Month: September 2016

Internalization of wingnuttia


by digby

I wrote about the origins of the malicious health rumors and how they play into Trump’s sexist dogwhistle (“she doesn’t have the strength and stamina to be president “) for Salon a couple of weeks ago. The point is to paint her as a weak woman who cannot handle the manly burden of being commander in chief. Her catching pneumonia on the trail lent validation to that primal notion, (which she knew would happen and is why she decided to try to work through it.)

The press has been reading the right wing’s relentless charge that she’s too physically and mentally weak to be president every day when they click on their favorite website, Drudge. They have been saying she has brain damage ever since she fell in 2012. When she got a cough, they knew very well that the right wingers were flogging the idea that it’s a Parkinsons symptom. When she got dizzy on 9/11 Hannity and the Fox doctors all kept running with the Parkinsons/brain damage story even after the diagnosis of pneumonia. The mainstream media tried to justify their own breathless coverage it as if it were a process story about her failing to keep them informed of her diagnosis. But that was always weird and never made much sense. Anyone watching he story unfold that day could see the febrile excitement in the media over the possibility of her being truly disabled, as Drudge and company had been pushing for months.

I don’t think they wanted her to be ill. But they had internalized the meme that she’s physically compromised in some fundamental way and when she became dizzy, all the stuff they’d seen about the brain damage came to mind. If you didn’t know all that you would just assume she got sick like people do every day and accept the doctor’s explanation and move on to other campaign issues. Instead it was a gigantic story, with repeated showings of her wobbling in slow motion and endless speculation about what she must be hiding in her medical records.

The Republicans are always good at this sort of unfounded smear and Trump is downright gifted at finding the underlying trait about his opponents that he can use to discredit them. With Clinton it’s not just “crooked Hillary” although the press has internalized that one too. The primitive lizard brain target is “she doesn’t have the stamina or the strength to be president.”  And it’s working.

  

by digby

One of the new memes coursing through the media is that Clinton made a huge mistake when she said that some white people were deplorable for being racist, sexist xenophobes. (That’s just not done in America.) She needs to give the American people a reason to vote for her besides the fact that Trump is a fascist because apparently being a fascist isn’t a good enough reason not to vote for someone (or enable his win with a third party vote.)

Anyway, here’s a story about a white person you’ve never heard of who is a big part of the Trump Movement. (Just don’t call him deplorable because that would be rude.)

At 4 p.m., Milo Yiannopoulos puts on a pair of glasses for the first time today. He examines himself in a mirror to see if he wants to add a gray suit to his purchases, which will push his bill to almost $12,000 at Savile Row’s Gieves & Hawkes. He’s buying clothes for his next round of college speeches in, as his bus announces in huge letters next to five giant photos of him, the Dangerous Faggot Tour. It resumed at Texas Tech University on Sept. 12 and is scheduled to hit campuses including Columbia, Dartmouth, the University of Alabama, and the University of California at Berkeley before concluding at UCLA in February. “I have ridiculously bad eyesight, but I have learned to live with an impressionistic view. Life is a Monet painting,” he says, taking off his glasses. “I wander around enjoying myopia.” 

Yiannopoulos is the 31-year-old British tech editor and star writer for Breitbart News, where he’s the loudest defender of the new, Trump-led ultraconservatism, standing athwart history, shouting to stop immigrants, feminists, political correctness, and any non-Western culture. Yiannopoulos gained his initial fame as the general in a massive troll war over misogyny in the video game world, known as Gamergate. He was permanently banned from Twitter in July after the social media company said his almost 350,000 followers were responsible for harassing Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones. He still has nearly 275,000 subscribers to his YouTube speeches, and CNBC and Fox turn to him as the most notorious spokesman for the alt-right, the U.S. version of Europe’s far right (led at various times by England’s Nigel Farage, France’s Marine Le Pen, Austria’s Jorg Haider, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, and Germany’s Frauke Petry). 

Their followers’ politics are almost exactly the same: They’re angry about globalization—culturally even more than economically. They’re angry about political correctness guilting them about insensitivity to women, minorities, gays, transgender people, the disabled, the sick—the everyone-but-them. They’re angry about feminism. They don’t like immigrants. They don’t like military intervention. They aren’t into free trade. They don’t like international groups such as the European Union, United Nations, or NATO—even the International Olympic Committee. They admire the bravado of authoritarians, especially Vladimir Putin. Some are white supremacists. Most enjoy a good conspiracy theory.

