Friday, December 8, 2017

I used to think Fox News...

...was one of the biggest, if not the biggest, problems in America. Yep, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report and now Brietbart. Those, I used to think, were the biggest problems in America. It was right-wing media, I reasoned, that dumbed-down the Republican Party base, giving us first the tea party, and now Donald Trump.

But now I think just a little differently. And a piece in Bloomberg this morning, "What If the Courts Were Filled With 'Little Scalias'?," reminds me why (my emphasis):

The left has lately been in a panic at the realization that President Donald Trump has so many vacancies to fill on the federal bench, a panic hardly abated by conservative proposals to add a lot more seats. The fear, as one of my Yale colleagues puts it, is that Trump will appoint lots of “little Scalias” -- a reference to Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016 and was succeeded on the Supreme Court this year by Neil Gorsuch.

Whom, you might ask, are all these "little Scalias"? And the point is, it doesn't matter: they're out there, apparently, and just waiting to be appointed to the federal bench. And the point, further, is that they weren't created by Trump or Jeff Sessions or even Fox News. And neither were Fox News's viewers. No, they were out there all along and merely there for the taking. Do you think, for example, that Sean Hannity's recent paranoid conspiracy rantings are costing him viewers? Then think again.

So my final point is that Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and, yes, Donald Trump, wouldn't exist without a ready and willing audience to support them. A nation of over 330 million people is bound to have a few jackasses like Sean Hannity and Donald Trump. (It's probably a bell curve.) The problem -- the main problem -- here is that over 60 million adults in this country thought Trump was qualified to be president. As Pogo famously said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Or, as Jerry Seinfeld put it:

"I will never understand people."

"They're the worst."

That's the problem with America -- Americans.