If the legitimacy of the government derives from the consent of the majority, then at some point, we will have to address this disjuncture between the popular will and our elected bodies. We should start with nonpartisan redistricting reforms, and a fresh look at the Electoral College. But Mr. Trump’s comments make the adoption of democratic reforms that much harder.
Second, there’s a more insidious longer-term purpose here as well. Propaganda about illegal voting has been used — throughout history and in modern times — to justify unnecessary restrictions on voting. Unpopular incumbents like Mr. Trump can help their odds of re-election with measures that make it harder for people to vote.
Source: Trump’s Lies Pave the Way for an Assault on Voting Rights – The New York Times
Tag: lies
Welcome to 1984. Trump is more dystopian than Orwell.
Three different Orwell experts find massive and unmistakable parallels between the Trump administration and the dystopian nightmare of 1984.
This part quoted below struck me the most because so many of us cried out about lies, fake morality, and deception during the Bush administration, but there were never any social or political consequences. So of course the post-truth war on the reality-based community has continued and intensified.
But this new world has been a while coming. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” were foreshadowed by the George W Bush adviser who said in 2002 that the new American empire was “creating [its] own reality”. As in the 1930s, war has been at the heart of the corrosion of trust in politicians. The lies over Iraq and the quagmire of Afghanistan were followed by the financial crash of 2008, and bankers’ bonuses – making people far more willing to disbelieve the remote metropolitan media and be drawn to the false dawn promised by Trump.
Read more in The Guardian today: Welcome to dystopia – George Orwell experts on Donald Trump.
How do you spell L-I-E?
I just got the following new alert from CNN.com “The White House will allow key presidential aide Karl Rove and former counsel Harriet Miers to be interviewed by committees probing the firings of U.S. attorneys, but they will not testify under oath, Rep. Chris Cannon says.”
In other words, we don’t want to start a whole ‘nother perjury investigation so we’ll let them lie to you, just not under oath. Does that make you feel better?