But members of the alt-right, unlike their old, frustrated European counterparts, are less focused on policy than on performance. Their MO usually involves pissing people off with hypermasculine taunts. 

They call establishment and even Tea Party Republicans “cuckservatives”—because they are cuckolded by the Left. They do most of their acting out online, often by organizing on 4chan or Reddit and then trolling targets on Twitter. The alt-right is a new enough phenomenon that in August, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan—running against an alt-right candidate in a primary—mistakenly called it “alt-conservatism” on a radio show. “It’s a nasty, virulent strain of something,” he said. “I don’t even know what it is, other than that it isn’t us. It isn’t what we believe in.” 

As Donald J. Trump has become the candidate of the alt-right, Breitbart News has become the movement’s voice. The two merged semiofficially in August, when Breitbart’s chief executive officer, Steve Bannon, quit his job to run Trump’s campaign. And Yiannopoulos, whose byline on the site is simply “Milo,” is Breitbart’s most radioactive star. 

“Milo is the person who propelled the alt-right movement into the mainstream,” says Heidi Beirich, who directs the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups and describes the term “alt-right” as “a conscious rebranding by white nationalists that doesn’t automatically repel the mainstream.” Beirich says she’s not even sure if Yiannopoulos believes in the alt-right’s tenets or just found a juvenile way to mix internet culture and extreme ideology to get attention. “It’s like he’s joking: ‘Ha ha, let me popularize the worst ideas that ever existed,’ ” she says. “That’s new, and that’s scary.”

There’s more at the link. If youcan stand it.

How weird that this “hypermasculine” cult has vaulted into the mainstream when the first woman is nominated by a major party for the presidency of the world’s only superpower. Go figure.

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Lewis Black tells it like it is

by digby

The newest Real Housewife of the Potomac: Colin Powell

by digby

I wrote about his email hack for Salon this morning:

Who would have ever thought that underneath his staid, sedate elder statesman Colin Powell was a catty Real Housewife of the Potomac? If the emails that were hacked and released to the press this week are any indication, he’s quite the backbiting gossip, with nasty opinions of just about everyone he knows.

For instance his old friends the Cheneys were probably upset to read what Colin really thinks about them:

“[The Cheneys] are idiots and spent force peddling a book that ain’t going nowhere.”

Meow. And this about Cheney, Rumsfeld and his old boss George H. W. Bush:

“One day when we both have had too many drinks we can discuss why [President George W. Bush] tolerated [Donald Rumsfeld] and why Dick [Cheney], a successful SecDef, was so committed to Don. I must say I gagged as [President George H.W. Bush] praised him as the ‘best’ at the statuary hall unveiling.”

Gag him with a spoon.

And that Hillary Clinton is such a total screw up:

“Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris.”

And she’s just such a loser:

“I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect. A 70-year-old person with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still dicking bimbos at home (according to the NYP).”

“Hillary has not been covering here [sic] self with glory. For good reason she comes across as sleazy.”  

She’s actually 68 but it’s clear he thinks the decrepit crone is on her last legs:

“On HD tv she doesn’t look good. She is working herself to death.”

He’s quite the nasty little bitch for a four star general, isn’t he? (You would think he’d show some empathy for poor old Bill’s reported “dicking” after his own indiscretion was splashed all over the tabloids.)

But while he may like totally gag at the idea of voting for that old bag, it’s Donald Trump who really makes him want to hurl:

“Ailes as an advisor wont heal women, don’t you think?” 

“Yup, the whole birther movement was racist. That’s what the 99% believe. When Trump couldn’t keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim.”

“To go on and call him an idiot just emboldens him.” 

“Trump has no sense of shame.” 

“Trump is a national disgrace” 

“I am back from Bohemian Grove. Surprise, surprise. I sat next to Stephen Harper a couple of time and had a nice discussion. Grove attendees know that Trump is a disaster. Most will vote against bit quite a few will not vote for Hillary and will vote for a third party candidate.”

(If you’re not familiar with Bohemian Grove, it’s an exclusive gathering in California of the most important men in the world each July. No women allowed, natch.)

And he was really upset at the news media for giving The Donald so much free time. It’s all about the ratings like that time when Trump got all mad at Fox and Ailes “sent Megyn Kelly off to get over her period.”

You might think that since Powell feels so strongly about Trump he would endorse Clinton as he did President Obama if only out of patriotism since Trump is a such a “disaster.” But that doesn’t look likely. And that’s because what really has the General’s panties in a bunch was the fact that Hillary Clinton had cited his advice to her about how to deal with emails when she joined the State department. He was fit to be tied that they even mentioned his name because he so didn’t tell her she should use private email and it’s just so exasperating that she told the FBI that she had talked to him about it. It’s like she was trying to say that he was just like her and, oh my God, that’s just so bogus.

