The chief Kossak is still enraged at the election results, and just let his bile spew in an epic rant about that continued enragement (which is pretty much a textbook case of “anger issues”). A bunch is the usual “racist/sexist/white supremacist” crap, but much takes square aim at his own side for such an epic cock-up.
Some of the tastier bits:
I’m angry at Hillary Clinton for losing. Plain and simple, her campaign had one job. And it should’ve been an easy job! And yes, they won the popular vote, and let’s never forget that. But they weren’t even polling in Michigan! It was rank incompetence.
I’m angry at Clinton for running an old-world campaign. She was in California TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE ELECTION raising money. She was in CALIFORNIA! TWO WEEKS before the election! Clinton’s campaign raised $500 million for itself, and another $175 million through Priorities USA. Donald Trump’s campaign raised about $250 million total. But Clinton, who lived through both the Obama campaign and the Bernie Sanders one, was still stuck in that old way of thinking, that more money meant more victory.
And speaking of the Obama and Sanders campaigns, Clinton still didn’t learn the obvious lessons from a people-powered campaign. I mean, spend time in front of crowds in battleground states, and the money will come in, easily! You don’t have to have a rich-people fundraiser in California weeks before the election to raise the money.
Oh, and what was all that money spent on? The biggest chunk was on worthless TV ads that did nothing to move the needle. Donald Trump knew that, and spent almost nothing on TV. Yes, he was on TV a lot, but that’s because he gave the media reasons to cover him. Meanwhile, the Michigan Democratic Party had to scramble to raise $200,000 for its GOTV efforts, completely ignored by the Clinton campaign.
I’m angry at the Democratic consultant class, who really shit the bed this year in epic, glorious fashion. All that money you donated? Either pissed away by these assholes, or tucked into their pockets. It’s on Clinton for letting them run the asylum. And related, I’m angry at myself for thinking that campaign manager Robbie Mook—a decent guy—heralded a different way of running the campaign. Either he went along with the bullshit, or he got sidelined. Either way, any top consultant working for this campaign should be blacklisted into eternity. Not the staffers who toiled away! Those people are heroes. But the assholes at the top making the decisions.
But most of all, he seems really angry that people are allowed to express opinions he doesn’t agree with:
I’m angry at those who are angry at me for trying to tamp down the Clinton criticism after the primary, as if endless sniping from the left, through Election Day, would’ve done anything to improve her chances. Goddam liberals, why couldn’t we wait until after she was elected to snipe at her? She ran the most explicitly liberal campaign in Democratic history, yet that was never enough. Meanwhile, the religious right never took their eye off the ball, and rallied fiercely behind Trump despite his overt moral failures. Now they get that Supreme Court, and we don’t. Congrats!
I’m angry at the media, who thought endlessly harping over a non-scandal email story was clever and smart and necessary. Then, after Trump announced he would kill the White House traveling press corps, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer declared that Trump had “gone too far!” Fuck you. NOW he had gone too far? Fuck them all. I hope Trump kills the White House press corps altogether, so maybe the assholes will be properly motivated and incentivized to hold the presidency accountable, rather than playing “stenography” from inside the White House.
Remember when the Clinton Foundation was a BIG STORY, despite there being ZERO evidence of wrongdoing, while a single reporter at the Washington Post dug up example after example of wrongdoing at the Trump family foundation? Remember? Yup. Fuck those assholes.
I’m angry at ME. It was easy to trust the data, and I expected it to continue working. And then it didn’t, and fuck that shit. So I built an entire narrative around what the data said, and it was wrong. And I still don’t know how else I would’ve handled it, so that makes me angry as well. I know what we must do in the future—organize with a vengeance—but when it comes to covering the election, I’m at a bit of a loss.
I’m angry at me because I don’t know what I could’ve done better. I know there are people who want to scream “you shouldn’t have squelched Clinton dissent!” And to that, I say that’s one of the things I did RIGHT. Heck, maybe I should’ve tamped it down sooner. I don’t know how anyone can argue that having liberals diarying about “Clinton’s imminent email-related indictment” was in any way helpful. Clinton Derangement Syndrome was strong, and it cost us.
Takeaways:
“Spend time in front of crowds in battleground states, and the money will come in.” Really? Have you seen Clinton speak? There more she speaks, the less people like her. Hillary’s great at scarfing up big bundled donations from special interests expecting political favors. Drawing donations from small donors thanks to her electric personality? Not so much.
