Food for thought...some comments are spot on, others merely echo the Dumbing Down of Americans believing anything they read/see/or hear on Corporate Media PROPAGANDA Machines.
In addition, an informed person who listened to a Donald Trump Rally heard LIE after LIE after LIE after LIE.....to the point of boredom or annoyance. .
It apparently sold well to those lapping up the Propaganda,refusing to FACT CHECK.
Reminiscent of: "If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it."
[not accurately attributed: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels]
Keep watching!
@HILLARYCLINTON’S LOSS: A COMPLICIT MSM, BROKEN TRUST, TRADE, JOBS AND RACIAL JUSTICE ON BLOG#42
Costly Hubris: With A Complicit Media, Hillary Still Loses a Slam-Dunk Election | Blog#42
I write this as we await the final results of the “Election from Hell.” As of 2:00 a.m. EST, it is pretty clear that Donald J. Trump will be declared the winner.
Hillary Clinton lost an election she should have won handily. Why? Because white working class and former middle class Democrats wanted what Bernie Sanders offered. The Clinton campaign engineered the Sanders campaign’s demise through a combination of media control, with journalists and some think tanks practically taking dictation from the DNC, and Clinton campaign headquarters, well-known columnists literally changing the life narrative of millions of voters, and cable news networks presenting obvious political operatives as analysts. Voters tuned out en-masse.
The 2012 and 2014 Democratic losses should have been followed by a post-mortem process. They weren’t. The warning signs from various quarters of the Democratic voter base not only went completely unheeded, but it seems that a conscious decision was made to change the narrative, rather than address reality head on. From 2014 on, the focus of the media has been to construct a narrative of Democratic success in spite of the GOP’s obstruction. Unfortunately, one cannot look a hungry person in the eye and inform them that they just had a full meal. But that is what was done. Paul Krugman of the New York Times moved away from his usual economic op-eds after the 2014 election. It was at that point that we were treated to op-ed after op-ed extolling the successes of the Obama administration. While the Obama presidency has acquitted itself admirably given what it has had to deal with, the economy is hardly healthy and millions among those who live in it, are still very much at-risk. But the narrative was manipulated, using the smoke and mirror tools hidden in the way the unemployed are counted.
But the snow job the media was in the process of laying the groundwork for didn’t stop there. The biggest slight to Democratic voters was completely changing the narrative Bernie Sanders almost won the primary with: painting the angry white voter as uneducated and Republican and completely erasing blue collar and former middle class Democrats who have anxiously been waiting for their turn in this jobless, low-wage recovery. Well-known economist pundits wrote column after column depicting the economic recovery as not ideal, but mostly complete, when it couldn’t be any further from the stark reality tens of millions of Americans of all backgrounds are living. White working class Democrats have been angry. Black working class Democrats have been angry. White millennials are angry. Black millennials are angry and despondent, both for the same economic reasons as their white counterparts, plus the devastating police brutalityofthe last few yearsBoth Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were ridiculed for talking about unemployment in terms that were divergent from the narrative the media concocted. While Trump’s recitation of the facts wasn’t altogether precise, Sanders’ was:
The Clinton campaign and a DNC completely under its control waged a war of gender, class, and race divide and conquer, pitting Democrats of different ethnic and economic backgrounds against each other, going as far as planting anti-Semitic news stories in order to heighten the suspicions of susceptible voters against a largely unknown Senator Sanders, even as there were cries of media bias. Those cries not only went unheeded, but pundits doubled down on their attacks against Sanders, as did the Clinton campaign.
