January 2 - Erdogan: Turkey's One-Man Wrecking Crew; Pulling Back the Curtain to Expose the Real Donald Trump

We begin with the New Year’s massacre in Turkey which the Islamic State has taken credit for and assess the exploding blowback to President Erdogan’s misrule across a broad front of issues, not just his earlier support for Islamic State fighters and their entry into Syria, but his resumption of a war against the Kurds, his wholesale purging of teachers, lawyers and judges, and more recently his uncritical embrace of Russia which calls into question Turkey’s membership in NATO. David Phillips, the Director of the Peace-building and Rights Program at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University and author of “The Kurdish Spring: A New Map for the Middle East” joins us to discuss what it will take for the people of Turkey to wake up to what a dangerous and destructive autocrat they have in Erdogan. As he dismantles democracy, ruins the economy and divides the country between its secular traditions and a resurgent Islamic fundamentalism of the ruling AKP Party, the irony becomes clear that Erdogan and the AKP are increasingly similar in outlook and ideology to the Islamic State terrorists who are just beginning to strike at their former patron.

Part 2

Then, with the editor of the Wall Street Journal saying that in their coverage of the new Trump Administration, they will not call Trump’s lies, lies, we explore what the role of the press is likely to be in covering Trump since so far he has written his own rules which the press has dutifully followed, as well as not demanding his tax returns, not getting him to do press conferences, and all the while giving Trump $5 billion’s worth of free media. John Nichols, The Nation magazine’s Washington correspondent and author of “People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy” joins us to discuss what can be done to expose the real Donald Trump and whether he is in any way up to the job of president when the press has so far been unable to lay a glove on him while our political opposition appears unwilling to question Trump’s legitimacy let alone his competence to be president.