How dare Bernie Sanders supporters not fall in line and do the Party’s bidding?
Saint Hillary is pure as the driven snow! How dare you investigate those silly email and Clinton Foundation scandals?
Clinton got the most biased coverage in her favor ever in Presidential election history, and Kos is screaming that it just wasn’t fawning enough.
Note that Kos is screaming about both how was he to know all the polls were wrong and how he should have squelched dissent harder! Don’t see a little disconnect there, Commissar Kos? Like how your side’s ruthless insistence on squelching dissent skews polls, or having a press so in-the-tank for Hillary dangerously impaired your side’s situational awareness? Ever hear the term “preference cascade”?
Take a nice refreshing drought of Kos’ anger, and liberal self-delusion, at the same time.
I wanted to do a comprehensive roundup of analysis of last week’s election, so this post just grew and grew to its current Brobdingnagian size. So tuck in! There’s a lot to chew over.
Let me first note that all the pundits were wrong about this race, save two not normally regarded as pundits. Scott Adams said early on that Trump was going to win the nomination and the race through persuasion techniques (and also that human beings are fundamentally not rational, which gives me no joy at night), and Michael Moore said that Trump was going to sweep the rust belt due to blue collar anger. So props to them for getting the fundamentals right when so many others (myself included) got them wrong.
First, this lengthy Washington Post semi-insider look back at the race is unavoidable. (I say “semi” because many of the big names for Hillary Clinton’s Permanent Traveling Circus of Corruption (for example, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills) are missing.) The piece confirms the impression that Hillary Clinton is the Æthelred the Unready of American politics. One big difference between the camps that struck me: The Trump side of the story includes lots of interaction between the candidate and his staff. Clinton? No back and forth interaction recounted at all. It’s like she was a ghost in her own campaign.
Also this:
It was like looking at the lottery ticket and saying, “I think these are the winning numbers, but I’m going to go confirm them again.” . . . “Anthony Weiner.” “Underage sexting scandal.” “Hillary Clinton.” “FBI investigation.” There is no combination in which that word jumble comes up net politically positive.
Iowa: Trump by 148,000 votes (9.6 points)
Trump: 68,000 more votes than Romney
Clinton: 172,000 fewer votes than Obama
Michigan: Trump by 12,000 votes (0.3 points)
Trump: 164,000 more votes than Romney
Clinton 297,000 fewer votes than Obama
Ohio: Trump by 455,000 votes (8.6 points)
Trump: 111,000 more votes than Romney
Clinton: 511,000 fewer votes than Obama
Pennsylvania: Trump by 68,000 (1.2 points)
Trump: 223,000 more votes than Romney
Clinton: 155,000 fewer votes fewer than Obama
Wisconsin: Trump by 27,000 votes (1.0 points)
Trump: 1,500 more votes than Romney
Clinton 238,000 fewer votes than Obama
There were also states where Trump won votes, but not enough to win the state, where both lost votes, etc. Interesting wonky stuff.
County by county results in Texas. Trump lost Fort Bend (which has to be worrisome to the state GOP) but picked up Jefferson, where Beaumont features one of the few significant concentrations of black voters outside the major cities. Also, Libertarian Gary Johnson beat Green Party candidate Jill Stein in every county but one: Loving county, the least populated in both Texas and the nation, where she beat him 2 votes to 1. On the other hand, Stein didn’t receive a single vote in Hall, Kenedy, Kent, King, Roberts, Shackelford and Terrell counties.
Even in California, Stein only beat Johnson in three counties: Humboldt, Mendocino and San Francisco. If the Greens can’t do better than in a safely blue state with the most corrupt Democratic Party candidate ever, and the most corrupt DNC ever rigging the race against Bernie Sanders, their outlook would appear grim.
Most devastating electoral defeats in United States history at least had some mitigating circumstances. In 1984, Walter Mondale got blown out by Ronald Reagan, a popular incumbent President presiding over an improving economy. Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 election by a large margin, but his opponent was another incumbent President with extensive resources to marshal.
Hillary Clinton’s stunning collapse is different. It’s hard to think of a historical analog that could come close to resembling the magnitude and depth of the failure. She had a popular incumbent President campaigning for her furiously; the popular First Lady did likewise. The economy is far healthier than it was eight or even four years ago.
