Fake Gold

Well, I guess there are only two topics of conversation today: the fall-out from the allegations tat Trump has been taking golden showers with Russian prostitutes and the snow.  The latter is in the process of melting, so that just leaves Trump.  I have no idea whether the claims about Trump and the compromising material about him the Russians may or may not are true, (although, despite the lack of direct evidence, they seem very well sourced), but it speaks volumes about the President-elect that a lot of people seem to have no difficulty in believing them to be true.  Rather like Cameron and that pig.  In a way, I find it sad that we live in an age when people can so easily believe such things about  our political leaders.  Not that I'm harking back to some mythical Golden Age of Politics during my childhood, when politicians were all fine upstanding people, moral exemplars every one of them.  But back then, the worst you might suspect of them were a few dodgy business connections or the odd discreet affair.  Political scandals really were political: the issue in the Profumo affair was less that a member of the government was paying a prostitute for sex, than that he'd been foolish enough to sleep with one who was also seeing a Soviet embassy official.  

But to get back to Trump, his response to the allegations has been fascinating, angrily labeling them 'fake news'.  Which is interesting because the so-called 'fake news' which has become such an issue with regard to the Presidential election was universally associated with attempts to boost Trump's standing and the denigration of his opponents.  'Fake News' - the current media buzz word' - was of no concern to the right until it started targeting their man.  It was apparently OK for false news stories to be peddled if they only concerned the alleged involvement of leading Democrats with a peadophile ring centred around a restaurant, but not when they allege Trump was being pissed on in a Moscow hotel room.  Except, of course, that these Trump allegations aren't 'Fake News' by any stretch of the imagination.  They aren't click bait concocted by some teenager in their bedroom and posted on social media.  They are the result of an investigation by a former intelligence professional, using sources and contacts built up over the course of a long career in the business.  But, as we've seen all too often in contemporary politics, the right have moved quickly to co-opt liberal nomenclature to discredit their enemies.  'Fake News' is a phenomena created entirely by the left as an explanation for their defeat.  It was always a nonsensical idea and now it has been turned against them.  Just as the right have succeeded in stealing the liberal's clothes, portraying themselves as the outsiders and champions of the disenfranchised, now they've also stolen what their opponents thought was their new weapon to discredit the right.