Thursday, September 5, 2019

The Total Devastation of Trump's Fake Hurricane Map

Maybe it's because the human mind can absorb only so much death and destruction and misery. Maybe it's because the consolidated media borg doesn't enjoy the same access to the Bahamas as it does to the White House and the halls of Congress. Maybe it's because their oil and gas and war industry sponsors would rather they talk about anything but Hurricane Dorian being the most glaring symptom to date of the heated-up planet.

Therefore, the scandal of Donald Trump's apparent doctoring of a map in order to "prove" his false statement last week that Alabama was in the storm's original tracking cone has actually vied for precedence with the actual storm, especially once Dorian had finally left the islands but had not yet begun its slow march up the Atlantic coast of the United States.




If there's one thing that the 24-hour news cycle abhors besides lack of insider accessibility, it's slowness. After awhile, a stalled-out hurricane and before-and- after aerial shots get boring. Anything that doesn't adhere to the spirit of capitalism and horse-race politics, anything that doesn't move at the speed of death is a yawn. People stop clicking unless they can see stuff up close and personal.

The world might be coming to an end, but the media will obsess over Trump's every oafish affront to reality to their last dying breaths. Nothing he does is too petty or too silly to turn them away, not even the tragedy of the Bahamas. Anything, anything to avoid the reality of the world outside of Washington, D.C. Some particularly bored enterprising journalists even went so far as to detect the tell-tale black Sharpie pen on the Resolute Desk and to helpfully circle it for our contrived outrage.

Dorian is not just your ordinary Category Five storm, you see. It's been officially dubbed a "political hurricane" by NPR, whose own storm coverage rotates around Trump focusing only on his base. If a story about disaster on an epic scale doesn't have a presidential campaign angle, then it might as well not even exist. The only eye that counts is Trump's beady little blue eye. The only wall that counts is not the eyewall of the hurricane, but his vanity border wall and his diversion of billions of Pentagon dollars from more deserving construction projects, such as the rebuilding of hurricane-devastated Puerto Rico.

Not that the Democratic leadership is as concerned about making regular Puerto Ricans' lives better as it is about the clear and present danger of Trump's threats to "national security." After all, Puerto Rico has become prime disaster capitalism real estate in the wake of Maria, with salivating plutocrats counting on all that government reconstruction money to help create another exclusive and secure paradise for themselves. 

There has certainly been no mainstream coverage this week about the US military being the most voracious consumer of polluting fossil fuels on Planet Earth, the burning of which causes global warming, which in turn spawns more powerful hurricanes like Dorian, which in turn create more short-term investment opportunities for the voracious uber-rich.

It's safer, and certainly a lot more fun, for the corporate media borg to ignore the roasting globe and instead to gleefully exult about Trump getting roasted for his weather map flimflam:


The illustration, shown in a video released by the White House Wednesday afternoon, instantly caught the attention of many, including late-night hosts, who ridiculed the president for once again appearing to distort facts. By early Thursday, “#sharpiegate” and other similar hashtags were still trending on Twitter.
“He’s not even trying to hide the lies anymore,” ABC host Jimmy Kimmel said. “Not only do we have fake news, we now have fake weather, too.”
Now, to it's credit, CNN did hold a climate change "town hall" for the Democratic presidential contenders on Wednesday. The candidates all did their earnest utmost to become Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez clones-for-a-day as they promised trillions of dollars to combat climate change. This televised spectacle was held to make up for the fact that the Democratic National Committee has refused to include climate change as an official debate topic. In light of the devastation of Dorian, therefore, the party elders actually vie with Trump himself in the feigned cluelessness and cynicism departments. Of course, the party had also reneged on its pledge to refuse any more donations from the fossil fuel industry only two months after agreeing to ban them.

 Chairman Tom Perez probably signed the initial divestment pledge with a Sharpie pen retrofitted with disappearing ink.

4 comments:

Capt. Queeg said...

Ahh, but the strawberries that's... that's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with... geometric logic... that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox DID exist, and I'd have produced that key if they hadn't of pulled the Caine out of action. I, I, I know now they were only trying to protect some fellow officers...

opit said...

If there is to be any separation between 'climate change' and weather, then storms must be regarded as outside trend lines even as they affect averages. Otherwise a person might be tempted to note that they are nowhere any part of 'climate projections' - wise as they are too localized,sporadic and violent.

voice-in-wilderness said...

Given Trump's pathological inability to admit a mistake, a clever opponent could probably set an even more embarrassing trap for him (not that embarrassment is one of Trump's set of emotions).

Anyway, I'm much more interested in Trump's tweet of the picture of the Iranian missile site blow-up. WIRED Magazine has an article that explains how satellite buffs were able to determine which U.S. spy satellite took the picture, noting how hard the military has worked to keep such capabilities secret. Not the first president to off-handedly divulge an important secret, but if anyone else had tweeted the picture, Trump would have put them in Guantanomo (or Bagram if we still operate that black site).

Erik Roth said...

Yes, yes, yes.
What's deplorable, to quote a telling term, is the brazen failure by Democratic Party elites (linked with all the elites) to hold anyone accountable for anything, in order to keep the ball in their game rolling all the way to the bank.
Impeachment? Emolument? Security? Too many syllables to hold attention, let alone concern.
But painfully, and perilously, it is beyond deplorable. It is insufferable.
Somberly I submit another commentary to consider:

"President Sharpie —
Trump’s lies about Alabama and Hurricane Dorian are no laughing matter."
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-hurricane-dorian-sharpie-map-881285/
September 6, 2019 ~ by Jamil Smith