This election was always about trade, jobs, and racial justice. On racial justice, the Clinton campaign’s strategy of delegitimizing a former civil rights activist was pure evil genius. That campaign started in the summer of 2015, immediately after Netroots Nation and Black Lives Matter’s intervention on Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley. Hillary Clinton didn’t attend the event. While Senator Sanders’ handling of the situation left something to be desired, the media’s reaction was puzzlingly brutal, especially to Sanders:
As the weeks went by and Senator Sanders was making genuine attempts at making amends, the media stayed mad, even as some civil rights activists were praising Sanders for his new platform for racial justice. When Clinton finally had her encounter with Black Lives Matter activists, media reception was very muted:
In an effort to retain the Black vote, the DNC convention was used to showcase the Mothers of The Movement, without so much as a mention of its name, Black Lives Matter, or that of its founders. But this tone-deafness didn’t stop with the dog and pony show that was the DNC convention. As late as September, right as several deadly police shootings took place, Hillary Clinton took to Black radio and said “maybe I should talk to white people…” The emphasis ended up being on the word “maybe.” Clinton never broached the subject with white voters. She never adopted Bernie Sanders’ platform for racial justice, which was by far superior to hers.
When the unrest began in North Dakota a few weeks ago, with Native Americans protesting the pollution of their drinking water and the desecration of their ancestral land, Hillary Clinton remained completely silent.
She has remained almost completely silent as daily WikiLeaks email dumps revealed the ugly sight of the sausage-making operation that has been the Clinton campaign. As every single one of Black and progressive voters’ suspicions was confirmed, the chorus from the media and Clinton campaign grew louder, accusing Russia of interfering with the U.S. election, rather than dealing with the content of the revelations. No explanations were forthcoming, with the exception of one small detail Hillary Clinton insisted on clarifying during her first debate against Donald J. Trump. No apologies were made. No reversals were announced. No fears were allayed. The Kabuki play continued uninterrupted, even as the heavens thundered and the lightning struck the stage.
Hillary Clinton, wrongly, in retrospect, decided she could pretend to pivot left and avoid courting progressives after she clinched the nomination. In fact, over the entire summer, Hillary Clinton was largely absent from her own campaign, as progressives angrily stewed.
We will know far more, once final voting data is published. What was to be the year of the woman didn’t translate into votes for Hillary Clinton. Women didn’t turn out in force for Hillary. Her image as a feminist didn’t catch on beyond the upper registers of what’s left of the US middle class. Even accounting for voter suppression, Black voters, Hillary’s firewall, didn’t turn out, either. A campaign that relied almost exclusively on the fear of Trump and no substance was doomed to failure. Hillary Clinton’s campaign was exposed for its cynicism, corruption, elitism, and raw ambition for power over the welfare of those it claimed to protect. The more exposed the campaign became, it unashamedly and unapologetically soldiered on, and was ripe to be the recipient of the public’s wrath.
Hillary Clinton made the wrong judgment when she decided she could pretend to pivot left and avoid courting progressives after she clinched the nomination. In fact, over the entire summer, Hillary Clinton was largely absent from her own campaign, as progressives angrily stewed. If voters couldn’t readily explain what it was about the Clinton campaign that angered them, the Clinton campaign should have known and compensated for it. They didn’t:
For at least half of the Democratic party, likely the half that is in economic distress or on the brink of it, in the end, the calculus must have been that it would be better to suffer through four years of Trump than another potential sixteen years of neoliberal control of a Democratic party that is as badly in need of reform as the GOP.
Aside from the candidate, herself, John Podesta, David Brock, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Donna Brazile and many other Democratic political operatives, who else is to blame? NBC, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and just about every newspaper in the nation.
I’ve been writing in these pages for the last two years that, what lays at the center of every single problem that ails America is a complete breakdown in ethics. Our system is rotten to the core. In an election in which a vast majority of voters demanded change, Hillary Clinton publicly insisted on running on a platform of continuity while privately planning to take America back to the 1990’s. Voters who survived the tech bust of the early 2000’s only to succumb to the Great Recession would have none of it.
Donald J. Trump, as distasteful as he may be, will be subject to the same constitution every other president has presided under. Given what we know about the legal challenges ahead of him, it is doubtful he will serve a full presidential term.
