Off to la-la land

The Bowling Green Massacre was a hoot — but maybe ol’ Kellyanne, liar-for-hire, simply misspoke? It happens, and I imagine she’s got so much make-believe ricocheting around inside her head that it’s easy to lose track of what is, and isn’t, real. So we all have our few minutes of fun at her expense, and it’s over.

What do you know? It turns out that it isn’t over. In fact, Kellyanne Conway has been peddling the Bowling Green Massacre story for a good while, and has done so in multiple venues.

White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway cited a demonstrably nonexistent “massacre” as justification for President Donald Trump’s temporary immigration ban in an interview with Cosmopolitan magazine days before making headlines by mentioning the falsehood on MSNBC’s “Hardball.”

Worse, The Orange One weighed-in with the news that stories like the Bowling Green Massacre are a commonplace, but the wicked-librul-bedwetting-commie-media is just not covering them.

Speaking to the U.S. Central Command on Monday, President Trump went off his prepared remarks to make a truly stunning claim: The media was intentionally covering up reports of terrorist attacks.

“You’ve seen what happened in Paris, and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening,” he said to the assembled military leaders. “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”

Now, that’s crazy on its face. If a bomb goes off somewhere, there are pictures on the Internet before the first ambulance arrives. Even so, it is a fact that the “Bowling Green Massacre” has joined the list of terror attacks in the mind of some people, and those same people have added another offense to their list of media offenses.

I know some of those people. They actually do believe all this crazy stuff.

When Adolf Hitler needed a casus belli to justify the invasion of Poland, he resorted to a crude deception. He took some prisoners and dressed them in Polish army uniforms, drove them to the border, gunned them down, and then displayed the corpses to a credulous world, saying that Poland had tried to invade Germany but their forces had been repelled.

At least a few reporters noted that the so-called invaders appeared to all have been shot in the back, and that there was no evidence of the general mobilization that would necessarily precede an invasion, but that was drowned-out by the clamor for war.

We all know how that worked out.

The moral of the story is plain: An awful lot of people will believe any insane thing that’s put in front of them, so long as it comes from an authority figure, and they won’t be turned by facts once a stampede is underway.

That’s why it is so important to keep our heads and resist Trump’s cynical demonization of the press; to, in fact, support the press. Competition keeps the legitimate outlets honest. The administration of Donald Trump is building its casus belli right now, and if he succeeds it will culminate in the comprehensive abrogation of our liberties.

History is now, and right here.

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