The elite media almost universally loathed her rival — a conformity of opinion that we’ve never seen before in modern American politics. Wall Street was 99% behind her. The polling industry put out a constant deluge of bogus data pronouncing Donald Trump’s certain defeat.
With all these massive advantages, Hillary still somehow managed to lose to the guy from “The Apprentice.”
A majority of white women voted for Trump. (Exit poll caveats apply.) Evidently those years of “war on women” blather were all for naught… (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Six million, seventy-thousand, eight-hundred and two people voted for one of the many third-party candidates running for President. To put it into perspective, that’s more than the combined population of Houston and Chicago.
That means that the total number of people who voted against Hillary Clinton was 65,682,480 people.
In other words, Hillary Clinton received 47.6% of the popular vote.
For those keeping score, that means the majority of votes cast did not, in fact, go to Hillary Clinton.
Dear Alec MacGillis: How dare you commit actual journalism rather than prop up Democratic talking points???
Back in Dayton, where Clinton never visited during the entire campaign, I had run into two more former Obama voters after Trump’s March rally there. Both Heath Bowling and Alex Jones admitted to having been swept up in the Obama wave, but had since grown somewhat disenchanted. Bowling, 36, a burly man with a big smile, managed a small siding and insulation business, and as he’d grown older he’d had gotten more bothered about the dependency on food stamps he saw around him, especially among members of his own generation, and demoralized by the many overdose deaths in his circle.
Jones, 30, who worked part-time at a pizza shop and delivering medicines to nursing homes, joked at first that his vote for Obama might have had to do with his having been doing a lot of drugs at the time. He grew serious when he talked about how much the Black Lives Matter protests against shootings by police officers grated on him. Chicago was experiencing soaring homicide rates, he said — why weren’t more people talking about that? He was upset that when he went out on the town in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine bar district, he had to worry about getting jumped if he was on the street past a certain hour — and that he felt constrained against complaining against it. “If I say anything about that, I’m a racist,” he said. “I can’t stand that politically correct bullshit.” He had, he said, taken great solace in confiding recently in an older black man at a bar who had agreed with his musing on race and crime. “It was like a big burden lifted from me — here was this black man agreeing with me!”
Also this:
A few days after the release of the tape, which was followed by a string of accusations from women saying they had been sexually harassed and assaulted by Trump, I checked back in with Tracie St. Martin to see if she still supported him. She was working on a new gas plant in Middletown, a working-class town near Dayton that was the setting of the recent best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” Here’s what she wrote back in a text message: “I still appreciate the honesty in some of his comments. Most of his comments. I still favor what he says he may be able to do. I am voting against Hillary, come what may with Trump. It’s important to me that ‘we the people’ actually have political power. And electing Trump will prove that. I am AMAZED at the number of people voting for him. The corruption is disgusting in the press. Yes, as of right now I am voting FOR Trump.” She was sure he would win, she said: “His support is crazy! The polls have to be wrong. Have to be fixed.”
And she shared an anecdote that reflected how differently Trump’s comments had been received in some places than others. “I’m setting steel for this new gas plant…I’m operating a rough terrain forklift,” she wrote. “So today, I kept thinking about the debate and the audio was released…And I got underneath a load of steel and was moving it…I was laughing and laughing and one of the iron workers asked ‘what are u laughing at.’ I said ‘I grabbed that load right by the pussy’ and laughed some more…And said ‘when you’re an operator you can do that ya know’, laughed all fucking day.”
The problem for the left is that, when everyone’s Hitler, nobody’s Hitler.
At which point, enter the Teflon Pussygrabber.
As for the “divisive” policy positions – a wall to keep out Mexicans, a moratorium on Muslim immigration – “divisive” appears to be elite-speak for “remarkably popular”. As with Brexit, in any functioning party system the political establishment can ignore issues that command widespread public support only for so long. In that sense, the rise of a Trump figure was entirely predictable. Indeed, I see an old quote of mine has been making the rounds on the Internet in the last couple of days. I wrote it over twelve years ago in The Daily Telegraph:
In much of western Europe, on all the issues that matter, competitive politics decayed to a rotation of arrogant co-regents of an insular elite, with predictable consequences: if the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain issues, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones.
At which point – all together now – enter the Pussygrabber. His supporters didn’t care about his personal foibles (anymore than Rob Ford’s did) because he was raising issues nobody else wanted to talk about.
