First, a personal note. The surgeon found three small polyps (is there a plural for polyps?) in my colon yesterday, all easily removed. She told me after that, given my age, this might well be my last one since something else, like my atrocious eating habits, will do me in first. I was actually a bit sad at the news, not about passing on but about no more colonoscopies. After all, the young surgeon could pass for my grand-daughter and was very cute. I was surprised, though, when she asked me for a date after the procedure. Then, again, she did see my best side … LOL. But what hit me was an untapped business opportunity, the ‘colonoscopy diet.’ If I had one of these every week, I’d lose all that extra weight I have … and with no freaking exercise.

Okay, there is a lot of more serious stuff to worry about out there, or so it seems. Economists keep warning of an impending economic collapse even though nothing has happened yet. Donald Trump, who seemed to be on the ropes not that long ago, has surged back into the GOP lead after his legal woes increased, and America’s gun carnage seems to be worsening as talk of widespread civil strife increases. Of course, there remains the international wild card in Putin, a Trump-like figure who might easily ignite a scorched earth policy as his autocratic rule is threatened by an ill-fated incursion into the Ukraine. But our real worries are internal.

Let’s take the economy. Various pundits have been predicting a recessions or even a 1930’s – type depression for a year now. Some experts point out that some 12 economic indicators point to a crash of some magnitude. Most recently, it has been pointed out that the M2 money supply has shrunk by 4.1 percent since last year. This is a tectonic change, not seen since the great crash of almost a century ago. Though I have no idea how we lose money in the aggregate, this sounds ominous. Yet, the markets have rebounded since the beginning of the year and Armageddon keeps getting put off. So, are the doomesday predicitons real? Should we listen to see if ‘the fat lady is really singing.’

Who knows what to believe these days. What is real and what not. The thing is, we have been inundated by clearly ‘fake news’ since the Gingrich Revolution of the early 1990s. It existed before that of course but not on the scale we now face. I’m not talking about misinformation from Russian bots enclosed in military basements in St. Petersburgh Russia who swayed the 2016 election toward their favored candidate Donald Trump. No, I’m talking about our home grown propoganda machine that would have made the Russian Communist print outlet Pravda appear to be a beacon of truth. Those old style Commies could have learned a lesson or two from the today’s Republican Party in the art of sophisticated misdirection and outright lying.

George Washington once said that “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the powers of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to their unjust dominion.” Either he was very prescient and able to see two centuries into the future or he was talking about Thomas Jefferson who, disagreeing with the oh-so popular Washington’s beliefs in a strong national government, waged a quiet campaign agasinst him and then an overt and salacious campaign against his Federalist successor John Adams. Newspapers, in those days, often were aligned with specific candidates and philosophies. But somewhere in the 19th century, they adopted a more independent posture and pretended to print the truth, leaving opinion to their editorial pages. Amazingly, some of them did just that.

Something happened about three decades ago that restarted the age of propoganda and outright fabrications with a renewed vengeance. A good starting point would be when Newt Gingrich and some 300 Republican members of Congress stood on the Capitol steps on September, 1994 and announced their ‘Contract with America,’ or what some of us called the ‘Contract ON America.’ Though only a few minor promises in their expansive reworking of the country ever saw the light of day, it was ‘the show’ that mattered. That summer, I went back to the U. of Wisconsin after a year’s leave in D.C. to work on Clinton’s welfare legislation. I recall a top Republican operative on the Hill telling me one day about the new language they were required to use. The inheritance tax was always to be called the death tax, or you were fined by the party (the Republican and not the Communist party). Capture the language and you capture the heart. More to the point, the show was about to become big time.

In 1960, there were only two radio stations that had a talk-show format. In 1995, there were 1,130 such stations across the nation with 70 percent of them explicitly conservative in perspective. The march to the right was jump-started in 1988 when Rush Limbaugh went from a local show to a national frenzy reaching some 20 million faithful listeners at one point. Soon several heavyweights entered the scene. The conservative muckraking outlet called the Drudge Report started in 1995, Fox News began its rise to prominence in 1996, and Newsmax in 1998. Succcess breeds imitation and others joined a crowded field of far-right outlets.