Who won this election? The American people. In the four years of hell to come, there may be a silver lining. The progressive movement that Bernie Sanders started should emerge as the dominant bloc in the Democratic party. Should resistance to its ascent continue to be forbidding, Progressives should splinter off no later than the start of the new year and form their own party and mount an immediate campaign to claim state houses and congressional seats in the 2018 mid-term election. The two party system has failed. The time for a new progressive party is now.
Friends:
I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ‘cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: “PRESIDENT TRUMP.”
Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now.
I can see what you’re doing right now. You’re shaking your head wildly – “No, Mike, this won’t happen!” Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president. You alternate between being appalled at him and laughing at him because of his latest crazy comment or his embarrassingly narcissistic stance on everything because everything is about him. And then you listen to Hillary and you behold our very first female president, someone the world respects, someone who is whip-smart and cares about kids, who will continue the Obama legacy because that is what the American people clearly want! Yes! Four more years of this!
You need to exit that bubble right now. You need to stop living in denial and face the truth which you know deep down is very, very real. Trying to soothe yourself with the facts – “77% of the electorate are women, people of color, young adults under 35 and Trump cant win a majority of any of them!” – or logic – “people aren’t going to vote for a buffoon or against their own best interests!” – is your brain’s way of trying to protect you from trauma. Like when you hear a loud noise on the street and you think, “oh, a tire just blew out,” or, “wow, who’s playing with firecrackers?” because you don’t want to think you just heard someone being shot with a gun. It’s the same reason why all the initial news and eyewitness reports on 9/11 said “a small plane accidentally flew into the World Trade Center.” We want to – we need to – hope for the best because, frankly, life is already a shit show and it’s hard enough struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck. We can’t handle much more bad news. So our mental state goes to default when something scary is actually, truly happening. The first people plowed down by the truck in Nice spent their final moments on earth waving at the driver whom they thought had simply lost control of his truck, trying to tell him that he jumped the curb: “Watch out!,” they shouted. “There are people on the sidewalk!”
Well, folks, this isn’t an accident. It is happening. And if you believe Hillary Clinton is going to beat Trump with facts and smarts and logic, then you obviously missed the past year of 56 primaries and caucuses where 16 Republican candidates tried that and every kitchen sink they could throw at Trump and nothing could stop his juggernaut. As of today, as things stand now, I believe this is going to happen – and in order to deal with it, I need you first to acknowledge it, and then maybe, just maybe, we can find a way out of the mess we’re in.
Don’t get me wrong. I have great hope for the country I live in. Things are better. The left has won the cultural wars. Gays and lesbians can get married. A majority of Americans now take the liberal position on just about every polling question posed to them: Equal pay for women – check. Abortion should be legal – check. Stronger environmental laws – check. More gun control – check. Legalize marijuana – check. A huge shift has taken place – just ask the socialist who won 22 states this year. And there is no doubt in my mind that if people could vote from their couch at home on their X-box or PlayStation, Hillary would win in a landslide.
But that is not how it works in America. People have to leave the house and get in line to vote. And if they live in poor, Black or Hispanic neighborhoods, they not only have a longer line to wait in, everything is being done to literally stop them from casting a ballot. So in most elections it’s hard to get even 50% to turn out to vote. And therein lies the problem for November – who is going to have the most motivated, most inspired voters show up to vote? You know the answer to this question. Who’s the candidate with the most rabid supporters? Whose crazed fans are going to be up at 5 AM on Election Day, kicking ass all day long, all the way until the last polling place has closed, making sure every Tom, Dick and Harry (and Bob and Joe and Billy Bob and Billy Joe and Billy Bob Joe) has cast his ballot? That’s right. That’s the high level of danger we’re in. And don’t fool yourself — no amount of compelling Hillary TV ads, or outfacting him in the debates or Libertarians siphoning votes away from Trump is going to stop his mojo.
