As noted here last week, all three cable news networks have taken to broadcasting each and every Donald Trump event as if it were actually newsworthy, despite the fact that they all consist of exactly the same bumper sticker idiocy and hate-speech. It is a unique arrangement between the networks and Trump that does not exist for any other candidate of either party.
Never one to miss a broadcasting opportunity, the management of Fox News has decided to abandon all of the pretenses of being “fair and balanced” (which no one believed anyway) and coming right out to declare that it is now cable’s first and only all-Trump TV network.
The programming on Fox News has already been leaning heavily toward a Trump-centric schedule for months. Media Matters has been tracking the candidate appearances on Fox and the results illustrate why the network is making its conversion to full Trumpism. In August alone, Fox News featured Trump for a total of nearly five hours over seventeen appearances. That means he averaged about a third of a one-hour program every other day for a month.
Trump’s ubiquitous placement on Fox even exceeded the combined total air time for ten other Republican candidates (Bobby Jindal 11 minutes, Jim Gilmore 16, Lindsey Graham 18, Ted Cruz 22, Jeb Bush 29, Rick Santorum 19, George Pataki 32, Rand Paul 33, John Kasich 45, and Rick Perry 48). The remaining candidates (Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker) all registered an hour and a half or less for the month. That’s compared to Trump’s four hours and forty-eight minutes.
To be fair, Fox News hasn’t discarded every other news item in favor of their hero and new master, Donald Trump. There is one other story that gets frequently play on the network. It concerns Hillary Clinton and her email. This story fills just about every moment that isn’t already taken by Trump. Never mind that they haven’t uncovered any evidence of unlawful behavior or any harm due to classified secrets being revealed. Nothing. It is pure speculation and innuendo. Considering all the time they devote to it, the fact that they have come up empty pretty much tells you all you need to know about the alleged scandal.
So look for the big premiere of Trump News and Wall Building in the next few weeks. In the meantime you can enjoy the current schedule of near 24/7 Trumpiness. After all, it isn’t like there is any reason to respect the democratic process as the nation elects its next president. Fox News is fully devoted to hyping The Donald and reaping the bonanza in ratings, which is all that really matters in America today.
Last month Hillary Clinton’s campaign busted an attempted infiltration by the scumbags at James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. The exposure of O’Keefe’s scam was reported by Clinton staff to Time, complete with evidence of the would-be fraud. You might think that after having been revealed and held up to ridicule the deceivers at Project Veritas would back off and lick their wounds. But no.
Devoid of any semblance of shame, O’Keefe just released a video (posted below) produced during the failed infiltration. He contends that he has caught the Clinton campaign accepting donations that are prohibited by law. The only problem with his allegations is that they are not proven to be true by his pitiful video antics.
O’Keefe’s flunkies approached a booth that was selling campaign swag at the site where Clinton announced the launch of her campaign for the Democratic nomination for president last June. He says that while there his “journalist” met a Canadian woman who wanted to by a couple of items, which is prohibited by law because the purchases are donations to the campaign and can only be made by U.S. citizens. In the course of the transaction, O’Keefe’s flunky offered to buy the items for the Canadian woman and the transaction was completed. This is what O’Keefe is now alleging is an epic violation of campaign laws and proof of incorrigible criminality by Clinton (who wasn’t even there). Thank goodness O’Keefe was there to uncover a potentially fraudulent sale of a t-shirt that could very well alter the course of America’s democracy.
More to the point, if any law was broken it was by O’Keefe’s flunky. The campaign is seen in the video advising the Canadian that they cannot sell her anything, just as the law requires. So when the O’Keefee undertook to make the purchase for her, she was the one that allegedly committed a crime. It is unlawful to make a donation in the name of another person who is not legally permitted to make a donation themselves. However, it is not a crime for the person selling swag to accept payment from a valid U.S. citizen, which is what happened.