What was forgotten in all this hysteria was that Trump had brought to the race unique advantages, some of his own making, some from finessing naturally occurring phenomena. His advocacy for fair rather than free trade, his insistence on enforcement of federal immigration law, and promises to bring back jobs to the United States brought back formerly disaffected Reagan Democrats, white working-class union members, and blue-dog Democrats—the “missing Romney voters”—into the party. Because of that, the formidable wall of rich electoral blue states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina crumbled.
Beyond that, even Trump’s admitted crudity was seen by many as evidence of a street-fighting spirit sorely lacking in Republican candidates that had lost too magnanimously in 1992, 2008, and 2016 to vicious Democratic hit machines. Whatever Trump was, he would not lose nobly, but perhaps pull down the rotten walls of the Philistines with him. That Hillary Clinton never got beyond her email scandals, the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation wrongdoing, and the Wikileaks and Guccifer hackings reminded the electorate that whatever Trump was or had done, he at least had not brazenly broken federal law as a public servant, or colluded with the media and the Republican National Committee to undermine the integrity of the primaries and sabotage his Republican rivals.
Finally, the more Clinton Inc. talked about the Latino vote, the black vote, the gay vote, the woman vote, the more Americans tired of the same old identity politics pandering. What if minority bloc voters who had turned out for Obama might not be as sympathetic to a middle-aged, multimillionaire white woman? And what if the working white classes might flock to the politically incorrect populist Trump in a way that they would not to a leftist elitist like Hillary Clinton? In other words, the more Clinton played the identity politics card, the more she earned fewer returns for herself and more voters for Trump.
Snip.
The Democratic Party is now neither a centrist nor a coalition party. Instead, it finds itself at a dead-end: had Hillary Clinton emulated her husband’s pragmatic politics of the 1990s, she would have never won the nomination—even though she would have had a far better chance of winning the general election.
Wikileaks reminded us that the party is run by rich, snobbish, and often ethically bankrupt grandees. In John Podesta’s world, it’s normal and acceptable for Democratic apparatchiks to talk about their stock portfolios and name-drop the Hamptons, while making cruel asides about “needy” Latinos, medieval Catholics, and African-Americans with silly names—who are nonetheless expected to keep them in power. Such paradoxes are not sustainable. Nor is the liberal nexus of colluding journalists, compromised lobbyists, narcissistic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, family dynasties, and Clintonian get-rich ethics.
The old blue-collar middle class was bewildered by the leftwing social agenda in which gay marriage, women in combat units, and transgendered restrooms went from possible to mandatory party positions in an eye blink. In a party in which “white privilege” was pro forma disparagement, those who were both white and without it grew furious that the elites with such privilege massaged the allegation to provide cover for their own entitlement.
Michael Barone ponders why the polls failed. A variety of reasons, including this one:
3. Clinton campaign targeting: staggering incompetence. In an excellent Washington Post article, Jim Tankersley points out that in the closing weeks of the campaign, the Clinton campaign put more ads on the air in the Omaha market (aiming, presumably, at the 1 electoral vote of Nebraska 2, since Iowa’s 6 votes were clearly already lost) than in Michigan and Wisconsin combined (26 electoral votes). By one metric, during one period Republicans ran 405 ads in Michigan and 2,319 in Wisconsin while Democrats ran only 31 in Michigan and 255 in Michigan. This, despite the fact that the Clinton campaign had lots more money than the Trump campaign.
This wasn’t the only example of campaign malpractice. The Clinton campaign spent time and money on winning Arizona and Georgia, and while it performed better there than Obama had, it was not by enough to carry their 11 and 16 electoral votes, respectively. At the same time, Clinton didn’t set foot in Wisconsin (10 electoral votes) after its April 5 primary. In effect, Clinton was aiming for her 340th electoral vote and ignored the need to campaign for her 270th, which is the one that counts.
The 70-year-old Bill Clinton apparently repeatedly advised Clinton campaign chairman Robby Mook and others to campaign in white working class areas. The 36-year-old Mook spurned — perhaps ridiculed — his advice. None of this going after men who wear trucker hats unironically; let’s show Brooklyn-type Millennials that supporting Hillary is really cool.