Here are the 5 reasons Trump is going to win:
- Midwest Math, or Welcome to Our Rust Belt Brexit. I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes – Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally Democratic states – but each of them have elected a Republican governor since 2010 (only Pennsylvania has now finally elected a Democrat). In the Michigan primary in March, more Michiganders came out to vote for the Republicans (1.32 million) that the Democrats (1.19 million). Trump is ahead of Hillary in the latest polls in Pennsylvania and tied with her in Ohio. Tied? How can the race be this close after everything Trump has said and done? Well maybe it’s because he’s said (correctly) that the Clintons’ support of NAFTA helped to destroy the industrial states of the Upper Midwest. Trump is going to hammer Clinton on this and her support of TPP and other trade policies that have royally screwed the people of these four states. When Trump stood in the shadow of a Ford Motor factory during the Michigan primary, he threatened the corporation that if they did indeed go ahead with their planned closure of that factory and move it to Mexico, he would slap a 35% tariff on any Mexican-built cars shipped back to the United States. It was sweet, sweet music to the ears of the working class of Michigan, and when he tossed in his threat to Apple that he would force them to stop making their iPhones in China and build them here in America, well, hearts swooned and Trump walked away with a big victory that should have gone to the governor next-door, John Kasich.From Green Bay to Pittsburgh, this, my friends, is the middle of England – broken, depressed, struggling, the smokestacks strewn across the countryside with the carcass of what we use to call the Middle Class. Angry, embittered working (and nonworking) people who were lied to by the trickle-down of Reagan and abandoned by Democrats who still try to talk a good line but are really just looking forward to rub one out with a lobbyist from Goldman Sachs who’ll write them nice big check before leaving the room. What happened in the UK with Brexit is going to happen here. Elmer Gantry shows up looking like Boris Johnson and just says whatever shit he can make up to convince the masses that this is their chance! To stick to ALL of them, all who wrecked their American Dream! And now The Outsider, Donald Trump, has arrived to clean house! You don’t have to agree with him! You don’t even have to like him! He is your personal Molotov cocktail to throw right into the center of the bastards who did this to you! SEND A MESSAGE! TRUMP IS YOUR MESSENGER!And this is where the math comes in. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost by 64 electoral votes. Add up the electoral votes cast by Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It’s 64. All Trump needs to do to win is to carry, as he’s expected to do, the swath of traditional red states from Idaho to Georgia (states that’ll never vote for Hillary Clinton), and then he just needs these four rust belt states. He doesn’t need Florida. He doesn’t need Colorado or Virginia. Just Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that will put him over the top. This is how it will happen in November.
- The Last Stand of the Angry White Man. Our male-dominated, 240-year run of the USA is coming to an end. A woman is about to take over! How did this happen?! On our watch!There were warning signs, but we ignored them. Nixon, the gender traitor, imposing Title IX on us, the rule that said girls in school should get an equal chance at playing sports. Then they let them fly commercial jets. Before we knew it, Beyoncé stormed on the field at this year’s Super Bowl (our game!) with an army of Black Women, fists raised, declaring that our domination was hereby terminated! Oh, the humanity!That’s a small peek into the mind of the Endangered White Male. There is a sense that the power has slipped out of their hands, that their way of doing things is no longer how things are done. This monster, the “Feminazi,”the thing that as Trump says, “bleeds through her eyes or wherever she bleeds,” has conquered us — and now, after having had to endure eight years of a black man telling us what to do, we’re supposed to just sit back and take eight years of a woman bossing us around? After that it’ll be eight years of the gays in the White House! Then the transgenders! You can see where this is going. By then animals will have been granted human rights and a fuckin’ hamster is going to be running the country. This has to stop!
