5762

This is great stuff from Matt Taibbi.

A thousand ridiculous accidents needed to happen in the unlikeliest of sequences for it to be possible, but absent a dramatic turn of events – an early primary catastrophe, Mike Bloomberg ego-crashing the race, etc. – this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant with the attention span of an Xbox-playing 11-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised.

It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go.

And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He’s way better than average.

Trump knows the public sees through all of this, grasps the press’s role in it and rightly hates us all. When so many Trump supporters point to his stomping of the carpetbagging snobs in the national media as the main reason they’re going to vote for him, it should tell us in the press something profound about how much people think we suck.

Jay Matthews, a Plymouth native with a long beard and a Trump sign, cites Trump’s press beat-downs as the first reason he’s voting Donald.

“He’s gonna be his own man,” he says. “He’s proving that now with how he’s getting all the media. He’s paying nothing and getting all the coverage. He’s not paying one dime.”

Reporters have focused quite a lot on the crazy/race-baiting/nativist themes in Trump’s campaign, but these comprise a very small part of his usual presentation. His speeches increasingly are strikingly populist in their content.

His pitch is: He’s rich, he won’t owe anyone anything upon election, and therefore he won’t do what both Democratic and Republican politicians unfailingly do upon taking office, i.e., approve rotten/regressive policies that screw ordinary people.

No one should be surprised that he’s tearing through the Republican primaries, because everything he’s saying about his GOP opponents is true. They really are all stooges on the take, unable to stand up to Trump because they’re not even people, but are, like Jeb and Rubio, just robo-babbling representatives of unseen donors.

Trump isn’t the first rich guy to run for office. But he is the first to realize the weakness in the system, which is that the watchdogs in the political media can’t resist a car wreck. The more he insults the press, the more they cover him: He’s pulling 33 times as much coverage on the major networks as his next-closest GOP competitor, and twice as much as Hillary.

Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star. It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.

Funnily enough, I just wrote about the car wreck thing in the other thread before reading this!

5763

Yeah, I think that pretty much nailed it.

It basically breaks down like this:

  1. Money buys coverage in the media
  2. Coverage buys votes

So, normally, the system results in the guy who can get the most money winning, since he buys the most coverage, and thus gets the most votes… basically because voters are imbeciles who will literally just vote for whoever they see the most, seemingly regardless of what they see them doing.

Trump broke the system by realizing that if he does crazy shit, he gets FREE coverage. So the media basically just hands him the equivalent of a gazillion dollars in campaign contributions. And since the voters dont’ actually care what he does, this kind of coverage is totally fine for the purposes of getting votes.

5764

It misses one key factor - the egotistical over-inflation of media self-importance. It’s not all the media’s fault (though they like to think that it could be), there is a HUGE population of people who are fed up with business as usual when their lives are getting run over by the 21st Century. There are a lot of reasons for that, but for over 30 years the GOP has been selling Government as THE evil while then perpetuating that evil. The media didn’t create this mass, it was created by decades of anti-government political platforms which were never really realistic, nor adhered to by those who were elected and that mass eventually took smaller government is better all the way to asymptote. Trump has seized that group that the GOP elites have cultivated, but not served. Has the media been complicit in this cultivation? To a degree (especially with Fox News telling them what they want to hear) but not as much as they’d like to think.

5765

This is very good and reinforces your point:

When the plague descended on Thebes, Oedipus sent his brother-in-law to the Delphic oracle to discover the cause. Little did he realize that the crime for which Thebes was being punished was his own. Today’s Republican Party is our Oedipus. A plague has descended on the party in the form of the most successful demagogue-charlatan in the history of U.S. politics. The party searches desperately for the cause and the remedy without realizing that, like Oedipus, it is the party itself that brought on this plague. The party’s own political crimes are being punished in a bit of cosmic justice fit for a Greek tragedy.

Let’s be clear: Trump is no fluke. Nor is he hijacking the Republican Party or the conservative movement, if there is such a thing. He is, rather, the party’s creation, its Frankenstein monster, brought to life by the party, fed by the party and now made strong enough to destroy its maker. Was it not the party’s wild obstructionism — the repeated threats to shut down the government over policy and legislative disagreements; the persistent call for nullification of Supreme Court decisions; the insistence that compromise was betrayal; the internal coups against party leaders who refused to join the general demolition — that taught Republican voters that government, institutions, political traditions, party leadership and even parties themselves were things to be overthrown, evaded, ignored, insulted, laughed at? Was it not Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), among many others, who set this tone and thereby cleared the way for someone even more irreverent, so that now, in a most unenjoyable irony, Cruz, along with the rest of the party, must fall to the purer version of himself, a less ideologically encumbered anarcho-revolutionary? This would not be the first revolution that devoured itself.