O’Keefe maintains that he and his flunky did not know the Canadian woman. However, given his history of shameless dishonesty, it would be naive to take his word for that. Especially since the events suggest otherwise. For instance, as soon as the Clinton staffer told her she could not buy the items, O’Keefe’s flunky stepped in to support her and tried to persuade the staff to make the sale. Was it just a coincidence that she was standing next to a Canadian? And why was she there recording it if they weren’t in on this scheme together? If this wasn’t her project, what was? Their partnership was sealed when they agreed to let the O’Keefee buy the items herself.
What’s more, the Canadian made an odd, off-hand threat when denied the sale saying that “When I go back to Canada I will talking about this.” Who would say such thing unless they were involved in the con and attempting to get a rise from their victim? For more proof of collusion, consider how O’Keefe says in the video that “It didn’t take long for these campaign staffers to think they had found a way to skirt the law and take the Canadian woman’s money.” But, as shown in the video, it was the Canadian woman who suggested that the flunky buy the items, not any of the Clinton staffers. That seems a little like it was planned and then blamed on the staff.
The media isn’t taking O’Keefe seriously. At a press conference this morning one reporter asked O’Keefe incredulously “Is this a joke?” In further questioning O’Keefe actually admitted that it was his group that broke the law. He also admitted that the actual amount of the transaction was $30-40.00. That’s significant because the video shows a staffer saying “So it’ll be a total of $75.00.” That’s proof that he edited the video to insert the completion of an entirely different transaction and passing it off as the one with the Canadian woman. That’s typical of his operation where he deliberately edits his videos to produce false representations of what took place.
The whole affair is ridiculous. The notion that a piddling sale of $30.00 is being elevated to some kind of massive campaign corruption scandal is absurd. It would never be prosecuted even if something illegal was done here by the Clinton staffers, which it wasn’t. The only crimes committed were by O’Keefe & Company. And to top it off, O’Keefe’s director of communications at Project Veritas, Daniel Pollack, told the Washington Post that…
“Had [O’Keefe’s flunky] not been there the Canadian woman very well might have asked nicely, and they would have said, ‘sure.’ We don’t know what course this would have taken had our journalist not been there.”
That’s actually a good point. Pollack is conceding that, but for O’Keefe’s interference, who knows what would have happened. Probably nothing at all, because it was the O’Keefee and the Canadian who concocted and carried out the crime. The staffers were clear that no sale would be made to a non-citizen. There is no evidence whatsoever to assume that they would simply have changed their minds. And if O’Keefe’s flunky were actually a “journalist,” she would have kept her mouth shut and waited to see what would happen, and Pollack wouldn’t have to wonder. Instead, she tried to manipulate the situation into a controversy that wasn’t going that way prior to her interference.
But of course, she is an activist, and a dishonest one at that. And the only evidence needed to prove that is that she works for O’Keefe who has been convicted of crimes committed during these phony stings. He also has the distinction of having his work labeled“political disinformation” by Special Prosecutors in Texas. Yes, Texas. And he is still producing political disinformation. Except now even fewer people are paying him any attention. Even Fox News hasn’t touched this one.
The Republican Party’s current (and cringeworthy) front-runner for the nomination for president, Donald Trump, is infamous for his repugnant views on women. His openly derisive rhetoric is so notorious that he was even questioned about it by Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly in the first GOP primary debate. Following that exchange Trump actually ended up providing more evidence of his misogyny by singling out Kelly, the only woman debate moderator, for despicable criticism and insults.
Apparently, that wasn’t a sufficient demonstration of hostility toward women, so Trump is upping the ante with a new line of attack aimed at Hillary Clinton and her long-time aide, Huma Abedin. In remarks yesterday to his glassy-eyed disciples, Trump assumed his characteristic schoolyard bully stance to level charges against Abedin that were purely slanderous and without any factual basis whatsoever.
