The Daddy State is rolling along in spite of what we can see on the surface.
Vox:
Isolate your devotees from outside influence. Give them a comforting substitute for reality.
I'm not going to indulge the ridiculous notion that 45* is playing some amazing 8-Dimensional Chess - that's not something Obama could do, and it sure as fuck ain't something 45* could handle.
That's not to say this shit happens by accident, or that he's not capable of subtlety - just that 45* does what he does with a purpose in mind and it all ends up pretty much out in the open because he can't help bragging about it. And that's the key.
The Authoritarian has to keep score. He has to be able to point to what he's done and count something (rally attendance, Electoral Votes, dead Jews) because he has to show you how great he is as a boss, or to show the boss what a good little follower he is.
And when he runs up against the contradictions he creates (which always in turn create massive fuckups), he just makes shit up so the "facts" will fit around the required outcome.
Keep watching. Keep pushing back.
Vox:
Report: Trump transition ordered government economists to cook up rosy growth forecasts
The Trump University economics department strikes again.
Updated by Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias matt@vox.com
Feb 17, 2017, 2:19pm EST
As the White House staff tries to put together a budget for President Donald Trump, they face a fundamental problem. Trump has promised to cut taxes, increase spending on the military and infrastructure, and avoid cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The only way to do that without producing an exploding budget deficit is to assume a big increase in economic growth.
And Nick Timiraos at the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is planning to do just that — by making things up.
Deep into his story about Trump budget hijinks, Timiraos reveals that “what’s unusual about the administration’s forecasts isn’t just their relative optimism but also the process by which they were derived.” Specifically, what’s unusual about them is that they weren’t derived by any process at all. Instead of letting economists build a forecast, Trump’s budget was put together with “transition officials telling the CEA staff the growth targets that their budget would produce and asking them to backfill other estimates off those figures.”And all that crapola falling out of 45*'s Putin Receptacle about Fake News?
Isolate your devotees from outside influence. Give them a comforting substitute for reality.
I'm not going to indulge the ridiculous notion that 45* is playing some amazing 8-Dimensional Chess - that's not something Obama could do, and it sure as fuck ain't something 45* could handle.
That's not to say this shit happens by accident, or that he's not capable of subtlety - just that 45* does what he does with a purpose in mind and it all ends up pretty much out in the open because he can't help bragging about it. And that's the key.
The Authoritarian has to keep score. He has to be able to point to what he's done and count something (rally attendance, Electoral Votes, dead Jews) because he has to show you how great he is as a boss, or to show the boss what a good little follower he is.
And when he runs up against the contradictions he creates (which always in turn create massive fuckups), he just makes shit up so the "facts" will fit around the required outcome.
Keep watching. Keep pushing back.
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