Cynicism is thinking the worst of everyone right off the bat. So, screw em! Skepticism is having questions — lots of questions — that need answering before you’ll make up your mind. Skepticism leads to critical thinking while cynicism leads to bias reinforcement. If you want to believe everyone’s a rat bastard then even the good things they do will have a “rat bastard” stank to them. If you want to believe the bad guys will always win in the end so why bother doing anything to stop them — then the bad guys WILL win in the end and your worst fears will be realized. Just like you wanted them to be.
The goal of a propagandist is to pull you past skepticism and critical thinking to cynicism where, down deep, you’ve already surrendered to them. You don’t have to be a propagandist though to give cynicism succor. You just have to give in to it.
While it’s completely true that Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in America’s history, it’s completely NOT true that he’s going to get away with it. That’s up to us. If we accept Trump’s corruption and roll over for him? Then, yes — Trump will get away with it. If we refuse to roll over? No, he won’t.
Not even remotely.
Trump’s corrupt on a scale few humans can match but he’s not monolithic. He’s an incompetent man-child, an inarticulate boob who’s failed at literally everything. The ONE thing he’s succeeded at: not getting caught. That onus is on us. We can change all this ourselves just by giving a shit and insisting that the rule of law — now that we’re bringing it back and enforcing it — applies to Trump the same way it applies to the rest of us.
Mitch McConnell is an adept politician but a rotten human. The inner rot is finally making its way to Mitch’s exterior. While he’s managed to keep ahead of the stink up till now, the stink just caught up with Mitch. Mitch has sooooooo much explaining to do. Under oath. With the TV lights turned up to eleven and the glare of the cameras turned up to twelve.
Mitch is the Poster Turtle for cynicism. The end justifies the Treason Turtle means. No one will ever accuse Mitch McConnell of overplaying his sincerity card. He’s our own Schmuck-iavelli.
We need our news media to be deeply skeptical. Alas, “Both Sides Do It” brand journalism has perverted their skepticism into cynicism. Everyone, BSDI insists, does things for the same reasons — usually political. Their motives? The same. They’re concerns — ditto.
Oy.
If Democrats behaved like Republicans, we’d BE Republicans. We don’t. We aren’t. Democrats, you see, are skeptical by nature but prone to cynicism because of the way we keep voting in the majority without experiencing the joy of winning that should have been part of the package. Getting cheated out of the thing you earned sucks if it happens once. With Democrats, this is starting to look like a habit.
Democrats have won the presidential popular vote in every election since Reagan. And yet — though he LOST the popular vote, George W. Bush became POTUS. So did Trump — after losing the popular vote. Trump wants to be the second person to ever LOSE the popular vote twice and still get to be POTUS.
That’s called cheating. And cheating to win is not “another way to win”, it’s cheating. If you cheat to win, you’ve done the opposite of winning: you’ve disqualified yourself from the competition entirely. Win? No, you didn’t win. You’re not even in the conversation.