Trump vs. Lapdog Media - a Day in Review, 5.31.2016

Let's quickly review the events of the day:

1. Donald Trump holds a free-wheeling, hour long press conference during which he details where the $6 million raised for veterans has been contributed or is about to be donated, excoriates the press in general for being inherently biased and dishonest - both of which accusations are 100% correct - and singles out one ABC reporter as being a "sleaze".  Also true.
   
2. Bernie Sanders calls a "press conference" about healthcare.  He speaks for ten minutes, takes no questions at all, and no one in the lapdog press corps covering his campaign objects.
3. Hillary Clinton studiously avoids having any meaningful, un-planned, un-staged interaction with the lapdog press corps covering her campaign for about the 180th consecutive day, and no one in the media will object.
4. Finally, at 12:50 p.m., CST today, I went over to the landing page for the very liberal Politico.com, and inventoried the various headlines there.  There were at that time 25 headlines in all, and the word "Trump" appeared in 17 of them, including 9 of the first 10 in order.

This is how Donald Trump has dominated this election season to this point, and how he will continue to dominate it through Election Day.  And neither the Clinton Campaign nor her lapdog press agents in the mainstream news media have the slightest clue what to do about it.

What's the Deal With Bill Kristol?

No doubt many of you are wondering what the deal is with Weekly Standard Editor and long-time neo-conservative columnist Bill Kristol and his single-minded efforts to hand the presidency to Hillary Clinton by convincing some poor, unsuspecting schlub to mount a run as a third-party candidate.  I don’t know Mr. Kristol personally, but this is really not all that hard to figure out.

There are two main motivations at play here:  Vanity, and a maniacal desire to protect Israel.

Kristol obviously wants us all to believe that it’s all about political principles with him, that he just can’t stomach the thought of a man he considers to be a low-life, Donald Trump, occupying the White House for the next four to eight years.  And that would all be well and good and perfectly acceptable as an explanation had Mr. Kristol not on several occasions uttered with his very next breath that he’d be perfectly fine with Mrs. Clinton obtaining the presidency as the results of his own actions.

Note to Bill:  There simply is no conservative political principle that can turn Hillary Clinton into a preferable president over the GOP nominee.  There just isn’t.  Sorry, but that cat don’t flush.

No, principle isn’t it.

A big part of Kristol’s motivation is obviously vanity – or hubris might even be a better word for it.  For the last few months since he became the titular leader of this doomed-to-fail cause, he has suddenly become the liberals’ favorite conservative in Washington, and he obviously delights in all the attention he is getting.  He obviously relishes his daily appearances as the fake-conservative talking head of choice on MSNBC.  He no doubt loves being the lead story at times on CNN and NBC.  He probably even finds himself suddenly being invited to fancy dinner parties and receptions from which he has been excluded for decades, and finds he really enjoys the high dollar hors d’ouevres that are being served.

In other words, he’s become John McCain circa 2006 or Lindsey Graham circa 2012, and he likes it.  No shame in it, really – it happens to lots of “conservatives”.

But Kristol’s biggest motivation always has been the protection of the state of Israel.  Advocating for U.S. maintenance of its special relationship with Israel has always been a centerpiece of his writings throughout his career. 

That’s a noble cause, and one with which I entirely agree. 

The problem with Kristol is not the cause, but the methods.  He obviously believes that the best way to ensure that the U.S. will never abandon its most loyal ally is to ensure that our country becomes entangled in every bloody conflict that erupts in the entire Middle East.  At the rare times in which no such conflicts present themselves, Kristol invariably advocates that the U.S. invent them, as he did with his tireless advocacy for the invasion of Iraq.  Involvement in all of these conflicts ensures that the U.S. must maintain a major military presence in the region, thus ensuring our ability to quickly intervene on Israel’s behalf should it be attacked by the hostile nations that surround it.

The truth here is that Kristol realizes that Donald Trump understands that the U.S. no longer needs to be dependent upon the importing of millions of barrels of crude oil each day from Middle Eastern producers, thanks to our ability now to extract oil from previously inaccessible shale formations.  For the last 70 years, that need has created a strategic national interest for the U.S. in ensuring the free flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf.

Trump understands that that strategic national interest no longer exists, and that, in Kristol’s mind, makes him a very dangerous man who must be defeated by any means necessary, even if that means handing the presidency to Hillary Clinton and giving her 3 to 4 appointees to the Supreme Court.

The other truth here is that Kristol loved the foreign policy decisions made by Mrs. Clinton and President Obama while she was Secretary of State.  He was all for getting the U.S. tangled up in a civil war in Syria, even though that meant literally arming and creating ISIS as it exists today.  And he was all for our disastrous military involvement in Libya, even though our country had zero strategic interest to intervene in that country.  And he was all for U.S. promotion of the “Arab Spring” movement, since it destabilized several governments in the Middle East, and destabilization always ensures the creation of more bloody conflicts.

Because all of those horrible decisions and all of those disastrous policies work to ensure the U.S. maintenance of a major military presence in the Middle East.

