It may sound like it's a bit over the top, but when you've got a fuckwad like Donald Trump going over the top several times in any given News Cycle, it all starts to look a little normal - and that's kinda the problem.
I long for the good old days of nice quiet boring elections. Oh yeah, BTW - when you Bernie Bros get all het up and blathery about Wasserman-Schultz rigging the thing, and how Hillary hijacked the primaries and there was Fraud and all that? You open the door for Trump to pull the shit that Trump seems to be trying to pull.
We used to be able to count on news magazine shows like 60 Minutes for that kinda thing - ah, those were the days. Have you even seen that shit lately?
In CBS's defense, at least they pointed up some of the problems and some of the efforts being made to help people who've come home with some real problems that they either didn't have when we sent them over there, or who may have had the beginnings of a problem that just got a lot worse - but at any rate are beset with problems simply because we're so determined to make these kids do shitty things to other people while practically ignoring the shitty things happening to them because of the shitty things we sent them over there to do.
And it oughta be pretty easy to see a parallel between Army Rangers in Iraq and militarized cops here at home.
Whatever; but notice - the CBS piece is like Thoughts-n-Prayers Journalism. It tells the story in such a passive voice that we get to think of ourselves as informed and compassionate, but still pretend these problems aren't really our problems; we even get to think these problems are totally disconnected from anything we've ever done - like voting for the wrong politicians - or not bothering to vote at all - or supporting the War Machine companies who maintain a near strangle hold on half-a-trillion tax dollars every fucking year.
And that's the difference as I see it - Oliver is addressing the problem, but he's also talking about the connections with what "our government" is doing in our names, while it seems like CBS is going out of its way to ignore all that so they can give us the Facebook version.
There's not so much as an acknowledgement of right-or-wrong about any aspect of the veterans' troubles; and they're sure as fuck working hard to avoid inviting an inference that maybe we oughta make something of a commitment to work for solutions - at the very least we need to be talking about pressuring the GOP (mostly) to get up off their asses and stop trying to starve the VA into a privatization scheme that benefits practically nobody but their cronies.
Because above all else, Press Poodles earn their kibble by making sure we don't end up thinking we need to do anything - cuz that might mean pushing a few dollars towards helping Americans and away from the commercial interests of a corporate content provider.
"Too often, the face of our economic superiority is a corporate imperialism - our technological dominance is shown by smart bombs and Predator drones. We could do something else."
Trump says if he does a great job as president, his assets will increase in value, and so: "...that's a conflict, but that's like a good kind of conflict, isn't it?"
He starts his bad week with a poor showing at the debate, follows it with three days of Alicia Machado and "finishes" with this little meltdown in Ohio, which included more than some vague allusion to how maybe Hillary's not been "loyal" to Bill (?) Seriously, this is the guy they're talking about when they try to warn us about wrestling with pigs.
We can parse it out and try to draw conclusions about his fragile ego and the weird workings in Trump's little brain, but I think we have to consider that he's really just following his usual pattern, which is first and always counterpunch - never brush it off and never let any of it go - Tit-For-Tat come hell or high water.
But second - and I think more to the point - there's real purpose to it. This is a guy who throws shit. He's learned that the more shit he throws, the harder it is for anybody to sort thru it and make any sense of it. But while we're busy trying to get our heads around the shit storm, he stays more or less off the hook because we've all spent one more week not looking into the Rape Allegations and why they postponed the hearing; not looking at The Trump Foundation being uncertified which makes Trump's own actions potential felonies; not focusing on the leak of a few pages of his tax documents from 1996 that appear to confirm that he's been stiffing us all for the last 20 years - and that's what he wants. He wants to stall and deflect and postpone, constantly doubling down on his phony Populist routine which gives him more opportunity to go on playing the rubes for suckers, putting more millions in his pocket, as he moves towards whatever he thinks is his destiny while giving us that self-satisfied comfortable feeling that we've got him all figured out - and maybe we do, but prob'ly we don't.
It's not a ringing endorsement, but when the Rupert Street Journal Editorial Page puts up anything that isn't easily recognizable as slagging "The Libruls", it means something; it's important.
The anecdote is a powerful illustration for your narrative, although it can be a very misleading thing in direct debate (see Logical Fallacy - Anecdote). But when the stories are common to the point of being legion, there's more than some probability that we've got a real problem. And these stories are so common, even I know a guy who did some sub-contracting on The Taj Mahal, and got fucked over by Donald Trump.
Trump is the perfect example of a business ethic that says "I get to promise you whatever it takes to make the deal, but when it comes to paying the invoices that I contracted for, I intend to do only what my lawyers can't keep the law from forcing me to do at gunpoint." When the guys at the top have their spats, and it gets expensive, and they need money to settle - guess who gets squeezed? I worked with guys like Trump my whole career. I watched two of the best companies ever get swamped by the shit that follows these malignant slugs like plague follows rats. This Trump guy is weak and cheap - he has no soul and no honor.
