Time to panic.
After running a disastrous campaign...after infuriating many Republicans...after hitching his wagon to a white supremacist website...after revealing himself to be a true American grotesque...Trump is catching up to Hillary Clinton.
See here and here.
Trump didn't do this: The anti-Clinton press did. The right-wing conspiracy theorists are winning the day. Never underestimate the power of Clinton Derangement Syndrome.
It is hard to beleive that pseudo-scandals like "Emailgate" and the Clinton Foundation are going to hand this election to a bombastic, lying, low-IQ oaf who -- as anyone with any brains can see -- acts as Putin's agent, witting or unwitting. (I think the former.) But within just a couple of weeks, Trump has more than halved the once-considerable distance between his number and Hillary's.
I still think that Trump will win this one.
So far, nothing has been able to defeat Donald Trump except Donald Trump: He has hurt himself by blurting out a series of utterly unnecessary idiocies. He can commit political suicide, yes. But no outside force can touch him.
Nothing said by Hillary Clinton has had any impact. Nothing said by any Democrat has had any impact. Nothing said by the major newspapers has had any impact. Nothing said by Trump's biographers has had any impact. Nothing said by our great authors, intellectuals and cultural leaders has had any impact. Nothing said by major economists and foreign policy experts has had any impact. Nothing said by our popular comics -- Colbert, Maher, Bee, Oliver, Noah, Myers and all the others -- has had or will have any impact. Nothing said by your favorite bloggers has had or will have any impact.
Anything said against Trump -- by anyone -- is considered part of the Great Illuminati Conspiracy.
Anything said in favor of Clinton -- by anyone -- is considered part of the Great Illuminati Conspiracy.
The October Surprise will seal the deal. I've been traipsing around the internet -- and guess what? Turns out that others are starting to whistle a theme first sounded here: Wikileaks will release documents faked up by the Russians. Americans have been so thoroughly brainwashed by anti-Clinton propaganda that they will accept without question the bonafides of documents that have been laundered through Russia's intelligence services.
It's coming. Mark my words.
Incidentally, the last time I made this prediction, I received an interesting bit of feedback from someone who more or less admitted to being a paid Russian troll. You may want to check out the back and forth. He indicated that, when the made-in-Russia October Surprise hits, the Troll Army will mount a defense based on the proposition that Wikileaks never distributed fake documents before, and thus cannot possibly be distributing fake documents now. If it comes by way of Julian Assange, you know it must be authentic. You're going to see that argument made all over the damned internet: Watch for it.
Perhaps the only way to stop a Donald Trump presidency is to stop talking quite so much about him and start talking about her. Defend Hillary Clinton against the smears, each and every time you hear someone spew nonsense. To do so, you must educate yourself. And you must be brave: Haters gonna hate, and Hill-haters hate hard.
A Kremlin asset close to taking over the White House? Sounds great for big investors in
ReplyDelete- Raytheon (Tomahawk cruise missiles)
- Baxter International (smallpox vaccine)
- Huntington Ingalls (naval ships),
up 13%, 20% and 24% in the past six months.
I haven't found great stats yet, but it's looking as though US warfare stocks rose in the fortnight after Trump won the Republican nomination, whereas the DJIA itself fell.
The Cubs lost today. My buddy called me say that the season is over, the Cubs are doomed, the are three games under .500 in one run games. In the meantime, they have the best record in baseball by more than five games. I told him to call me later in October and maybe then we can panic. Same thing for you.
ReplyDeleteAnd as if at the instant of need:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/world/europe/russia-sweden-disinformation.html
Julian Assange is already laying the groundwork. In both of his recent U.S. interviews (first with Maher and then w/Megyn Kelly), he has talked about Wikileaks' "perfect recored" so far. Just consider the cast of characters that want a Trump presidency: Putin, Assange, Stone, the hard right, the white supremacists, and ISIS. Imagine the possibilities for an October surprise with such a cast working on Trump's behalf. http://www.nationalmemo.com/isis-fighters-say-trump-will-help-recruit-new-followers/
ReplyDelete....not to mention the "2nd amendment people" who have been encouraged to stop Clinton presumably via gun violence.