This is how Bill Kristol’s mind works.  Don’t kid yourself otherwise by attributing some principled motivation to him.  But do pity the poor schlub he has apparently convinced to become his own personal sacrificial lamb in this election season.

Time to Shut Up, Mitt. Seriously.

Mitt Romney told an interviewer this week that he continues to attack Donald Trump because "that's how I can sleep at night."

Really.

Ok, so, this former two-time loser in presidential politics sleeps well due to his efforts to undermine his own political party's nominee for the office, thus helping a lifetime criminal in her efforts to sit in the White House for the next four years, sentencing the nation to what would be a de facto third term for our first openly fascist presidency.  This activity is what gives Mitt Romney sweet, sweet dreams.

Presumably, then, Mr. Romney has slept just fine for the last four years, since he did basically everything he could to ensure Mr. Obama got his second term in office. After all, this is the same Mitt Romney who squandered both debates with Obama by pulling every effective punch any respectable GOP candidate would have had at his disposal, the same Mitt Romney who paid some worthless consulting firm $14 million for a "get out the vote" effort that failed to materialize on Election Day, the same Mitt Romney who did everything he could to blow a fairly significant polling lead during the last six weeks of his campaign.

If you are a Republican voter who still gives a rat's behind what Mitt Romney has to say, you are part of the problem here, not the solution.

Time to shut up and go home, Mitt, or just come out with it and formally switch parties.  "Tiresome" is a very mild word to describe what your act has become.

This is Donald Trump, Winning

As of noon today, Central Standard Time, 15 of the 26 headlines on the landing page at Politico.com contained the word "Trump".

#winning

Scattershooting While Wondering if There is a Way to Stop the Kardashians From Reproducing…

Trump and the Governor

Donald Trump goes to New Mexico and gratuitously insults Governor Susanna Martinez, and everyone thinks his campaign is suddenly doomed.  It’s not.  We’ve seen this film before, and it always ultimately fades away.

Want proof?  Marco Rubio announced yesterday that he would be happy to speak on Trump’s behalf at the GOP convention.  A few hours later, Trump was urging Marco to change his mind and go ahead and run for re-election to his Florida Senate seat.

Huh?  Wasn’t it just a couple of months ago that Rubio was doing his best imitation of Don Rickles, hurling insult after insult on the debate stage and for a week after?  And wasn’t Trump responding to 

“Little Marco” with his own imitation of Triumph the Insult Dog?

Why yes, yes it was.

This is How The World Turns in this year’s GOP presidential campaign.  Get used to it, because it’s going to keep happening, and it’s all going to turn out ok.

The Trump/Sanders Debate Proposal

Oh, please God, let this happen.  This would be the political event of the century.  They should put it on pay-per-view.  Seriously – what better way to raise money for charity than charging $50 bucks a head to watch the thing and steering the proceeds to the charities of the candidates’ choice?

A friend expressed exasperation yesterday at the idea, saying it would turn the campaign “into a circus”.  Huh?  What campaign have you been watching, buddy?  This has been an unending three-ring circus since last July.

In Ring Number One, you have Hillary Clinton, the life-long criminal who without any question whatsoever allowed classified U.S. secrets to be shared with hackers and foreign governments over her illegal email server while she served as Secretary of State.  This is now not just an allegation – it is a clearly documented fact, and yet, the Democrat Party appears set to put her forth as its nominee for the Presidency.  Imagine how much damage she can do to national security in that office.

Isn’t that circus enough for you?

In Ring Number Two, you have The Commie.  Seriously, an avowed Marxist, Bernie Sanders, has now won 11 of the last 14 contested states on the Democratic side.  So the Democrat Party voters can’t decide between a criminal and a commie. 

Isn’t that Circus enough for you?

And in Ring Number Three, you have Donald Trump, who can’t decide if he’s running against the Democrats or any Republican who happens to pop up on his radar screen.  Donald Trump, who won every single debate against the 17 other Republicans arrayed against him despite having the detailed policy knowledge of the average hammerhead shark.  And the personality of one, come to think of it.

Isn’t that circus enough for you?

And you’re worried about a debate between the Commie and the Hammerhead making it even more of a circus?  C’mon, where’s your sense of fun?

In all seriousness, this is a can’t lose situation for Trump, and a can’t win situation for Hillary.

For Trump, Sanders is already now seen as anxiously responding to his suggestion, desperate to find a way to work it out.  If it gets worked out, all Trump would have to do in the debate would be to keep asking the Commie how he plans to pay for all of his idiotic proposals.  It would be the easiest debate in the history of mankind.

If the thing can’t be pulled off, Trump still looks like the bold candidate for proposing it in the first place.  If the reason it can’t be pulled off is because none of the networks are willing to let much or all of the proceeds/ad revenues go to charity, then Trump gets the win of making his enemies in the networks look like a bunch of money-grubbing sleazeballs, which most of them actually are.