Edit: A much more in depth piece by Norm Ornstein is worth the time:http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/the-eight-causes-of-trumpism/422427/

5766

Absolutely, i think i even read something about Murdoch and Trump sort of hating each other? But that does not dilute the influence Fox News in particular has had on the right (Republican) in the usa. We tend to think of propaganda as something that only really happened in Germany in the 1940’s, or Soviet Russia and China, but it is actually a cornerstone of the American story too (as it was for the British Empire in times past). Saluting the flag at school, singing the national anthem, that is all classic propaganda, instilled at a very young age, and by itself no bad thing. When it get’s mixed with the kind of messages coming from Fox News for decades, then it becomes a problem, and then you are very much on a footing as equal to anything history has to show us. Thus the Trump and general form of the current Republican ‘debate’ (insult match).

5767

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

5768

Well said, Timex.

5769

@greggiroux 1m1 minute ago

74% of 44,870 Dem absentee ballots returned in SC Dem primary are from black voters, per elections office update:

5770

Jon Favreau writes about working with Hillary Clinton, after savaging her in the Primaries - it’s a good read:

a few weeks after the election, I had a well-documented run-in with a piece of cardboard that bore a striking resemblance to the incoming Secretary of State.

It was one of the stupider, more disrespectful mistakes I’ve made, and one that could have cost me a job if Hillary hadn’t accepted my apology, which she did with grace and humor. As a result, I had the chance to serve in the Obama Administration with someone who was far different than the caricature I had helped perpetuate.

The most famous woman in the world would walk through the White House with no entourage, casually chatting up junior staffers along the way. She was by far the most prepared, impressive person at every Cabinet meeting. She worked harder and logged more miles than anyone in the administration, including the president. And she’d spend large amounts of time and energy on things that offered no discernible benefit to her political future—saving elephants from ivory poachers, listening to the plight of female coffee farmers in Timor-Leste, defending LGBT rights in places like Uganda.

Most of all—and you hear this all the time from people who’ve worked for her—Hillary Clinton is uncommonly warm and thoughtful. She surprises with birthday cakes. She calls when a grandparent passes away. She once rearranged her entire campaign schedule so a staffer could attend her daughter’s preschool graduation. Her husband charms by talking to you; Hillary does it by listening to you—not in a head-nodding, politician way; in a real person way.

This same story has repeated itself throughout Clinton’s career: those who initially view her as distrustful and divisive from afar find her genuine and cooperative in person…

…Your eyes are rolling. You don’t often see or read about this side of Hillary. You don’t doubt her fierce brilliance when she’s debating policy with Bernie Sanders. You don’t doubt her stamina or tenacity when she’s sitting through hour eleven of the Benghazi Kangaroo Court. But when it comes to nearly everything else, Clinton can seem a little too cautious and forced—like she’s trying too hard or not at all, preferring to retreat behind the safety of boilerplate rhetoric and cheesy soundbites. It’s a tendency that can’t just be blamed on her opponents or the media, though I wonder how many of us would be so brave and open in our public personas after being subjected to twenty-five years of unrelenting and downright nasty criticism of what we say, what we do, and how we look.

5771

Christie endorses Trump.

Guess we know now who Trump’s VP pick will be.

5772

Some men just want to see the world burn.

5773

The Republican party really has gone bonkers. Christie endorsing Trump is so self-serving.

5774

Guess who dominates the news cycle again?
Is Rubio winning yet?

5775

I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure we’re all losing.

5776

Pretty much, but then I don’t see any appreciable difference between the remaining three contenders. They all want essentially the same thing. Their rhetoric might be different, but the end goal remains the same. (I simply can’t stand Rubio. He’s awful. Worse than Trump? I don’t know, it’s like what’s worse - dying in a fiery car accident or getting shot in the head?)

5777

Derek Willis of Propublica just pointed out on twitter…guess which junior senator from Florida voted “NO” on superstorm Sandy relief fund package?

#insertElephantsNeverForgetJoke

5778

920x920.jpg920×596

Amazing election cycle.

5779

Ha. But yeah that explains a lot. Thanks trig.

5780

Trump just said that Romney walks like a penguin. Hahaha, penguins are losers.

5781

I’m watching his live speech.

Biggly is not perfectly cromulent.