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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (1235303)

6/2/2020 10:37:20 AM

From: Wharf Rat

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pocotrader

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Farce, Tragedy and Photo Op
Talking Points Memoby Josh Marshall

As much as anything else, the spectacle yesterday afternoon in front of the White House was a deliberate set-up. It’s a not-unknown stock in trade for bad actors to invite press to one kind of purported event and switch to something more ghastly on camera, forcing the press to become complicit in what unfolds.

Yesterday was a version of that.

Not long after 5 PM the White House alerted the national media that the President would be making a statement or holding some sort of press conference in the Rose Garden at 6:15 PM. Later that was nudged to 6:30 PM and he didn’t finally speak until a short time later still. As we know now the plan was to break up the crowd of protestors who had been assembling loudly but peaceably through the afternoon. A mix of military and federal police – but apparently no DC police – started moving against the crowd and eventually used tear gas, flash bangs, rubber bullets and mounted officers to drive off the crowd which had been entirely peaceful and appeared to remain so as they were driven off.

What became clear was that the presidential remarks and driving off the crowd were timed to coincide to create a presidential photo op or what is probably best seen as a cartoonish but choreographed reality TV event. The plan was for the President to give his short speech with explosive concussions in the background and tear gas in the air followed by the President walking over to the ground just cleared of protestors to make a symbolic visit to St. John’s Episcopal Church where he would hold ostentatiously hold up a bible. The slight shifts in schedule were to make sure the timing was just right.

Within hours, his campaign released staged photos of the proceedings.

A short time later it emerged that the owners of the Church, the Episcopal Diocese of Washington hadn’t been informed or asked whether their Church would be used as a prop in what amounted to an ersatz white Christian nationalist photo op. But federal officers – police or military isn’t clear – actually forcibly expelled a priest from the Church grounds with tear gas.

It was a set-piece tableau of Trumpism, a visual demonstration of the dominance Trump demands but usually shrinks from personally. You protestors were on this literal ground. I commanded force against you and now I am on the same ground holding a bible aloft in victory.

Thankfully, it doesn’t appear there was any loss of life in this staged incident or I think any major injuries. But like so much of Trumpism it manages to bring together with a unique crudity the mix of rightist nationalism and TV production which is the heart of Trumpism – a loud red hat with gleaming white lettering of state violence. Nothing more captures the man than holding a Christian bible in the air as a sort of dominance talisman after driving priests out of a church where they were tending to the needs of peaceful protestors. Much as he bogarted tax payer money for use as campaign funds in extortion plot against the government of Ukraine here he turned the US military and federal police on peaceful protestors for what was in the final analysis a planned campaign event.