Trump Won’t Inherit the Land, So He’s Sowing It with Salt (MUST READ from Foreign Policy)

[highplainsdem]

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/22/trump-wont-inherit-the-land-so-hes-sowing-it-with-salt-vladimir-putin-playbook/

When Donald Trump said on Tuesday night that he would leave us in “suspense” come November 9, much of the country let out a gasp and the statement has dominated campaign coverage ever since. I wish this weren’t the case, but I was not all that surprised. Not because this wasn’t, as Hillary Clinton responded, a “horrifying” statement, not because Trump has been alluding to a “rigged” election for weeks now, not because I’ve become numb to the non-stop logorrheic rainbow of horror constantly shooting from Trump’s mouth, and not even because I was watching with a group of deep-red North Carolina Republicans who seemed to operate in base-12 while I was stuck in conventional old base-10.

To me, all of this was just one more step in the long, absurdist slog of the Russianization of this campaign. I’m not talking about Paul Manafort, or Trump’s real estate investors, or even his open invitation to the Russian intelligence services to hack U.S. computers in search of Clinton’s deleted emails. Even the Wikileaks-Trump-Putin triad feels natural at this point.

When Trump and his acolytes accuse protestors of being well-organized, paid saboteurs, I hear echoes of Kremlin television accusing people who came out in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square to protest for democracy in 2011 of working for the U.S. State Department. When Trump lies and injects conspirological plots into the mainstream, when I hear his supporters echo them back to me as gospel because “it’s on the Internet,” I feel like I’m back in Russia, listening to people tell me about George Soros and his nefarious plots. And then I hear about George Soros from Trump supporters who tell me that he has both created the Black Lives Matter movement and hacked American voting machines.

When I lived in Russia, every opposition group was afraid to take money from any organization even remotely connected to Soros, a name that is still code for shadowy, Semitic control over the duped masses, their money, and their screens. When Trump accuses others of what he’s doing himself — or what the Russians are doing on his behalf — I hear Vladimir Putin’s voice. When Trump talks about regulating the “dishonest” press or about jailing Clinton, these echoes become deafening.

But when Trump questions the peaceful transfer of power, when he, essentially, says that he will only accept the election results if he wins, when his supporters talk of assassinating Clinton if she becomes president, and of blood flowing in the streets if Trump doesn’t, the moment I’m transported to is not a Russian one, but an American one.

-snip-

[okaawhatever]

1. K & R nt

[uponit7771]

2. Sowing the land with salt is evil on its face... selfish nasty evil

[randome]

3. Cool. I learned a new word: 'logorrheic'. 'logorrheic rainbow' is a neat way of stating it, too.

logorrhea
law-guh-ree-uh, log-uh-
noun
1.
pathologically incoherent, repetitious speech.
2.
incessant or compulsive talkativeness; wearisome volubility.
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[2naSalit]

4. K&R!

[Hortensis]

5. Good article! But forget the sowing with salt.

It's easy to get lost and overwhelmed in the moment. We're a huge country of diverse cultures, even between generations, not just between regions, neighborhoods, races, religions and ethnicities. There are going to be various reactions, but even most of those who disapprove strongly of each other will be one in appreciation of our blessed stability and of what we have and are and will reject trump/breitbartism.

Key to this is that, across and up and down the spectrum, by far most people are actually doing okay to just fine and have a great deal to lose, even for those who don't have as much as they thought they'd have at this point.