Category Archives: Donald Trump

Those of us not actually infected with Trump Derangement syndrome and are old enough to clearly remember Bush, may remember that the media treated Bush the same way as they treat Trump, even if not quite as harshly. That is actually where the term was coined. “Bush Derangement Syndrome” was the first iteration of it, at least in memory. But for those even older, we may remember when the media showed constant hydrophobic rage at Nixon. If you wanted to have any degree of ‘cool’ at all, you had to really hate or mock Nixon. Then the 2IC of the FBI took him down by using a couple of ignorant and arguably scruple-less dupes at a major US Newspaper as couriers and beards. Career advancement by carrying documents from “Deepthroat”, a disgruntled FBI executive, to the editors at, all too predictably, The Washington Post with instructions to print without altering anything. Tough gig right? But great way to get a Pulitzer.

Suddenly what Lara Logan said about the prize falls into sharper relief.

One summer, there wasn’t much bad news to pin on GW Bush. So a mildly neurotic woman decided to camp out at the end of Bush’s driveway I think somewhere in Texas for the summer to protest the death of her son in the Iraq war. If memory serves, her name was Cindy Sheehan. And the media lapped this up and published regularly on Sheehan’s camping trip. Her family basically divorced her over it, again if memory serves. She was ventriloquizing her dead son as a weapon against Bush.

Her antics earned her a line in the brief internet hit song, Bush was Right:

One day during the presidency of GW Bush, I was having lunch with some old friends and some people I had never met before. One of them, a doctor at a Canadian forces base spoke out during the meal: “Well everyone hates Bush!”. I answered that actually I didn’t hate Bush. I didn’t say I liked him, just said I didn’t hate him. The response was a visceral and angry, “OH C’MON! YES YOU DO!” An instructive moment. Even back then you hate to hate who you had to hate or be excluded from polite company.

Going backwards to a previous Republican president who actually was the most popular ever up to that point, an entire Frankfurt School Critical Theory industry was spawned. A ‘journalist’ famous for constant and massive doses of mind altering drugs, ones that make you hallucinate things that aren’t there and not see things that are, became the vanguard of critical theory attacks on Nixon. His writing was very entertaining though, and Rolling Stone ended up having to print everything he wrote without editing. That did well for Rolling Stone. And one must add, his books are a really enjoyable read. From Hell’s Angels to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his material are page turners. But not something upon which one may want to make serious decisions for oneself. Hunter S. Thompson wrote in a way that defied and even showed contempt for all the rules of journalism. But he did it very entertainingly, and even endearingly. When he wrote Hells Angels and told a story in it about how at a party people got extremely high and started firing guns out the window to show how extreme this motorcycle gang was, only to find as you read onwards that in fact it was Thompson himself who did that. Cute. Funny. But not journalism. Great writing, but the story was about him and his behaviour.

In the clip below, Nixon describes what he calls the “Media Elitist Complex”. That is brilliantly succinct. This site has called it the Government media complex since we started it. But Nixon’s name for the threat shows a great deal of insight. It also shows he was a man of the people. Like Trump. So no wonder they had to destroy him.