The Evangelical Church collaborated with the Republican National Committee (RNC) to form the Christian Coalition, led by Ralph Reed with much support from evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell. That group organized a smear campaign based on total fabrications about Democratic candidates across America. The lies worked and the Republicans secured the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades. With such success, the web of deceipt went into high gear. Limbaugh, the first superstar was followed by Hannity, Beck, O’Reilly, Carlson, Coulter, and too many others to mention. There was much money to be made in feeding the public BS and plenty of greedy types lining up at the trough.

One of House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s first moves was to eliminate the Office of Technological Assessment (OTA). This office, created by a former Republican President (Nixon, no less) before the party had gone off the rails saved only $20 million at the time even though it was touted as a cost saving measure. More importantly, it provided Congress with objective information and thus was seen as dangerous to the apparatchiks of the GOP. In a moment of transparent projection, Gingrich hilariously accused President Clinton of “treating truth as a transaction.” Are any Republicans self-aware or don’t they care?

Today, I have time for one example of how wild lies infest the public consciousness. In July, 1993, White House Counsel Vince Foster, a close Arkansas friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, committed suicide by shooting himself through the head in a national park near to Washington. In a suicide note, he wrote about heinous Republican attacks on him as part of their ridiculous Whitewater scandal campaign. He was too decent of a man for such scurrilous attacks, became depressed, and ended it all. Vince pretty much blamed Republicans for this. So, how did the new Party of Gingrich respond?

First, a Gingrich acolyte, Dan Burton somehow took a simulated shooting of a melon as proof that Foster was murdered and did not die of a self-inflicted wound. They were soon off and running, aided by Limbaugh and the growing far-right propoganda machine as well as millions poured into this campaign by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife who created the infamous ‘Arkansas campaign’ to dig up dirt on the Clintons whether valid or not. That grew into some four distinct investigations, one of them being by Ken Starr, the lead investigator in charge of House campaign to impeach Clinton. They spent millions trying to prove such silly fabrications that the Clinton’s killed their friend because he knew too much about their scandalous behaviors, that they rolled him up in a carpet and dumped him where he was found, and that this was just the tip of the iceberg. They did all this for years despite the fact that every single responsible official said over and over that all the evidence supported suicide, every last bit.

Guess what, at the end of the day (or propoganda campaign), none of these ‘investigations’ found any proof of the suicide lie … not a single thing. Yet, only 35 percent of the public by this time believed that Vince Foster killed himself, though fewer blamed the Clintons. Buoyed by their early success, the purveyors of falsehoods eventually had the Clinton death toll up to 60 and then 90 victims, eventually leading Hillary to complain about the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ that attacked them without end, without mercy, and without any real justification.

That was at least a generation ago. Does it matter now? Well, Hillary Clinton went into the 2016 presidential campaign hindered by a great amount of distrust after a quarter century of continuous attacks. She lost to a man who, by any measure, was totally unsuited for the office. In the Covid pandemic, the right-wing propoganda machine convinced many Americans that vaccines would kill or cripple them, that Dr. Fauci was the enemy, and that most prevention measures were a Democratic plot to ruin the economy and weaken Trump. As a result, the death rate from Covid in those counties with the highest support for Trump was 5 to 6 times higher than in the top Democratic counties. Their lies were killing their own kind, but why would they care? And now we have the famous‘Big Lie’ campaign, much like the Vince Foster matter or the Benghazi campaign during the Obama years where multiple investigations also came up with absolutley nothing. So much time and effort spent on election fraud to sate the malignant narcissism of one demented wanna-be autocrat.

Oh, I remember watching Walter Cronkite on the evening news in the 1960s. Surely not everyone agreed with him. However, he gave us reasonably objective news in a non-hyperbolic style. We pretty much were operating out of the same playbook. Now we have at least two oppositional worlds where the members of each hate one another. Not a good sign for the future … the divided house and all. Let me end with a quote from John Adams (1814): “Remember, a Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

I should use the my one ear that still works to see if the ‘fat lady’ is yet singing.