Unfortunately, last week members of congress released an email that was among those requested from the state department which showed that he did tell her  how he circumvented the rules so they wouldn’t be subject to Freedom of Information requests. Ooopsie.

Colin Powell has a long history of being in the middle of scandals and always wriggling out of any responsibility for them. From his involvement in the My Lai massacre, to Iran Contra, to personally blocking President Bill Clinton’s promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military, to his infamous testimony before the UN that led to the Iraq war, Powell has been on the wrong side of history and the truth time and again and he’s always got some excuse as to why it wasn’t his fault.  Clinton should be overjoyed that this mean cheerleader isn’t rooting for her team.

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Trump Jr: awesome

by digby

So we can stop asking about the tax returns:

Donald Trump Jr. says that one reason for not releasing his father’s tax returns ― a tradition followed by every major party presidential candidate in the past 40 years ― is that it would simply invite too much scrutiny from ordinary people.

“He’s got a 12,000-page tax return that would create … financial auditors out of every person in the country asking questions that would detract from [his father’s] main message,” Trump Jr. said in an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review published Wednesday.

That is true. And from what I can tell, the media is shrugging. It’s just another admission that he has no intention of doing it because they don’t want people to know the full extent of his conflicts of interest. He is not going to do anything

And then there’s this:

The media has been her number one surrogate in this,” the younger Trump told radio host Chris Stigall on 1210 WPHT radio in Philadelphia. “Without the media, this wouldn’t even be a contest, but the media has built her up. They’ve let he slide on every in-discrepancy, on every lie, on every DNC game trying to get Bernie Sanders out of this thing.

“If Republicans were doing that, they’d be warming up the gas chamber right now.”

He seems to think that his father isn’t lying. He is wrong. He is never not lying.

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by tristero

Can Nicholas Kristof truly be totally oblivious to what he’s doing? Yeah, yeah he can:

Clearly, Clinton shades the truth — yet there’s no comparison with Trump. 

I’m not sure that journalism bears responsibility, but this does raise the thorny issue of false equivalence, which has been hotly debated among journalists this campaign. Here’s the question: Is it journalistic malpractice to quote each side and leave it to readers to reach their own conclusions, even if one side seems to fabricate facts or make ludicrous comments?

The answer, obviously is yes, it is indeed journalistic malpractice to quote fabricated facts and ludicrous comments by candidates. But Kristof then makes a very common error:

There are crackpots who believe that the earth is flat, and they don’t deserve to be quoted without explaining that this is an, er, outlying view…

Noooooooooo! When dealing with crackpots, and especially powerful crackpots, the media needs to weigh carefully whether to quote at all. Why? Because to repeat lies and idiocies in the media legitimates them.  It provides them – and the people who spout them – a status they would otherwise not receive or deserve. No one needs to argue whether the earth is flat, creationism is a scientific theory, climate change is real, or that insanely racist proposals like building a large wall on the Mexican border is a sensible idea. Who the f*** has time???

But the problem in Kristof’s column goes far beyond his defense of repeating candidates’ lies and nonsense.  Remember, his topic is the problem of false equivalence, which he clearly deplores. But look at the structure of his column:

Yes, Clinton has been…. Meanwhile, Trump is…

Clinton’s finances are… Trump would be the first major party nominee… 

Yes, Clinton created conflicts of interest…But the Trump Foundation… 

The Clinton Foundation…while the Trump Foundation…. 

Neither candidate has been very open about health… 

Clinton has produced… than Trump… 

Clinton has a…while Trump would have…

Of course, the point Kristof’s trying to demonstrate is that Trump is a scoundrel.  But no one will bother to wade through or remember the details of Nick’s comparisons.


What’s important is the fact that Kristof writes as if Trump actually is comparable to Clinton. It doesn’t matter whether Trump doesn’t compare – Nick Kristof made the comparison anyway. 

Therefore, Trump=Clinton. The details? Let’s not argue about the details, that’s just partisanship.

Yes, Nick intends well, but this column is a textbook example of how not to write about our bizarre election.