Trump: “Huma Abedin is married to a bad guy. Anthony Weiner is one of great sleazebags of our time. So Huma is getting classified secrets, she’s married to Anthony Weiner, who’s a perv. If you think that Huma isn’t telling Anthony, who she’s probably desperately in love with, in all fairness to Anthony, because why else would she marry this guy? Do you think there’s even a 5% chance she’s not telling Anthony Weiner, now of a public relations firm, what the hell is coming across?”
First of all, for Trump to assail Anthony Weiner, or anybody else, as a “sleazebag” takes a boatload of chutzpah. After all, Weiner was only guilty of sexting online and was never unfaithful to his wife, to whom he is still married. Trump, on the other hand, has cheated on his multiple spouses and even been accused of rape by one of them. And in an appearance on The View he said that if Ivanka were not his daughter “perhaps I would be dating her.” A perv who lusts after his own daughter and betrays his marital oath ought not to be calling other people names.
More importantly, the truly offensive part of Trump’s comment is the assertion that Abedin is incapable of conducting herself as a professional. Simply because she is a woman Trump believes that she would disclose classified information to her husband in violation of the law and the ethical requirements of her position. Because obviously, in his view, women cannot be trusted in sensitive jobs due to their biological compulsion to gossip.
This raises some interesting questions. Does he also believe that the women in the Bush administration were leaking secrets to their spouses? Is he disqualifying Carly Fiorina, or any other woman, from serving in government because she represents a security risk? Would Trump make the same charge against a man in a similar position? And if so, is he admitting that he would blab state secrets to his current wife Melania?
This was not a flip remark by Trump. When he made it originally he also asked the women in his audience to confirm his opinion. When a women in the crowd said that she would not reveal classified info to her husband, Trump shouted back contemptuously “You would,” in effect calling her a liar who would put national security at risk because of her unsuitability for the job and the inherent flaws of her gender. Remember, that was one of his supporters. And to seal the deal, Trump tweeted the same insult to Abedin this morning that he made in his speech yesterday.
It is really mind-boggling that any women, or men who respect them, would cast a vote for this neanderthal. But even worse, the other women and men in the GOP have been completely silent about this rebuke. Fiorina has not mentioned it. Nor has Trump’s BFF, and self-anointed Mama Grizzly, Sarah Palin. None of the other candidates seem to be disturbed by the suggestion that all women are gabby turncoats who would sellout their country for some good pillow talk. Which proves again that Trump is not a problem for the Republican Party. He IS the Republican Party. And his noxious ideas will remain a core part of their agenda even after his inevitable flame out.
Conservative muckrakers have been very busy lately producing deceptive videos that deliberately slander Democrats and progressive organizations. It has become their favorite method of spreading malicious lies via dishonest editing and unsupported allegations. Most notably of late are the videos that falsely portray Planned Parenthood as engaging in various unlawful practices.
The technique was famously employed by serial liar James O’Keefe when he produced videos wherein he pretended to be a pimp in order to damage the reputation of ACORN, a philanthropic organization that helps the poor obtain housing and register to vote. Although the videos were proven to be political disinformation, they resulted in ACORN losing funding and eventually shutting down. Later O’Keefe was sued by a former ACORN staffer and was ordered to pay $100,000 judgment for his libel. On subsequent projects O’Keefe was caught trying to seduce a CNN reporter, cast illegal votes, and tamper with the phones of a United States senator. For that offense O’Keefe was arrested and eventually pleaded guilty after his felonies were bargained down to misdemeanors.
So it was just a matter of time before this craven tactic was aimed at the campaign of a prominent Democrat running for high office. Time is reporting that…
“Hillary Clinton’s campaign offices around the country have been put on alert after at least two women approached Iowa staff under the guise of being supporters in an apparent effort to catch the campaign engaging in improper or illegal activity, a Clinton campaign official said.”
