The Greatest Divide

Have you noticed that in politics the divide between what you see and what you get is often quite wide?  Did Joe Biden really ever function as President or was he just an enfeebled front for some Democrat cabal? L.A. has a horrendous homelessness problem and spends millions, if not billions, to deal with it.  But the problem never gets better.  Where does it all go?  More examples?  Sure…

By now everybody has seen through the ham-fisted fear campaign of the A.I. mavens, and who knows what game Gavin Newsome is playing, but you can bet it is not what he is saying.  This last link is to a piece by Scott Pinsker in which he points out that the line between a PR campaign and psyops has grown very thin.  Yesterday, in one of his regular visits with Sarah Bedford, she and the host discussed how social media has distorted how those born after 9-11-01.  Said Bedford, “Obviously, social media is not a place were truthful information tends to flourish.”  (Link behind the Hughniverse paywall.)

The information age has made it easier to find information and to propagate lies – and it appears to have done so in at least equal measure, if not leaning to the side of the lies.  and politicians and political consultants are nothing if not opportunists.  Thus campaigns really have come more to resemble psyops than a genuine presentation of the candidate.  Personality matters more than policy, and what you get in governance is often widely separated from what you saw in the campaign.  Worse yet, the candidate often reaches office and continues simply to be a media figure and leaves the actual governance up to the faceless bureaucrats – no longer using the political process as a job interview and turning it simply into a media audition.  And thus our government loses its accountability to the people.

Biden and Trump represent two very different ends of this same idea.  Biden was clearly an empty suit, a cardboard stand-up used as cover for government by a committee of Biden-circle apparatchiks, infiltrated to no small extent by blatant socialists.  By the end of his, gratefully, single term he had obviously lost all ability to control his own administration.

Trump, by contrast, was elected on the basis of a cursing, bombastic, terribly egotistical, plain-talking to the point of offensiveness, persona.  And yet his governance, while unconventional in some aspects is, on the whole, quite good.  He seems to have modified Teddy Roosevelt’s old adage.  He talks big, carries an enormous stick, but acts with prudence and patience.  Example – we all went into this confrontation with Iran expecting total military annihilation.  We are getting something quite different – a combined and sophisticated strategy, of which the military is one small portion, that is patiently robbing the mullahs of their power while preserving the decent populace of that nation.

Biden used this gap between public presentation and actual reality as cover to do things clearly not within the will of the American people.  Trump is, on the other hand, restrained by his use of that gap to get elected.  Enough people are repulsed by the public persona that they cannot see when he does good, often taking contrary, and extremely harmful, positions out of pure opposition to his occupation of the office – and only that.  Further, because of the gap he simply will never be able to muster the national will to do things that require the whole of the national will – something like Reagan did when he won the Cold War.

This gap between presentation and reality has created massive distrust between the prevailing political parties, and goes a long way to explain our current deep, seemingly unbreachable, political divides.  We don’t really know who we are dealing with anymore.

The fix to this dilemma is not up to the politicians – they are opportunists and will do whatever.  The solution is up to us, the voter.  We have to become more sophisticated and learn to see through the media, and especially social media, fog.  As the saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.”