Isn’t it just a little too pat that a guy named “Robby Mook” is being set up as the scapegoat for the Clinton campaign? Are we sure they didn’t just invent him last week just to take the fall?
Another explanation, the polls weren’t wrong, they were fixed. “They did not get it wrong. They chose to lie to you the American electorate.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Why Clinton lost: “The ‘conspiracies’ were true, and the mainstream media lied to you to about everything.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
How the Democratic Party has been more than decimated under Obama:
“Since 2008, by our estimates, the party has shed 870 legislators and leaders at the state and federal levels — and that estimate may be on the low side. As Donald Trump might put it, that’s decimation times 50.”
Stephen Green: “For now then the Democratic Party is a wounded beast, and it will lash out ferociously. The interior fights will be ugly; the desperate attacks on the GOP will be uglier. Try not to get too near.”
“I had faith that the country had to change. It was about working-class people that rose up against the system—against both parties. I had hoped for something that would immediately bring jobs, or at least stop the bleeding, and overregulation can be stopped with a stroke of the pen. I’m excited that Obamacare could change—that’ll be a big benefit to us if we get a better health system. I’m excited about the Supreme Court. I don’t think Roe v. Wade needs overturning, but I think there are reasonable restrictions that could be put in place. This is the biggest political event in my lifetime, and I’ve lived through a lot of elections. I couldn’t be happier.”
That increase in middle-income households meant a mere $2,798 extra in annual income, and was 1.6 percent less than in 2007. The top 5 percent of earners saw a stratospheric jump of 21.8 percent in income, while the poorest Americans, a cohort of 46.7 million, are poorer than they were in 1989.
Four days before the Census Bureau’s report was released, Clinton called half of Trump’s supporters “a basket of deplorables” — something J.D. Vance, author of the best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” told The Post was “incredibly reductionist.”
“Like a lot of people on the left, Hillary seems to want to put the Trump phenomenon on racial anxiety,” he said. “It’s a really oversimplified way to address the concerns of millions of people who feel invisible to elites.”
Plus celebrity election reactions that, once again, make them sound like smug, entitled pricks.
Had the paper actually been fair to both candidates, it wouldn’t need to rededicate itself to honest reporting. And it wouldn’t have been totally blindsided by Trump’s victory.
Instead, because it demonized Trump from start to finish, it failed to realize he was onto something. And because the paper decided that Trump’s supporters were a rabble of racist rednecks and homophobes, it didn’t have a clue about what was happening in the lives of the Americans who elected the new president.
Snip.
Trump indeed was challenging, but it was [executive editor Dean] Baquet who changed journalism. He’s the one who decided that the standards of fairness and nonpartisanship could be broken without consequence.
After that, the floodgates opened, and virtually every so-called news article reflected a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton. Stories, photos, headlines, placement in the paper — all the tools were used to pick a president, the facts be damned.
Now the bill is coming due. Shocked by Trump’s victory and mocked even by liberals for its bias, the paper is also apparently bleeding readers — and money.
I’ve gotten letters from people who say they canceled their Times subscriptions and, to judge from a cryptic line in a Thursday article, the problem is more than anecdotal.
Citing reader anger over election coverage, Rutenberg wrote, “Most ominously, it came in the form of canceled subscriptions.”
For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”
It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.
Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”
The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”
Having lived at one time or another in small-town Pennsylvania, some lower-rung Detroit suburbs, San Francisco, Oakland, Tulsa and, now, Santa Monica, I could only think, well, “Wow.” This is a very large country. I couldn’t even find a copy of the Times on a stop in college town Durham, N.C. To believe the national agenda was being set in a conference room in a headquarters on Manhattan’s Times Square required a very special mind-set indeed.
CNN offers 24 different explanations for Trump’s victory, none of which include “because the American voter was tried of lying outlets like CNN acting as extensions of the Democratic Party.”
Too many of my progressive friends seem to have forgotten how to make actual arguments, and have become expert instead at condemnation, derision and mockery. On issue after issue, they’re very good at explaining why no one could oppose their policy positions except for the basest of motives. As to those positions themselves, they are too often announced with a zealous solemnity suggesting that their views are Holy Writ — and those who disagree are cast into the outer political darkness. In short, the left has lately been dripping with hubris, which in classic literature always portends a fall.