As described by Time, the modus operandi is typical of methods used by O’Keefe and company. There are even photos of some of the con artists sent to scam the Clinton campaign. One woman in the photos is a known operative who has worked with O’Keefe in the past. Time further reported the account of the attempted scam given by Clinton’s spokesperson:
“A Clinton campaign official alleges that the women engaged in several efforts to entrap supporters. In one scheme, described by Clinton staff, a woman attempted to pass a cash donation to Clinton volunteers and interns. In another, a woman approached the campaign on Aug. 19 and said both her parents had donated to Clinton the legal maximum of $2700 each and wanted to funnel an additional donation through their daughter, a violation of federal law. On Aug. 13, a woman claiming to be Canadian approached another Clinton fellow to ask how to falsify an address for a campaign donation.”
At this time it appears that the political dirty trickery failed. But just the fact that these cretins are out there trying to pull off their hoaxes is troubling. The possibility of a naive campaign volunteer getting fooled or being subjected to a video manipulation that casts them in a negative light is always a risk. Not that it proves any wrongdoing by the campaign, but it takes time and effort to debunk the lies and some people (e.g. Fox News viewers) will believe them no matter how ridiculous.
And that’s pretty much the point. They know that they can have a deleterious effect even if exposed as crooks. Let’s hope the Clinton campaign, and every other potential target of these charlatans, remains vigilant and wards off their attempted scams.
This evening on Fox News Shannon Bream, filling in for Megyn Kelly, did a segment about how dismal Hillary Clinton’s future is now that her poll numbers have descended to unfathomable depths, particularly with regard to favorability.
Like much of the rest of Fox’s recent coverage of Clinton, the impression made is that Clinton has about three weeks before she will drop out of the race and report to prison. To open the segment Bream gleefully reported that…
“A new poll now showing Clinton may be more disliked than she has been in decades. As a brand new survey from CNN shows her unfavorability rating is now at a whopping 53%. A number that Clinton has seen just one other time in twenty-three years of polling.”
What the “fair and balanced” propagandists at Fox are leaving out is that Clinton’s favorable rating in the CNN poll that they referenced is better than all of the Republicans that were polled. Clinton scored 44% favorable. That compares to Donald Trump at 36% and Jeb Bush at 34%. What’s more, Clinton’s unfavorable rating is lower than her most likely opponents. She pulled 53% while Trump and Bush were higher at 59% and 56% respectively.
Clinton has had the honor of being ranked as the most admired woman in the world nineteen times in Gallup’s annual survey. She received that honor the last thirteen years in a row. It is not particularly surprising that in an election year where seventeen Republican candidates are bashing her relentlessly her public image might suffer. Add to that the effect of the smear job that Fox engages in every day and it would be a miracle if her numbers didn’t decline a bit.
Notwithstanding those assaults, Clinton is still faring better than her GOP rivals who have had very little mud thrown at them. She is still beating them in head-to-head match-ups. And her support in the Democratic Party is unwavering.
What Fox News is trying to do is project their open disgust for her in the hopes that it will harm her electoral prospects next year. That’s also why they keep promoting Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. They obviously hate them just as much as they hate her, but for the time being they are happy to use them as wedges to create chaos for the Democrats.
If Clinton’s 53% unfavorable rating can be characterized as “whopping” by Fox News, then what would they call Trump’s 59% or Bush’s 56%? Of course the answer is that they wouldn’t call it anything at all because they wouldn’t devote a segment of a primetime program to their “favorability problems.” In the Fox world everyone loves Republicans and they always will win every election. At least that’s how they present it to their dimwitted audience who are later shocked when they lose.
The ferocity with which Fox News is chasing the story about Hillary Clinton’s email is becoming a pathetic tale of desperation and jealousy. It’s not enough that they report wild speculation as fact, they are determined to shape their coverage into what they regard as the Valhalla of scandals: Watergate.
For the record, the Watergate affair involved blatantly criminal activity like burglary, political corruption, bribery, obstruction of justice, and presidential abuse of power. It began as a plot by the Nixon White House to steal private documents from the Democratic Party in order to secure his reelection by fraud. Then it evolved into a cover-up that included threats, deception, and million dollar payoffs.
