Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[iam416]

It was a poorly run campaign in a number of respects.

[Dr. Strangelove]

lol to both mainevent and Talent. Yeah that's the great irony...Hillary's team competent enough to sneak in 3 million illegals to vote for her but sent them all to California and New York in a masterful display of dumbfuckery.

[Dr. Strangelove]

[ame]https://twitter.com/stevekovach/status/823876039134871552[/ame]

If nothing else this White House is already proving it will leak like a sieve. Trump likes in-fighting in his entourage and this group will give it to him.

[iam416]

The March for Life is, apparently, this Friday. I only know that because I happened across it on an NRO blog entry. I'm not sure how much the mainstream media is covering it, if at all.

I mention this because this will be yet another confirmation for those on the right that the mainstream media's plain preference for progressive causes. The liberal women's march was covered at length. I have no complaints -- it was the big event over the weekend, outside of the NFL. It was also plainly a pro-choice march (another thing conservatives saw and know).

The Pro-Life march will receive almost no coverage. Any coverage it may receive is as likely to include mockery as it isn't. Conservatives will see it as a plain and stark contrast.

There may be plenty of distinguishing features to justify differing coverage. I assume there are. But I'm talking optics and the optics for those on the right will be plain.

Meanwhile, on the substantive issues, Trump is taking conventional steps to limit funding of abortions -- including the Mexico City rule (no funding of foreign groups that perform abortions). Much to the left's chagrin -- or perhaps they are entirely oblivious -- this move polls really well as does limiting funding domestically (Hyde Amendment).

Finally, the press-Trump war continues and, IMO, it absolutely benefits Trump. In part, thanks to a non-stop "media bias" assault from the right and, in part, thanks to some of that stuff being true, the public's faith in the media is pretty damn low and Trump knows it and uses it. He has successfully cast the press as coastal elites and his "heartland base" is convinced.

I still think demographics favor the Ds long-term, but I'm now thinking they may have to simply load up in their coastal strongholds to get enough electoral votes in those states that they don't need "Middle America."

[hack]

I don't know. If we're really to believe the people who warn us about authoritarian/Orwellian communicators like Trump -- I'm thinking about people like Kasparov, Masha Gessen, other Russophiles -- then who the heck knows what the electorate will think in four years. Four years isn't really enough to get into people's heads in the way Putin has in 17 years, and obviously the right-wing assault on media is 35 years old, but being lied to at warp speed instead of at the usual pace and intensity is going to impact some people. Probably not enough to overcome the usual patterns, but possibly.

[iam416]

I fully expect Trump to lose/not run in 2020. I've underestimated him at every turn, so that's probably bad news.

I also fully expect the country to remain really split. What interests me the most is which party lays claim to populism. Trump has it, but his populism is (was) mostly contra R principles. The Ds had it, but, arguably, managed to lose it. They have a clear path to reclaim it, but the problem -- at least IMO -- is that identity-based "social justice" isn't it. As I've been wrong on numerous points in the past, I could certainly be wrong on this.

I'm also fascinated by the "fact" -- or, my opinion -- that Trump has significantly crippled the media's restraints. The outrage and news cycle hottakes do nothing to him. He waves his hand, decries the coastal elite media and it kills the message by killing the messenger.

In the law, you can have lousy, awful, piece of shit witnesses if they're only being deposed. If the jury will never see them, either on videotape or live, then the sterile nature of words on paper neutralizes much of their credibility weakness. People need to see you to judge your credibility. At trial, though, I'll take good witnesses and bad facts over bad witnesses and good facts. Credibility matters soooo much. My favorite line, ever, from Lionel Hutz is "now that's believable testimony." That translates to politicians, press, movements, you name it. Once you lose that credibility, it's next to impossible to get it back. For nearly half of the electorate, the press has, IMO, lost its credibility. That's troubling for a host of reasons, but I very much believe that's the reality.

[Hannibal]

Orwellian communicator politicians are not the threat. What they say carries little weight without the stamp of approval from what is perceived as a trusted third party. I would say that is even true of Democrat audiences for Democrat politicians. An Orwellian media that is trusted by the populace is the much bigger threat and, thankfully, that trust is at an all time low, where it deserves to be. With that said, people are still very heavily influenced by the media despite that lack of trust and it takes huge amounts of effort to reverse a dishonest narrative. Thankfully, we now have a President who will call attention to dishonest narratives from the media, highlighting these problems outside of the small minority of folks who listen to Rush Limbaugh or follow Paul Joseph Watson and Twitter. This will signal-boost the counternarrative and at least give more people access to it. This, of course, is a massively double-edged sword, so sometimes we are going to see embarrassing Sperg-outs like Sean Spicer's first couple of press conferences.

Eh. I accept the tradeoff. Happily.

[Hannibal]

I fully expect Trump to lose/not run in 2020. I've underestimated him at every turn, so that's probably bad news.