Trumping the media
by Tom Sullivan

Samantha Bee the other day observed that news network executives have “traded their balls for ratings” (just her opinion, she adds). That’s why the New York Times Washington Post gets to wring its hands this morning about Donald Trump being the “least transparent U.S. presidential candidate in modern history” (online headline):

… He is the first since 1976 to refuse to release his tax returns. He has declined to provide documentation of the “tens of millions” of dollars he claims to have donated to charity. He has yet to release a comprehensive accounting of his health. And, while Wednesday’s letter about Melania Trump’s immigration from her home country offers a few new details, there is no documentation to back up the claims.

At the same time, Trump and his aides are criticizing rival Hillary Clinton as secretive and demanding more information from her about her emails and health. Many Democrats also see Trump’s refusal to release basic information as hypocritical since for years, he was one of the loudest voices demanding that President Obama release his birth certificate to prove he was born in Hawaii and qualified to be president. Trump also called on Obama to release his college applications, school transcripts and passport applications.

There is a reason Trump gets away with this, as Samantha Bee pithily observed: because the media lets him. The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman wrote yesterday about Donald Trump’s appearance on the Dr. Oz show to “disclose” his medical records, prepared no doubt by his own Dr. Bornstein:

Coming from him, I imagine it included testimonials to Trump’s superhuman strength and sexual magnetism. But if you’re waiting for anything like a complete medical history on Trump, I wouldn’t hold your breath.

I say that because we’ve seen this many times before. There’s some policy plan or personal information about Trump that reporters are asking for, his campaign promises that it’ll be released very soon, then the press’ attention moves on to other things, and the campaign never delivers. That’s what will probably happen here too.

This is how Donald Trump deals with stories he doesn’t like: He either says he’ll answer at some later date, or just refuses to answer entirely, knowing that eventually, people will stop asking.

Chris Hayes last night discussed Trump’s evasive maneuvers with Rebecca Traister [lead-in timestamp 6:00]:

Hayes: Trump, he doesn’t ever give the first piece in the breadcrumb trail, whereas Hillary Clinton … We now have a whole bunch of State Department emails, right? We have medical records. We start to get these breadcrumb pieces and that inevitably, sort of…

Traister: And it gives more material, and inevitably in any amount of material you’re going to find something that is interesting or reportable, and then it’s like, “we found this interesting thing”…

Hayes: And in Trump’s case, he could say … he could produce a letter from the IRS saying he is under audit …

Hayes and Traister (together, laughing): But he is not going to do that!

Hayes: Because what would happen if he did that? Other things would follow.

Traister: Yes.

Hayes: And yet it seems to me Hillary Clinton gets … that’s why we [have] the paradox of her as this private person, I think, who doesn’t like the press, about whom we know more than anyone.

Traister: Right. But this is where once you follow this trail, if you are Hillary Clinton, is where you can get … I mean there is almost nothing she can do. Because she can’t not give it either. If she doesn’t give anything over, it would only more fully enhance, you know, that “she’s got something to hide.”

Clinton has a breadcrumb trail going back decades that the press finds easy to follow and easily searchable. Whereas Trump refuses to start one. Kurt Eichenwald, speaking of his blockbuster expose on Trump’s conflict of interest exposure from his worldwide business dealings, said he had to do some major digging across the world to come up with this original reporting.

Other reporters seem to think that’s not their job, an astonished Waldman writes, leading Trump to think “he can get away with this lack of disclosure, and we’ll just take his word for it that everything’s cool and there’s nothing to worry about.” It is so much easier on reporters to politely ask politicians to give them what they want, and to drop it and act as stenographers when they don’t.

It works for Donald Trump, and makes a lot of reporters look like they do too.

Update: A sharp reader noted I misidentified my news outlet above.

Nobody wants to have beers with either one of them

by digby

It occurs to me that with the public holding both parties, the press and the two presidential candidates in contempt and believe that none of them are honest and trustworthy, it may just be that at the moment people are making the general statement that everyone except the people they know in their own lives are a bunch of lying swine. In other words, maybe it’s not personal.

I recall Bill Clinton had terrible personal favorability ratings in office and high job approval ratings at the same time. So I wonder how people are deciding this presidential race? Obviously they mostly choose the candidate nominated by their party. That’s just how most people commonly sort through this. But for those who don’t vote party line, with both candidates being disliked personally, you wonder what metric they might use.

I’d guess this one is most likely. Greg Sargent reports on the qualifications gap

This week’s Post poll, for instance, found that 62 percent of Americans say they don’t think Trump “is qualified to serve as president,” while only 36 percent say he is qualified. By contrast, they say by 60-39 that Hillary Clinton is qualified. Meanwhile, they also say by 61-30 that Clinton has the “better personality and temperament to effectively serve as president.” Previous Post polls have shown similar findings.