The attempt to analogize Watergate to Clinton’s use of personal email accounts on a private computer server stretch the boundaries of absurdity. Even if the allegations that there were classified documents involved were true (and there is no evidence of that at this time), there is absolutely no suggestion, by even her harshest critics, that she was motivated by any larcenous effort to advance her own interests financially or politically. In other words, there was no intent to commit a crime.
However, to hear Fox News tell it, Clinton’s email controversy is identical to the felonies committed by Nixon’s thugs, many of whom went to prison for their crimes. Today Fox News contributor Meghan McCain (John’s daughter) wondered if “this could be this generation’s Watergate.” Yesterday Fox’s Special Report aired an entire segment devoted to baseless conjecture about Watergate. Also yesterday, Fox’s judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano tried to compare Clinton’s use of personal emails to Nixon’s habit of secretly recording everything that took place in the Oval Office. He never really got around to explaining what was similar about it. It was enough, for Fox’s purposes, just to plant the slanderous suggestion. Fox contributor John Bolton also weighed in to imply some conspiratorial connection between Clinton’s current email flak and her service on the Democratic Senate staff that investigated Nixon.
There was much more of this Watergating going on at Fox on other programs as they went all out to align Clinton with what is perhaps the worst political scandal in American history. But Watergate belongs to the Republicans no matter how much they whine about it. And whine they do. Before the Clinton campaign launched it was a regular obsession with Fox to compare anything associated with President Obama to Watergate. From Benghazi, to the IRS, to Libya, to Fast and Furious, and even to UFOs, Fox saw everything through their Watergate filter. [See News Corpse’s Illustrated Guide To The Fox News Obsession With Watergate]
Now they want to transfer their shame to Democrats so badly that they have lost all rational comprehension of what Watergate even entailed. Their accusations just seem anguished and impotent. But don’t let that make you think they will abandon their fetish for projecting Watergate’s stigma on Clinton or other Democrats. They are fully committed to their rewriting of history and they know that their dimwitted audience will eat it up.
For months there has been a concerted effort by Fox News to torpedo the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. They have done it by relentlessly airing stories about alleged scandals that they have trumpeted with glee would end her White House aspirations. Those stories include everything from Benghazi to the Clinton Foundation, to her aide Huma Abedin’s alleged ties to Muslim extremists, to her private computer server. Never mind that there has never been a smidgen of actual evidence showing that she had engaged in anything unlawful or unethical. Just the wild accusations repeated ad nauseum on Fox News is enough to plant the notion in the mind of the public and drive down her poll numbers for trustworthiness.
The mission of Fox News is obviously to sabotage the campaign of the strongest Democratic candidate for the 2016 presidential election. They know that Clinton, even after the smear crusade, still manages to out poll every Republican challenger. Consequently, they need to persist in the propaganda blitz until they succeed in bringing her down.
While previous attempts focused heavily on Benghazi, the inability to make their false charges stick has driven Fox to elevate a different scandalette to the forefront. So now Benghazi has been at least temporarily sidelined in favor of the dreaded lost emails. What Fox is trying to turn into a political frenzy is the allegation that Clinton had sent or received classified email communications using a private computer server rather than one hosted by the feds at the Department of State. This, they imply, may have exposed sensitive information to unfriendly nations.
The first point that needs to be made is that recent reports have revealed that hackers have already trespassed into the official government servers that store data for millions of federal employees. However, there is no evidence whatsoever that Clinton’s server security was ever breached by anyone. So Clinton may have actually protected the information she was handling by segregating it on her server while the feds were being hacked. The second pertinent fact is that there is no evidence that any classified emails were sent or received through Clinton’s server.
