interview yesterday while trying to justify Trump's much-criticized restriction on Muslims entering the U.S.

Sure it's a total disaster that makes Conway look like an uninformed amateur, but who knows?

The way this clown car is rolling, it may well have been done on purpose just to elicit the kind of media and public reaction that it's garnered - why?

As a carefully-crafted smokescreen to distract public attention from the radical extremist agenda the administration, in cooperation with the Republican House and Senate, are trying to ram down the throats of the American people.

Have you noticed how these sorts of quasi-delusional kinds of outbursts pop up like clockwork?

Australian Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull

I mean Trump's silly phone-feud with the conservative prime minister of Australia?

A Democratic nation that's been a close ally of the United States since the first world war?

I mean come on, really? Australia??

What the hell was that about?

My sense is that this administration's tactic of "lie then retract or deny" is being used to deflect attention from what they're really up to

Which ain't good.

Like the high-chair president's move to begin eliminating the financial regulations President Obama put in place after the catostrophic financial crisis of 2008 - which of course was caused in no small part by the loosening of financial regulations on the banking and financial industries.

(Props to Maureen Dowd for the high-chair president line, I love that.)

So while everyone's getting their panties in a wad about Kellyanne Conway lying about a massacre that never happened, the Republicans are trying to unleash some seriously next-level sneaky shit.

As Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren noted on her Twitter feed yesterday, just as the Republican majority Senate confirmed former Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, the Republican majority House of Representatives quietly passed a bill that would allow the aforementioned Exxon-Mobil to secretly funnel money to foreign dictators in the interests of extracting more fossil fuels from the earth.

Reunited and it feels so good - Tillerson & Putin

And most decidedly NOT coincidentally, Russia recently sold a 19.5% share of the "state owned" oil behemoth Rosneft for $10.2 billion Euros.

To who?

A shell company based in the Cayman Islands just as the Trump administration was announcing efforts to begin to ease sanctions on Russia.

The myriad conflicts of interest between Rex Tillerson being named Secretary of State and his Exxon-Mobil-fueled relationship with Vladimir Putin is staggering in the ethical sense.

It's fair to ask at what point will the millions of working class Americans who voted for the raving toddler-in-chief who now occupies the Oval Office realize what his real agenda is?

It seems as if all the little buttons that ignite prejudice and bigotry and engender discrimination based on religion, ethnicity and nationality have been pushed and prodded so often that the minions who swallowed the whole MAGA-thing are almost anesthetized to disturbing truths that Trump and his advisors want to normalize.

Like the banning of people based on their faith in the name of national security.

Which is like straight out of Hitler 101; a class Neo Nazi white nationalist White House policy advisor Stephen Bannon has certainly mastered.

By now it's pretty clear that the thin-skinned man-child intentionally uses his Twitter account as a free platform to toss out toxic chunks of political red meat to his followers and the media in order to distract them from the specifics of his real quasi-Republican agenda, which is of course to enrich himself financially.

So while many mainstream media outlets are reacting to his ceaseless petty feuds with his enemies, critics and increasingly (and disturbingly) America's traditional allies around the globe, they're not reporting about some of the really troubling things taking place on the ground (and behind Republican doors) as he begins to use the levers of executive authority to make himself and other greedy gazillionaires even richer.

And we're just two weeks from the inauguration? It's gonna a be a long four years.