ReplyDeleteOne outlier poll =/= Trump is gaining. And 538's article was absolutely correct, especially since the first debate has not yet taken place. Find a series of polls to support your theory of Trump gaining and then I might agree with you.
ReplyDeleteAnd then there is this:
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/08/donald-trump-is-bankrupting-the-republican-party-and-we-dont-mean-morally/
RNC with no money and an entire series of polls showing Clinton's convention bounce is still bouncing == no, Trump is not gaining.
I'll be your voice of reason, Joseph, when you get too far out into the conspiracy fields.
I don't often agree with Small J, but I don't see this as panic time yet, either.
ReplyDeleteOnce again: With a trivial handful of exceptions, the people who will believe VladiLeaks are the people who would never vote for Clinton, anyway.
If Putin really thinks that it would be best for Mother Russia if the USA were run by an orange grifter, then I must lower my estimate of Putin's intelligence, and I don't mean the "spy" kind of intelligence. MC Vlad Pooty-Poot may think he has the Donald in his pocket. His predecessor, Stalin, thought he had "the Adolf" in his pocket for about a year and a half--then came June 22, 1941, and Uncle Joe woke up with Der Fuehrer's "friendship" buried between his shoulder blades. Pooty-Poot would do well to remember that.
For Madoka's sake, The Orange Don is known to have asked why we can't use nuclear weapons. And Putin wants to give this guy authority to launch our nuclear weapons? Damn, Vlad, you been hittin' the vodka too hard?
ReplyDeleteDumb Ass White People (DAWPs hereafter) no longer compose as large a proportion of the U. S. electorate as they did in, for example, 2000.
ReplyDeleteMr. Cannon has stated in the past, IIRC, that he suffers the wretched misfortune to live in a neighborhood which contains a high proportion of DAWPs. Perhaps this deplorable state of affairs gives him the idea that DAWPs continue to compose an effective national majority, which, in turn, leads him to overestimate the Donald's chances of victory, as the Donald is the likely favorite of the DAWPs.
From the good grey NYTimes:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/us/politics/harry-reid-russia-tampering-election-fbi.html
As noted before, all that is needed to sell a stolen election is a compliant media, Ivory Bill. This morning I had to turn off the news because it was playing Anthony Weiner as news and Trump saying shit about that...as if he didn't shortlist Gingrich as a running mate.
ReplyDeleteI'm not so stupid as to plan to move to Canada. I'm researching Belize.
If Trump is gaining (and I'm not sure he is), then perhaps it's because the Democrats are making exactly the same mistakes that Trump's Republican rivals made. You can't shame someone who has no sense of shame. People who support Trump aren't going to drop him because establishment figures tell them he's a bad person. That's not because they're stupid and it's not because they're bigots - it's because they've been screwed over by establishment media and politicians since the 1970s. They simply don't care that Trump is a loose cannon (no pun intended) who might bring the whole system down. They don't think they have anything to lose. The system hasn't worked for them for almost 50 years. Their incomes have dropped, their prospects have evaporated, and now their life expectancies are dropping, too.
ReplyDeleteAnd what's the response of the "Party of the People" to all that? Well, pretty much nothing but weasel-words on the policy front coupled with an unseemly enthusiasm in courting political contributions from the very SOBs who took away their jobs, took away their pensions, foreclosed on their houses, sent their kids to die in various Middle Eastern hellholes, and priced prescription drugs and insurance premiums to unaffordable levels.
If the Democrats really want to win, perhaps they ought to stop giving Trump oxygen by running hit pieces and negative ads and come up with some policy proposals of their own.
Agree with Propertius 100%
ReplyDeleteThe reason why the "liberal media" keeps giving Trump oxygen is cos he is giving them ratings. They are addicted to his trash, same as his poor white supporters.
And Mr Cannon is right. Trump could potentially do better, but he won't do much worse.
Harry