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.