However, what really makes this media farce so dishonest is that the so-called journalists at Fox News are fabricating a controversy that doesn’t exist in reality. They spend endless hour of valuable airtime yammering about missing emails and mysterious servers. Even though Clinton, in an unprecedented display of transparency, turned over 55,000 pages of emails. This was never done by other Secretaries of State who also used private servers. Nor was it done by her GOP opponents who as governors did the same thing.
To make matters worse, Fox News completely ignores previous incidents when emails went missing. For instance, when the Bush administration was under investigation for various improprieties, they suddenly announced that, not thousands, but millions of emails had mysteriously vanished. This scandal even included allegations that then-White House operative Karl Rove had been communicating with a private server located at the Republican National Committee.
At the time, Bush’s Press Secretary Dana Perino (now a host on Fox News), insisted it was an unfortunate but innocent computer glitch. This is the same Perino who now calls Clinton’s email situation a criminal offense. And at a congressional investigation of the Bush matter, the GOP’s Clinton inquisitionist, Darrell Issa, also tried to dismiss the Bush debacle as a glitch. Furthermore, then-CNN reporter Ed Henry (now also on Fox News) speculated that the Bush affair might be a violation of the Federal Presidential Records Act.
As if that weren’t enough, the Fox News family has another email scandal in its past. When Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers were caught hacking into the phone and email accounts of private citizens, celebrities, politicians, and royals, they tried to cover it up by making millions of emails disappear. This destruction of evidence was not merely alluded to, but was proven with internal, News Corp. memos describing their policy of destroying emails “that could be unhelpful in the context of future litigation”.
So you have to wonder what moral authority anyone at Fox News has to complain about Clinton’s emails, which have never been proven to contain anything untoward. Clearly Fox isn’t interested in compliance with the law or good government. They are deploying a well-coordinated attack on a political rival whom they desperately fear. And they wonder why no one regards them as a reputable news network.
There is much being made about a new CNN poll that shows Donald Trump leading his GOP rivals in the race for the Republican nomination for president. However, there is less substance in these numbers than the media is pretending there is. What is astonishing is just how shallow the media analysis of these polls are. The ranking at which Trump finds himself can easily be explained by the clinical dementia of today’s Republican (Tea) Party. And despite these polls, Trump will never get the nomination or reside in the White House.
Let’s take a closer look. Trump currently has 18% of the support of the GOP voters. The truth that everyone is ignoring is that that’s an awfully pitiful expression of support. It means that 82% are not supporting him. Why does anyone in the press think that’s a positive showing?
Nevertheless, the media is heralding Trump as the runaway GOP leader with his measly 18% of support. For perspective, note that Bernie Sanders, in his campaign against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, is pulling support from 19% of Democratic voters. Yet the press is dismissing him as trailing Clinton badly. So Sanders has more support among Democrats than Trump does among Republicans, but the schizophrenic media declares Sanders a loser and Trump a phenomenon.
This same schizophrenia is shown in how Republican operatives and pundits portray the relationship between the media and the candidates. If Clinton declines to do an interview or makes reporters walk behind a rope line so they don’t interfere with her interactions with voters, she is condemned as being anti-media and disrespectful to the fine men and women of the press who are struggling mightily to bring truth to the American people. But if Trump or any other Republican bashes the press or denies them access (as Trump just did to the Des Moines Register), they are cheered for putting those unethical press weasels in their place.
Getting back to Trump’s placement in the GOP polls, the explanation for it is that there is a demographic in the Republican electorate that can best be described as batshit insane. And Trump has managed to secure a near monopoly on that addle-brained GOP faction. Prior polling has revealed that a significant subsection of the GOP holds some hysterically idiotic views. For instance:
Having established that a fair percentage of Republicans embrace a measure of dumbassedness in frightening proportions, the fact that a particularly knuckleheaded candidate has corralled them into his camp is not especially surprising. In fact, it would be surprising if these dimwits did not coalesce around a similarly daft contender, just as they did in the last election cycle with Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, et al.