Trump is the anti-Obama. Obama was wildly popular on a personal level but his policies were extremely unpopular. Trump will be wildly unpopular on a personal level but his policies will be extremely popular. A foreign policy of "America First" is beyond a no-brainer. The hand-wringing on both sides of the aisle over the President putting "looking out for the best interests of the country" as his job description shows how wildly out of touch the media and the Washington elites are with the rest of the country. Restricting immigration from third world shitholes and giving the finger to violent extremist groups like BLM are no-brainers too. The "outrage" over these is limited to small portions of the voting populace that would never vote for Trump anyways.

[iam416]

Yeah, there are two Orwellian angles. That's why I found the tweet about Ds bring up Orwell rather ironic.

Obviously, there's the language element and propaganda element that Rs have long compared to Ds and the PC culture and "liberal" press. I mean, "thoughtcrime" -- c'mon. And now there's the authoritarian dictator type angle.

[iam416]

Trump is the anti-Obama. Obama was wildly popular on a personal level but his policies were extremely unpopular. Trump will be wildly unpopular on a personal level but his policies will be extremely popular. "America First" is beyond a no-brainer. The hand-wringing on both sides of the aisle over the President putting "looking out for the best interests of the country" as his job description shows how wildly out of touch the media and the Washington elites are with the rest of the country.

Yeah, that's a viable prediction. I mean, he has himself a little bit buggered with Obamacare. I think that could be a political disaster. He has more viable, populist policies to pursue. However, he's going to deal with a turd sandwich at the outset and that won't go well, IMO.

Obama spent gads of his political capital on it. Lost big in the mid-terms because of it. But, man, it's nice political piece of legislation. It's so hard to undo a grant of benefits that it's a de facto poison pill. I can't see the Rs handling it well.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Trump is the anti-Obama. Obama was wildly popular on a personal level but his policies were extremely unpopular. Trump will be wildly unpopular on a personal level but his policies will be extremely popular. A foreign policy of "America First" is beyond a no-brainer. The hand-wringing on both sides of the aisle over the President putting "looking out for the best interests of the country" as his job description shows how wildly out of touch the media and the Washington elites are with the rest of the country. Restricting immigration from third world shitholes and giving the finger to violent extremist groups like BLM are no-brainers too.

Hanni already grossly overreading the results of the election to assume that Trump's policies are "wildly popular"

[Hannibal]

Yeah, that's a viable prediction. I mean, he has himself a little bit buggered with Obamacare. I think that could be a political disaster. He has more viable, populist policies to pursue. However, he's going to deal with a turd sandwich at the outset and that won't go well, IMO.

We'll see. Bear in mind that all of these Obamacare Repeal warnings and "advice" to Republicans are coming from people that voted for Hillary. These are the same people that recommended Bush Sr. and John McCain to us as great electable moderates. That would be like Jim Harbaugh saying to Urban Meyer "I wouldn't play that J.T. Barrett guy at QB if I was you." How much is that advice worth listening to?

[Dr. Strangelove]

Apparently Jared Kushner doesn't like Kellyanne Conway. Kellyanne Conway doesn't like Sean Spicer. Bannon doesn't like Priebus, who recommended Spicer for the job.

Trump thrives on this stuff. It shows where the power lies and inflates the ego. Always keep the subordinates squabbling.

[hack]

I agree that it takes a ton of time to erode trust in media. The right has been at it for a generation and still hasn't won over a majority to its shared view on media, though it's certainly made a frightening amount of progress. When the quarterly circulation figures come out, that'll be one indicator if people are resorting to tried/true options in a time of confusion. Another indicator is that Trump is obsessed with every word said about him. If media didn't matter, he wouldn't be.

As for calling out false narratives, on paper you'd think they should be actually false before you start doing that, and not easily verifiable as true. But, then again, many people are going to hear what they want to hear or are told to hear regardless of facts. Enough to win another general election? On paper, presumably, Ds aren't going to have a hard time getting people out to the polls in four years. But we'll see.


As for "America First", IMO the key here will be the percentage of voters who recognized that the interests of all Americans are not the same. What's good for most isn't good for some.

I agree that he won't be running in 2020, but I too have underestimated the pheonomenon. A small point there -- IMO it's not a matter of underestimating Trump, but a matter of getting a proper read on the voting populace. It was a failure of imagination to think that what Trump did would work. Very few people thought it would, and those predicting a Trump victory did so in large part thanks to historical patterns and not Trump himself, such as the autopsy Talent posted from the NRO that points out how hard it is to keep the presidency after a two-termer steps down.

[entropy]

Trump is the anti-Obama. Obama was wildly popular on a personal level but his policies were extremely unpopular. Trump will be wildly unpopular on a personal level but his policies will be extremely popular. .

interesting to see if this plays out... if people believe Trump brought jobs back to the US in 4 yrs, I'll probably end up agreeing with this statement. I really think it is that simple.

Immigration, china, etc... will all be 50/50 type issues. It will be jobs that matter the most.