Good lord(and I’m an atheist). OTOH, imagine the mindset of a person that watches Fox News for five hours in one day. And then imagine it is the most powerful man on Earth who had time to campaign for an hour on Fox News the following day.
“President Fox News Grandpa Had Himself a Morning on Fox & Friends
The world’s most powerful man called into a TV show to rant about a server in Ukraine, a haunting demonstration of his inability to process what constitutes observable reality.
If you are in any way tethered to observable reality, you will have noticed that this was not a good week for Donald Trump, American president. A parade of witnesses testified under oath that he’d engaged in a corrupt scheme to force a foreign government to attack American democracy for his personal benefit. Luckily for him, he’s not tethered at all, and neither is his favorite teevee network, The Fox News Channel. The impeachment hearings over the last fortnight have exposed that we do indeed live in two worlds: one, where members of Congress interviewed witnesses familiar with events, under penalty of perjury, to better understand what happened; two, the world of CrowdStrike, and Bruce and Nellie Ohr, and the Steele Dossier, and the “nude photos,” and whatever the hell else the reprehensible Devin Nunes kicked off every hearing by ranting about.
It was that world in which the president elected to keep himself safely ensconced on this Friday morning, as he joined his best friends in the whole world—the Fox & Friends—to discuss the week’s events. But as you will see, his view on events is no longer merely filtered through the kaleidoscopic bullshit of The Fox News Channel. He is now living in an entirely alternate reality, one where Ukraine attacked us in 2016, not Russia, who were framed, and Ukraine was in some kind of cahoots with the Democratic National Committee, and then the DNC gave the Ukrainians a server, which the Ukrainians refused to give the FBI, and if we could just get the server, which he asked President Zelensky for “very directly,” then we’d all get to the bottom of this little spy caper.
That is to say: the president is a Fox News Grandpa who phones into his favorite teevee show and sounds like one of the more deranged callers on C-SPAN who’s cut off midway through their third sentence. Trump was on-air for nearly an hour….
“The FBI went in and they told ’em, ‘Get out of here, you’re not—we’re not giving it to you.’ They gave the server to CrowdStrike, or whatever it’s called, which is a country—a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian. And I still want to see that server. You know, the FBI’s never gotten that server. That’s a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?”
Literally none of this is true. It is insanity. It has no bearing on reality. It seems to be one of those situations where the President of the United States convinced himself of some loony thing to protect himself from the truth, and now has repeated it so many times he genuinely believes it….
We are currently running an experiment on ourselves, except we long ago lost any control over how it’s conducted. We traded our lab coats in to become the rats. There is a man who appears to be in cognitive decline, who does not read and who gets all of his information from the TV screen—he admitted here that he watched Fox News for five hours (!) yesterday—in charge of the country. He seems legitimately unable to parse what is true and what is false, because it does not occur to him that it would matter. All information is judged on a single criterion: Is it good for me, or is it bad for me? Do they like me, or do they not like me? This is insanity. The contours of reality cannot be bent forever to prop up one loud grandpa’s fragile self-conception. Eventually the bend will become a break, and it’s all of us—the whole nation—who will fall into the void.”
Good lord(and I’m an atheist). OTOH, imagine the mindset of a person that watches Fox News for five hours in one day. And then imagine it is the most powerful man on Earth who had time to campaign for an hour on Fox News the following day.
“President Fox News Grandpa Had Himself a Morning on Fox & Friends
The world’s most powerful man called into a TV show to rant about a server in Ukraine, a haunting demonstration of his inability to process what constitutes observable reality.
If you are in any way tethered to observable reality, you will have noticed that this was not a good week for Donald Trump, American president. A parade of witnesses testified under oath that he’d engaged in a corrupt scheme to force a foreign government to attack American democracy for his personal benefit. Luckily for him, he’s not tethered at all, and neither is his favorite teevee network, The Fox News Channel. The impeachment hearings over the last fortnight have exposed that we do indeed live in two worlds: one, where members of Congress interviewed witnesses familiar with events, under penalty of perjury, to better understand what happened; two, the world of CrowdStrike, and Bruce and Nellie Ohr, and the Steele Dossier, and the “nude photos,” and whatever the hell else the reprehensible Devin Nunes kicked off every hearing by ranting about.
It was that world in which the president elected to keep himself safely ensconced on this Friday morning, as he joined his best friends in the whole world—the Fox & Friends—to discuss the week’s events. But as you will see, his view on events is no longer merely filtered through the kaleidoscopic bullshit of The Fox News Channel. He is now living in an entirely alternate reality, one where Ukraine attacked us in 2016, not Russia, who were framed, and Ukraine was in some kind of cahoots with the Democratic National Committee, and then the DNC gave the Ukrainians a server, which the Ukrainians refused to give the FBI, and if we could just get the server, which he asked President Zelensky for “very directly,” then we’d all get to the bottom of this little spy caper.
That is to say: the president is a Fox News Grandpa who phones into his favorite teevee show and sounds like one of the more deranged callers on C-SPAN who’s cut off midway through their third sentence. Trump was on-air for nearly an hour….
“The FBI went in and they told ’em, ‘Get out of here, you’re not—we’re not giving it to you.’ They gave the server to CrowdStrike, or whatever it’s called, which is a country—a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian. And I still want to see that server. You know, the FBI’s never gotten that server. That’s a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?”
Literally none of this is true. It is insanity. It has no bearing on reality. It seems to be one of those situations where the President of the United States convinced himself of some loony thing to protect himself from the truth, and now has repeated it so many times he genuinely believes it….
We are currently running an experiment on ourselves, except we long ago lost any control over how it’s conducted. We traded our lab coats in to become the rats. There is a man who appears to be in cognitive decline, who does not read and who gets all of his information from the TV screen—he admitted here that he watched Fox News for five hours (!) yesterday—in charge of the country. He seems legitimately unable to parse what is true and what is false, because it does not occur to him that it would matter. All information is judged on a single criterion: Is it good for me, or is it bad for me? Do they like me, or do they not like me? This is insanity. The contours of reality cannot be bent forever to prop up one loud grandpa’s fragile self-conception. Eventually the bend will become a break, and it’s all of us—the whole nation—who will fall into the void.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a29890242/trump-fox-and-friends-call-in-ukraine-server/
Oh, and during his rant, Trump admitted publicly(for the third or fourth time) that he obstructed justice as detailed in the Mueller report.