wolfpup:
I’m glad you read them, seriously – no snark. I think they’re insightful commentaries. So now you explicitly acknowledge here that we’re dealing with something entirely new and unprecedented. Whether the articles constitute “hyperbole” can only be truly known in the fullness of time and the perspective of history.
Yes, I acknowledge that explicitly here and now, but it’s not the first time I’ve expressed that view. Back on January 20th, to pick one of many examples, I said:
I thought the tone of his speech was jarring and jingoistic for an inauguration speech.
I suppose, for a candidate that made his bones by ignoring political norms, this should not surprise me. But it did. How do you go from thanking “the citizens of the world” to announcing that from this day forward it’s “America first?”
I could spend a great deal of time citing specific facts to back up the view that the articles are in no way hyperbolic, but most of us already know many of the facts and perhaps our perceptions are colored by our political convictions, and the New Yorker ’s editor and one of their principal staff writers have already expressed the sentiments better than I could.
We can point to past history as examples of how rights and freedoms can be degraded and reality distorted in a systematic web of lies, but the inevitable counter-argument is that the circumstances are not exactly the same, because circumstances never are, and that the comparison is therefore “hyperbole”. We’ll just have to let history be the judge, but certainly, any rational person would have to acknowledge that there is much to be concerned about and that there are very significant risks to basic liberties, common decency, and the principles that the constitution is supposed to protect.
Again I draw your attention to the comment I made to BobLibDem concerning how Bush was called a fascist and a racist and a would-be dictator. Do you recall those accusations during the Bush presidency?