WORDS HAVE MEANINGS!

I've been on Facebook for a fair amount of time and have something of a profile. I'm also quietly proud that I like to troll righties. Some would say that I shouldn't take advantage of someone as stupid as maga. They would have been right in a more amenable time. That is not now! The blatant lies and disinformation from the right must be countered, lest they multiply out of control. Lest they further damage our future. As evidence let us talk about Pizzagate, as if it was a thing, like Watergate. 

According to the story the maga underworld spread in 2016, Hillary Clinton and John Podestra ran a child sex ring from a basement in the Ping Pong Pizza Parlor. I didn’t make this up. A young man from Maryland packed up his assault style rifle and drove to Ping Pong Pizza to save those children. After firing a round in the floor, which fortunately did not go pinging around Ping-Pong Pizza and into some child's ribs, it became apparent there was no basement to run a child sex ring out of. I end this sentence with a preposition, in contempt of people allowed to use words so cavalierly as our right wing nutjobs are in the habit of doing. One of the 14 points of Fascism as described by Umberto Eco is Newspeak. Making use of an impoverished vocabulary. Words like Woke and DEI come immediately to mind. Recent accounts have added to this gem of campaign embarrassment from the right.  John Podesta's brother, as the story goes, was coming to DC to visit and he asked, over a cell connection, about Pizza. Our erstwhile rightwing Genius Brigade figured, this must be some kind of secret code. Because, no doubt John Podesta was a Democrat so his brother must be, as well and because theyre Democrats, it follows that they are child molesters. The fact that someone with the last name of Podesta might just want a slice of pizza because they like things Italian, did not occur to these morons. They wanted the kind of pizza you don't eat with a fork, where you bend it horizontally in the way Jon Stewart prefers. But the irony does not end there. The candidate the rightwing nutjobs worshipped was an actual child sex trafficker and they, the cult doesn't care. The intent is to plant that little shudder of some unamable guilt to hide your own guilt.

Another example, a post on Facebook asked if Pam Bondi should have the power to prosecute Joe Biden or Bill Clinton, or Barak Obama, if the evidence should become available.  I'm not a legal guy but I'm pretty sure, if the evidence has not emerged after this much time, it ain't gonna. More importantly, on what authority could the Nation's Attorney General prosecute past presidents on the assumption of some kind of evidence coming forward at some future time. Did I mention Attorney General Bondi's sketchy legal background? The bribe she took as Florida AG to withdraw from the Trump University case, her closeness to the Epstein mess. Did I mention that she serves as trump's consigliere'? Did I mention Trump's history of financial crime and his closeness with Putin and Orban? Did I mention Trump's prominent place in the Epstein files?

Hyperbole is the norm in Republican circles. Words are honored in the way that fishermen describe the one that got away. Hyperbole, which literally means an exaggeration not meant to be taken seriously. Listen to how they describe liberals. You would expect us to be the Red Guard from the 1960s, when in fact we are not as far left as Norwegian socialism.

Many years ago I remember politicians having a chuckle about how vicious insinuation could be used in a campaign. The example used was something about a politician on the stump saying something like, "now I'm sure my esteemed colleague does not beat his wife as vicious rumor claims".  This was not that long after former Senator Joseph McCarthy had the decency to drink himself to death. For a while politicians, even Republicans, were more careful of the appearence of lying. That has passed into history. We have incompetent people who misuse language, writing laws and filling government offices today. They are allowed to get by with this because of the culture of lies and disinformation that became normalized , once the Fairness Doctrine was ended. What can we expect when the Supreme Court has weakened the law, in the wake of making money-and the weilding of wealth-as a weapon endowed with free speech?