August 30, 2017

In case you missed it, there's a new trend on Twitter: complaining that Trump isn't getting enough credit for the "heckuva job" he's doing regarding Hurricane Harvey, especially since Obama failed so badly getting help to Katrina.

But this is far more than just Trumpster stupidity (tm). There was a conscious effort by the Republican Party and right wing media in 2009 to forget that George W. Bush was ever president. The economic crash under his watch, and dismal Katrina performance, the Iraq War-- among other massive fails -- required Republicans to engage what Driftglass calls "The Bush Off Machine."

This desire to forget their culpability in electing (until now my friends, until now!) the worst president in history led to a scrambling of the timeline in which they never voted for Bush and aren't responsible for anything bad that happened during the eight years he was president.

And the media helped. It's hilarious and sad that it took them until 2012 for even a minority of cable news pundits to "discover" that Tea Party members were merely Bush voters in tri-corner hats.

Then there's the "blame liberals and Obama for everything" addiction, led by on-air pundit Newt Gingrich:

Give a low-information voter an unhealthy dose of Hannity every night, and actual Republican voters will swear to you that Katrina itself was all Obama's fault.

This isn't an accident. And it's not just stupidity. These voters (!) have been trained to think this way. It's why we have Trump.

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