Consequently, Trump’s confederacy of dunces is sufficient in numbers to rise above his rivals, so long as there’s a lot of them. That’s because when you divide the remaining Republicans who are not wacko-birds (h/t John McCain) among the fifteen other candidates, there aren’t enough of them left to surpass the Trump/crazy constituency. That does not mean that Trump has a commanding lead. It means that there are way too many players on the field diluting the results for each of them. As they whittle down to a more manageable number, the 82% of non-Trump supporters will disperse to other candidates who will then tower over his paltry flock.
While the media is obsessing over the fake Trump “dominance,” they are missing some real news in the same CNN poll. For starters, they missed that Trump has the highest unfavorables of all candidates, Republican and Democratic. Meanwhile, Clinton has the highest favorables of all candidates, Republican and Democratic. Furthermore. Clinton is beating every Republican matched against her (Trump loses by 18 points). And the icing on the cake: Sanders is also beating the Republicans in head-to-head matchups (Trump loses by 20 points).
This is what passes for political reporting these days. Is it any wonder that people hold the media in such low esteem? They are littered with lightweights who seem to have no analytical skills or historical memory. If they did they would not be so shocked that a loudmouth buffoon has earned the admiration of the GOP’s most radical, racist, and ignorant bloc of voters, while four out of five of the poll’s Republican respondents reject him.
For most of the past decade TV news has struggled to adapt to the Internet era by employing sensationalism and tabloid scandal-mongering to boost ratings and save their failing industry. This seems like a scenario custom made for the political ascendancy of a faux-reality cartoon character like Donald Trump. In this environment a clown like Trump steals the editorial spotlight every time he belches out some typically ignorant and/or hostile opinion. He revels in all the attention he gets, despite the fact that most people are laughing at him. And the media regards their ratings as evidence that they are producing valid journalism.
So it is not surprising that when a new poll is published that shows Trump leading the pack of Republican losers, that the press will jump on that news and try to invent some sort of relevance to the state of the political landscape. In truth, Trump’s poll-topping position could not be more irrelevant. As reported here at News Corpse, polls that attempt to capture the mood of the GOP electorate at this early stage of a campaign are not particularly meaningful. Republican voters are as fickle as they are ignorant. Anyone who expects Trump’s polling to remain at these levels is woefully ill-informed about these election cycles.
While most of the media was pumping up Trump’s temporary and insignificant poll numbers, some other data released in the same survey was far more consequential and nearly entirely ignored. The USA Today/Suffolk University poll also did head-to-head matchups between Hillary Clinton and each of the GOP’s leading candidates. The headline that ought to have leaped out at the news editors’ desks was that “Hillary Clinton Beats All Republican Challengers.” That’s right, every last one of them, including the allegedly surging Donald Trump.
Clinton is beating Jeb Bush by four points, Marco Rubio by six, Mike Huckabee by nine, Rand Paul by ten, Scott Walker by eleven, Ben Carson by thirteen, and the Golden Boy of the quarter-hour, Donald Trump, by a landslide seventeen points. So Trump is actually faring far worse than any other Republican candidate against the likely Democratic nominee.
What’s more, an ABCNews/Washington Post poll shows that while Clinton’s favorables have risen to a majority (52%), Trump’s numbers, although improved, are still at 61% unfavorable. That includes 81% of Latinos (who Trump laughably said he would carry) having a negative view of Trump. And if further evidence of Trump’s unpopularity is needed, a Fox News poll last month reported that Trump led the field in candidates for whom voters say they would never vote. A substantial majority of 59% said that Trump would never get their support.
So why all the hoopla over a poll that shows Trump leading his Republican rivals? When there are sixteen candidates vying for the nomination, it doesn’t take much to grab the lead. Indeed, it only takes 17%, a number that no self-respecting candidate would ever brag about. It means that 83% of your own party’s voters chose someone else, or no one. Yet these are the numbers that the press has been hyping all day long, while virtually ignoring the far more significant results showing Hillary Clinton easily besting all of her GOP challengers. And her popularity is increasing even after a season of Clinton bashing over phony scandals about emails, charitable donations, and the unrelenting specter of Benghazi.