Meanwhile, a CNN poll from July found that 67 percent said Trump does not have “the right experience to be president,” while 64 percent said that Clinton does have the right experience.

He goes on to note that the only person in recent decades who has had comparable numbers to Trump and still won was Dan Quayle.

He doesn’t make a judgement that this will be decisive but does suggest that it should at least be noticed:

Still, one thing we do know is that the vast gap in perceptions here — large majorities view Clinton as qualified and fit for the job, while comparably large majorities view Trump as unqualified and unfit for it — continues to be neglected in commentary about how historically disliked the two candidates are. There may not be any precedent in recent decades for a major party nominee to be seen as unqualified by such large majorities. That may not end up mattering in the end. But it seems like another important data point in assessing how unusual, or even abnormal, the Trump candidacy really is.

Indeed. It’s hard to believe that Clinton is so disliked personally that a majority of people would vote for an equally disliked person they don’t believe is qualified to do the job. But maybe they do hate her just that much.

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About those honest and trustworthy numbers

by digby

Look who’s got even worse numbers than Clinton:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ trust and confidence in the mass media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly” has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history, with 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight percentage points from last year.

Gallup began asking this question in 1972, and on a yearly basis since 1997. Over the history of the entire trend, Americans’ trust and confidence hit its highest point in 1976, at 72%, in the wake of widely lauded examples of investigative journalism regarding Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. After staying in the low to mid-50s through the late 1990s and into the early years of the new century, Americans’ trust in the media has fallen slowly and steadily. It has consistently been below a majority level since 2007.

Why don’t people feel the press is reporting everything fully and completely? Are they hiding something or do they just have an unusual penchant for malpractice? Inquiring minds want to know.

You’d think they’d be just a tad less sanctimonious with the endless scolding over politicians failing to be “honest and trustworthy.” It’s not like the American people think they’re any better. Maybe they should take a little deeper look into the underlying lack of trust in all institutions instead of attributing the numbers to alleged character flaws of individuals. Certainly they should step back from their defensive crouch and ask themselves if this practice might be contributing to their own battered reputation.

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by digby

Ivanka Trump said this last night on Fox News, after her father said the same thing on the campaign trail:

 “There’s no policy on Hillary Clinton’s website pertaining to any of these issues, childcare, eldercare, or maternity leave or paternity leave for that matter. There’s no policy that’s been articulated on how to solve the problem.”

This is the kind of every day blatant lying the Trump campaign gets away with on a regular basis. It’s been fact checked. No one will care. As Think Progress reports:

Hillary Clinton has three different pages on her website that describe her plans for paid family leave and childcare.

Clinton, in fact, rolled out her own plans months ago. She called for paid family leave in her first speech of the campaign and unveiled her proposal to guarantee 12 weeks in January. Her plan would ensure eligible workers, mothers and fathers alike, would get two-thirds of their regular pay up to a certain cap and pay for the cost of the benefits with higher taxes on the rich. When Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2008, she also put forward a paid family leave plan. 

And in May she unveiled her proposal to address the cost, quality, and availability of childcare. She has pledged to use government spending and tax breaks to make sure that no family pays more than 10 percent of its income on care. She also paired it with a proposal to increase pay for childcare providers and early childhood educators as a way to ensure quality and availability. 

Here’s the Washington Post headline from last May:

The enormous ambition of Hillary Clinton’s child-care plan 

Granted, nobody heard about it because everyone was fulminating over emails at the time as usual, but it is on her website and she talks about it on the trail all the time.

This is Ivanka’s special project so she surely knew that Clinton had a plan. She just adopted the Trump campaign strategy of going on right wing media and blatantly lying about it knowing that the people who watch will never hear otherwise.

She has now added to her lie by going on mainstream morning TV and saying that Clinton has been around forever and never passed any plans for women and children so she’s a big fat failure. That’s not true and to the extent that Democrats including Clinton have tried to get paid family passed it was Ivanka’s party that blocked it.

When asked whether she and the Trump Organization provide it for her own employees, as millions of private companies do, she said they do. Her own small company does provide a measly 8 weeks of paid leave but there’s no documentation anywhere that the international Trump organization has a policy on it. And her father has lied about his properties before saying that they provide child care at his hotels. it turned out it was for the guests not the employees.

It’s part of their attempt to get women voters, as was the Dr Oz gambit today. And it could work. The fact that it’s all lies doesn’t really matter for the Trump campaign. It’s all about impressionistic attitude. But it remains to be seen if the impression most women have of him is now too set to change.

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