A skeptical Villager
by digby
Honestly, I can hardly believe this — and I’m not one to doubt the foolishness of Mark Halperin. Joan Walsh has the story:
The Summer of Trump officially closes with its silliest episode yet: the spectacle of Trump Truthers, an assortment of Trump-friendly media figures who insist that the man who said President Obama is a Muslim and “not an American,” and that Muslims must be gotten “rid of,” at a New Hampshire rally, was some kind of opposition plant, not an actual Trump supporter.
First out the gate was Ann Coulter early Friday morning. “I say he’s a liberal plant,” she tweeted. Brian Kilmeade of “Fox & Friends” echoed Coulter, insisting the anti-Muslim questioner “sounds like a plant, to be honest.” Fox’s Kimberly Guilfoyle and Eric Bolling continued peddling that theory all day. Laura Ingraham agreed, tweeting that the man “sure sounded like a put-up–cartoon presentation, bad acting.”
Media Matters ran down the list of right-wingers trying to bail out Trump, who was uncharacteristically media-shy after the controversy erupted, even canceling a scheduled public appearance on Friday (allegedly to close a business deal.)
But it wasn’t just official right-wingers: Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin peddled the notion on Saturday:
He doubled down on his questions – it’s only OK to use the cliché “doubling down” when talking about Halperin – in a long Twitter debate with journalists who challenged him, insisting the guy “sounded like the Travolta mumble in the dance scene in ‘Pulp Fiction.’”
Right. Because no regular right wingers sound like that guy. He needs to get out more.
This is a perfect example of the Village bubble in action. They simply cannot accept that the far right wing is actually as cretinously dumb as it is because nobody they know in Washington says those things in front of them. Here’s one of the Village’s greatest hits from 2002, when Howard Kurtz was still at the Washington Post and CNN. And he wasn’t alone in this opinion:
Has Tom Daschle lost a couple of screws?
Did the normally mild-mannered senator accuse Rush Limbaugh of inciting violence?
He came pretty darn close. There were cameras there. You can watch the replay.
We can understand that Daschle is down, just having lost his majority leader’s job and absorbed plenty of blame for this month’s Democratic debacle.
What we can’t understand is how the South Dakotan can suggest that a mainstream conservative with a huge radio following is somehow whipping up wackos to threaten Daschle and his family.
Has the senator listened to Rush lately? Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy. He’s so mainstream that those right-wingers Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert had him on their Election Night coverage.
It’s always possible that the Trump questioner was a plant. But if he was, it was some kind of coordinated plant with Trump since he chose the guy to ask it. And, by the way, the next questioner validated the idiotic Muslim training camps thing only saying the FBI is watching them — and then went into a diatribe about the BLM using guns to seize personal property. He was obviously a Cliven Bundy type.
What are the odds that both were plants and that Trump happened to call on them? Not good, I’d say. In fact, it’s fairly obvious that Trump’s followers include far right fringe freaks. And there are a bunch of them.
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