March 5, 2017 by Gregory Franklyn

“You can fool some of the people all of the time and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” – Attributed to President Abraham Lincoln.

BREAKING NEWS: The Republican President just accused Former President Barack Obama of wiretapping his home and office in Trump Tower before the election. As usual, he provided no specifics or evidence of the claim, he just “put it out there”. My suspicion is that he did so to divert our attention from the many scandals that plague his young regime. He is a skilled manipulator of the Lame-Stream media and he knows they’ll go rushing to cover the story and, hopefully, keep them busy with that so they’re not focusing on him. He even suggested that this BREAKING NEWS BOMBSHELL  is equivalent to the Watergate Scandal in scope, to accentuate how earth shaking his accusation is. Everyone agrees that the accusation, if true, would be earth shaking.

IF TRUE!

His own Political Party is reluctant to weigh in on the claim, and those who DID, found it questionable. The questions they raised could backfire on the President in a bigly yuge way. If the wiretapping were Illegal, and it actually happened, and Former President Barack Obama were actually involved, it would be a very big deal for the Former President. If the wiretapping were legal, however, it would be a very big deal for The Republican President. It would mean that a FISA Court found credible evidence to suggest that The Republican President NEEDED to be wiretapped. That would be devastating to the White House and the The Republican President’s Regime. Which, incidentally, isn’t even 2 months old yet. But, if the wiretapping was legal, it would alert that same media he was trying to use to distract the media FROM him, to a serious problem TO him, that he alerted them to. Wouldn’t that be a LOL moment?

But running just below the surface of this accusation, and the way The Republican President presents it to the public, is the real story. The real story is about The Republican President’s skill at manipulating the media. He knows how most people watch the news. He knows that more viewers, than not, are doing something else while the news is on and they won’t be paying full attention to what is being said. The headlines that they’ll hear on the radio will condense it to a mere sentence or two, and that the television news will give it 2 minutes or less that they are not paying full attention to anyway. Not nearly enough time to tell the whole story, but it’s been “Put Out There”. The Former President is involved in criminal activity the likes of which we haven’t seen since Nixon was driven out of office in shame. It’s roaming around the ether, now, for everyone to consume.

There’s talk about it everywhere this morning. The implication that Barack Obama is a criminal. It has not been conclusively determined that the accusation is true or false, It’s just “Put Out There”. So the viewers who are only catching little snippets of the discussion, have this idea implanted in their minds and it is, consciously or unconsciously, coloring their perceptions of what’s happening in the executive branch of their government.

It’s the same reason that many Republicans, particularly Presidential Candidates, will continue to say something over and over, even after it has been conclusively determined NOT to be true. It’s a media manipulation technique. They know what 45 knows. The accusation doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be “Put Out There”, and it will take on a life of its own. They know that because they know that most consumers of the news aren’t paying that close of attention. It just has to be “Put Out there”.  It doesn’t have to be true. They also know that apologizing for the false accusation will not get NEARLY the press that the accusation gets, assuming that there even IS an apology. Personally, I can’t imagine The Republican President ever apologizing for ANYTHING, let alone a successful damaging of a Democrat.

Here’s an example of the technique from the 2016 election. Some of Hillary Clinton’s emails were found on a computer in the home of Huma Abedin, who was a chief Clinton Aide at the time. The Email scandal about a private server Clinton used while Secretary of State, plagued her throughout the campaign, it questioned her trustworthiness, and was finally determined not to be a problem from a legal, or security standpoint. However, it was “Put Out There” in the days before the election, that there was more to the story and that maybe the allegation DID have merit. Maybe Clinton really was untrustworthy. And then, the election happened before it was determined that the newly discovered Emails were already known to investigators because all of them were also on the server that the investigators had already gone through. But it was too late to take it back because the election had already happened. It just needed to be “Put Out There” just before the election for it to do its work. It didn’t need to be true.

Republicans have been using this technique for decades because it works. They have, under the direction of one Frank Luntz, honed this technique down to a fine art, and The Republican President is consummately skilled at its implementation. But. he is a spas, who regularly over-reaches. He is blunt, boorish, unsophisticated, UN-nuanced. He just “Put It Out There” without following the thread through to its logical conclusion. That would take more than a tweet. This time, I can only hope that his home and offices WERE wiretapped and that a FISA Court HAD determined that there was credible evidence to suggest that The Republican President NEEDED to be wiretapped. You know, we may get the President we elected after all! Wouldn’t THAT be something.

Much Love,

Gregory