For the record, this is not the first time that the media has ignored polling that showed Clinton beating her GOP rivals. Two months ago the same thing happened with a Quinnipiac poll where Clinton also beat every Republican they matched against her. It kind of makes you wonder whether they will ever report any poll reflecting positively on Clinton. Especially when there is hoax candidate like Trump in the race.
When Hillary Clinton was running away with the Democratic nomination, it was not unusual to hear Fox News pundits pumping up Bernie Sanders. It wasn’t because they admired his progressive policies or his grassroots appeal. It was because they reflexively jumped at any opportunity to knock Clinton down a peg.
Now that the Sanders campaign is actually looking competitive, the same Foxies are getting nervous and looking for ways to discredit him. The primary line of attack has been to feverishly repeat that Sanders is a (gasp) Socialist. Under ordinary circumstances that would be sufficient to rattle the fear centers of their perpetually anxious viewers.
However, these are not ordinary times. Consequently, more creative measures were required by the Fox punditocracy. So they brought in Jamie Weinstein, senior editor of Tucker Carlson’s ultra-rightist Daily Caller, to slip a brazen lie into the discussion at the very end when there was no time left for it to be rebutted. The segment sought to concern-troll Clinton’s less commanding, but still substantial, lead over Sanders, while simultaneously dismissing the surging challenger as a far-left crank.
Where the broadcast went off the rails was at the end when Weinstein concluded his final diatribe by making an assertion that was utterly false and intended to defame Sanders. He offered as evidence of Sanders supposed extremism that he had spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union. That allegation is almost laughable, but it will assuredly be swallowed whole by Fox’s dimwitted viewers. Following Weinstein’s false comment, Fox News anchor Gregg Jarrett smiled and noted that you learn something new every day. The problem is that, with Fox News, what you learn each day just makes you more stupid than you were the day before.
The origin of the this made-for-Fox fallacy was a 2007 interview of Sanders’ wife, Jane, by Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. In the interview she was describing how she and Bernie met and some of their early engagements which were almost entirely related to their shared interest in community affairs. They were so involved in these sort of activities that she joked…
“The day after we got married, we marched in a Memorial Day Parade, and then we took off in a plane to start the sister city project with Yaroslovl with 10 other people on my honeymoon.”
The context was obviously humorous. Who could possibly read that and come away thinking that she seriously meant that they honeymooned with ten other people who were implementing a sister city project? Well, apparently Weinstein and others of his ilk came away believing just that. Weinstein likely picked up the lie from uber-conservative John Fund who wrote an article for the National Review containing the same misrepresentation of Sanders’ diplomatic trip.
We are going to have to get used to wingnuts hyperventilating over the political labels attached to Sanders. Today there was an extended discussion on Fox’s The Five about “Sanders’ Socialist Agenda.” At no time during the broadcast did anyone on the show identify any policy advocated by Sanders that they could actually call Socialist (if they really have any idea what the word means). The policies they did mention were his support for higher taxes on the rich, for expanding access to education, and for single-payer healthcare. Those are pretty mainstream policies that millions of Americans support. And the right has been absurdly calling Obama a Socialist for so long that the word has lost all meaning.
There was also much feigned hand-wringing about whether Sanders was going to pull Clinton farther to the left and damage her electability in the general election. The consensus on the program was that she was already a far-left candidate without Sanders’ influence. But these cretins think that just being a Democrat means being far-left. What they don’t realize is that Sanders’ platform leans to the mainstream of the American people who elected President Obama twice. Any effect he has on Clinton moving in that direction will only enhance her electability. So bring it on, and don’t complain if the people once again reject the regressive and repressive policies of the Republican Party in November of 2016.