No matter what happens, it all makes Hillary look like the odd-woman out, marginalizing her even more than she already has been over the last couple of months as the final round of primaries approach.  And if the debate actually happens, both candidates would have a prime opportunity to go after her with impunity.

Mid-day yesterday, one of Trump’s staffers indicated he was “just kidding” when he tossed the idea out there on Wednesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Show.  But late Thursday night, representatives of both campaigns said negotiations were ongoing.

As he always does, Trump has, with a single throwaway line in an interview, dominated a news cycle for the next 24 hours, and set up a process during which he has no chance to lose and several ways to win from a public perception standpoint.

If he would focus on this kind of thing, instead of tossing out gratuitous insults at his fellow Republicans, he would be literally unbeatable.

Trump is Elvis, Hillary is New Coke, and Bernie is the Backup QB

So, I was in a meeting earlier this week when the subject of discussion turned to analogies for the remaining political candidates.   This is a good discussion, because to a large extent it explains where we are in this race.

I’ve already written about my analogy for Bernie Sanders:  he’s the backup quarterback.  Right now, he’s the most popular of the three remaining major party candidates, according to the national polling data, just as the backup QB is always the most popular player on a football team with an under-performing starter.

But, like the backup QB, Bernie is popular because he has been largely unexamined.  He has essentially no chance to win, so neither the media nor the voters have spent much time analyzing what it really means to be a socialist.  Just as the fans inevitably cringe and stop cheering so loudly as soon as a backup QB gets on the field and demonstrates why he wasn’t the starter to begin with, so would the voters cringe were Bernie to actually become the nominee and they were forced to face the reality of exactly who he is.

My favorite analogy for Hillary Clinton is that she is just like “New Coke”.  You millennials won’t be familiar with this, but you can Google it for yourselves rather than have me explain was New Coke was.  Those of you who were cogent human beings in the early 1980s will remember the introduction of New Coke by the Coca Cola Bottling Company.  New Coke had a slightly different taste than Coca Cola, and it has this behemoth organization behind it spending tens of millions of dollars trying to convince the consuming public that they should love it and indeed be very excited about it.

The problem was, the more any normal human being tasted New Coke, the less they liked it.  This is Hillary Clinton in a nutshell.

Like New Coke, Hillary has this gigantic organization behind her spending tens of millions of dollars every week in an attempt to convince the voting public that they should love her and indeed be very excited about the opportunity to enjoy four years of her in the White House.  The problem with Hillary is, the more any normal human being becomes exposed to her, the less they like her.

Most politicians crave public and media attention and grow more popular with increasing exposure to both.  Hillary Clinton is exactly the opposite:  the more media and public attention she gets, the less popular she becomes.  This is nothing new – it has always been the case with her.

This is why the Democrat National Committee did everything it could to ensure Ms. Clinton would not have to endure any sort of truly contested race for the nomination.  They all knew it was vitally important to keep Hillary out of the public eye as much as possible throughout the campaign.   

Because the “idea” of Hillary – the U.S. is long overdue for its first female president, after all - is an idea that appeals to millions of Americans.  But the reality of Hillary, her unlikable personality, her fealty to all manner of far-leftwing causes, her obvious, blatant criminal activities over the last 35 years, and all the other baggage she brings along with her (including a big ol’ bag named Bill) is amazingly unappealing.

New Coke ultimately failed and disappeared from the shelves simply because the public, having been exposed to the reality of it, simply did not like it.  The same is likely to become true for Hillary.

Many people like to draw an analogy between Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan, but I don’t like that one.  While it is true that the circumstances of their respective races are similar in some ways, the two could not be more un-alike from a personal standpoint.

No, my favorite analogy for Trump is that he is a lot like Elvis Presley was in 1956.  When he appeared shaking his hips and singing this new-fangled rock ‘n roll music on the Ed Sullivan Show in September of that year, Elvis was a shock to the national system.  Many people in “proper” society thought he should be banned and his music should be banned with him.  Some even believed he was the anti-Christ (I’m not kidding). 

But Elvis had the exact opposite progression with the public that New Coke had:  the more he was exposed to the public, the less shocking he became as the public became acclimated to this new form of music and performance artist.  Within a year, lots of rock musicians were shaking their hips on Ed Sullivan, and teenagers were shaking their own hips on Saturdays on American Bandstand.  By then, no one thought Elvis was the anti-Christ, and no one feared the world was going to come to an end, and indeed, many of those teenagers’ parents were playing his albums in their living rooms.

This kind of progression, from an initial shock to the societal system to a gradual but steady acceptance and ultimate endorsement, is exactly what we have seen and continue to see where Trump is concerned.  True, the lunatic Glen Beck still thinks Trump is the anti-Christ, but no one else does.  Just three months ago, comparisons of Trump to Hitler were ubiquitous in the traditional and social media.  Think: when was the last time you saw that comparison made?

The hair is a lot different and you wouldn’t want to listen to him sing “Jailhouse Rock”, but Trump is Elvis, Hillary’s New Coke, and Bernie is and will always remain the backup QB.