- The Hillary Problem. Can we speak honestly, just among ourselves? And before we do, let me state, I actually like Hillary – a lot – and I think she has been given a bad rap she doesn’t deserve. But her vote for the Iraq War made me promise her that I would never vote for her again. To date, I haven’t broken that promise. For the sake of preventing a proto-fascist from becoming our commander-in-chief, I’m breaking that promise. I sadly believe Clinton will find a way to get us in some kind of military action. She’s a hawk, to the right of Obama. But Trump’s psycho finger will be on The Button, and that is that. Done and done.Let’s face it: Our biggest problem here isn’t Trump – it’s Hillary. She is hugely unpopular — nearly 70% of all voters think she is untrustworthy and dishonest. She represents the old way of politics, not really believing in anything other than what can get you elected. That’s why she fights against gays getting married one moment, and the next she’s officiating a gay marriage. Young women are among her biggest detractors, which has to hurt considering it’s the sacrifices and the battles that Hillary and other women of her generation endured so that this younger generation would never have to be told by the Barbara Bushes of the world that they should just shut up and go bake some cookies. But the kids don’t like her, and not a day goes by that a millennial doesn’t tell me they aren’t voting for her. No Democrat, and certainly no independent, is waking up on November 8th excited to run out and vote for Hillary the way they did the day Obama became president or when Bernie was on the primary ballot. The enthusiasm just isn’t there. And because this election is going to come down to just one thing — who drags the most people out of the house and gets them to the polls — Trump right now is in the catbird seat.
- The Depressed Sanders Vote. Stop fretting about Bernie’s supporters not voting for Clinton – we’re voting for Clinton! The polls already show that more Sanders voters will vote for Hillary this year than the number of Hillary primary voters in ’08 who then voted for Obama. This is not the problem. The fire alarm that should be going off is that while the average Bernie backer will drag him/herself to the polls that day to somewhat reluctantly vote for Hillary, it will be what’s called a “depressed vote” – meaning the voter doesn’t bring five people to vote with her. He doesn’t volunteer 10 hours in the month leading up to the election. She never talks in an excited voice when asked why she’s voting for Hillary. A depressed voter. Because, when you’re young, you have zero tolerance for phonies and BS. Returning to the Clinton/Bush era for them is like suddenly having to pay for music, or using MySpace or carrying around one of those big-ass portable phones. They’re not going to vote for Trump; some will vote third party, but many will just stay home. Hillary Clinton is going to have to do something to give them a reason to support her — and picking a moderate, bland-o, middle of the road old white guy as her running mate is not the kind of edgy move that tells millenials that their vote is important to Hillary. Having two women on the ticket – that was an exciting idea. But then Hillary got scared and has decided to play it safe. This is just one example of how she is killing the youth vote.
- The Jesse Ventura Effect. Finally, do not discount the electorate’s ability to be mischievous or underestimate how any millions fancy themselves as closet anarchists once they draw the curtain and are all alone in the voting booth. It’s one of the few places left in society where there are no security cameras, no listening devices, no spouses, no kids, no boss, no cops, there’s not even a friggin’ time limit. You can take as long as you need in there and no one can make you do anything. You can push the button and vote a straight party line, or you can write in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. There are no rules. And because of that, and the anger that so many have toward a broken political system, millions are going to vote for Trump notbecause they agree with him, not because they like his bigotry or ego, but just because they can. Just because it will upset the apple cart and make mommy and daddy mad. And in the same way like when you’re standing on the edge of Niagara Falls and your mind wonders for a moment what would that feel like to go over that thing, a lot of people are going to love being in the position of puppetmaster and plunking down for Trump just to see what that might look like. Remember back in the ‘90s when the people of Minnesota elected a professional wrestler as their governor? They didn’t do this because they’re stupid or thought that Jesse Ventura was some sort of statesman or political intellectual. They did so just because they could. Minnesota is one of the smartest states in the country. It is also filled with people who have a dark sense of humor — and voting for Ventura was their version of a good practical joke on a sick political system. This is going to happen again with Trump.
Coming back to the hotel after appearing on Bill Maher’s Republican Convention special this week on HBO, a man stopped me. “Mike,” he said, “we have to vote for Trump. We HAVE to shake things up.” That was it. That was enough for him. To “shake things up.” President Trump would indeed do just that, and a good chunk of the electorate would like to sit in the bleachers and watch that reality show.
(Next week I will post my thoughts on Trump’s Achilles Heel and how I think he can be beat.)
Yours,
Michael Moore
Michael Moore
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