More on the same theme: “Dems didn’t seem to like many of the people who they expected to vote for them. Do not expect this to get better anytime soon, as Dems trot out their continued hatred for flyover country, along with calling all the Trump voters racists, sexists, xenophobes, and so forth.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Donald Trump is going to be the President of the United States.
In July I wrote the piece I put up this morning acknowledging a Hillary Clinton win. It is fitting that it is the ultimate bit of being wrong after a year of being wrong about the election. I genuinely presumed Donald Trump could not win. All of the data agreed. And I and the data were wrong as were so many others.
Snip.
Democrats overplayed their hand on cultural issues. They had a Supreme Court impose gay marriage on the country and then tried to force men into women’s bathrooms. On top of that, they ruined healthcare for many Americans and drove up premiums. Then they nominated the worst politician in American history. Within the next 12 hours they will take off the mask and show just how much contempt they have for the very white working class that just kicked their ass.
This piece was published the day after the election and, boy, did he get that one right.
I have never seen anything like this election. The disdain for Hillary Clinton is obvious, but the real struggles and hurt of many voters went unregistered. The data that I have long relied on to help shape my opinions is no longer reliable and, frankly, a lot of people I thought were full of crap turned out to be as right as I was wrong. There are really two Americas and I have to do better relating to one I thought I knew already.
I’m still a conservative. I still believe limited government is best and a strong man in Washington is a dangerous thing. I think protectionism is a bad idea. But I think the #NeverTrump Republicans need to do a reset and give Donald Trump the chance we did not give him up to now. There clearly were voters who would not admit to supporting Trump and they have sent a strong signal that they should be listened to.
I was wrong about so much about this election and so were so many others. The sooner we get over our pride, eat some crow, and realize we missed the mood of the country, the sooner we can move on. The Brexit polling was more accurate than the American election polling this year. That is stunning. But it is also somewhat exciting to be flying blind into the future knowing the gauges we’ve always used to see where we are going no longer work.
The media mocked him ruthlessly for putting undue weight behind rallies over polling — a fatal error, according to Mitchell. “Rallies equal newly engaged voters,” he said. In 2008 Obama had tens of thousands who stand in line for six hours because they want to experience and taste and feel all this.” Mitchell refers to them as the “monster vote” and suggests that it’s these perhaps previously disenfranchised voters who aren’t on pollster call lists. “And so the big question was, will the 20 million who didn’t vote in 2012 come out for Trump? I kept saying it’s going to happen, no question — it’ll be something like 2008 where the previously quiet black vote came out for Obama. And it did.” It’s also worth noting — while his predictions were overly enthusiastic — that Trump would do better with Latino and black voters, and there’d be a low black voter turnout.
Matt Walsh: “Liberals, it’s clear that you wish to continue losing.”
You found the taste of defeat so novel and exciting that you’ve become intoxicated by it. Indeed, you’ve done everything you possibly could over these past few days to ensure that your losses are magnified and replicated in the future. Not satisfied to simply lose in 2016, you’ve now begun the project of losing in 2020 and beyond.
Truly, your performance since Tuesday has been astounding in its tone deafness. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone could paint such a masterpiece of ineptitude and self-destruction by accident. I can only conclude that you’re doing it on purpose because, for whatever reason, you are not satiated by just one stunning, historic loss. You want more. And if that is in fact your aim, I would like to make a few suggestions to help you accomplish the goal.
Including this:
5. Continue calling everyone who disagrees with you racist.
It’s a settled fact on the Left that Trump won because 60 million people are slobbering, inbred racists. On that point, I’d like to arrogantly quote myself from a piece I wrote last week:
It turns out that white people don’t like being called racists every second of the day. It seems that guilt, shame, and self-loathing are not the best ways to generate electoral turnout. Evidently, “Repent, you bigots!” is not the most effective rallying cry.
On a related note, it’s not true that all white people are racist. Of course it isn’t true. Again: stop being ridiculous. You can’t take some random sin or vice and assign it to an entire group of people based solely on their skin color. In fact, do you know what it’s called when you accuse everyone in a certain racial group of possessing some negative characteristic? Racism, by definition.
The other problem with writing off all of your political opponents as racist is that, if you come to believe your own propaganda, you’ll quickly develop a deep hatred for the half of the country that disagrees with you. And if you hate people, you tend to alienate them. For example, take the Democrat strategist on CNN who sarcastically blurted out, “Oh, poor white people” when she was asked about the white Trump voter who’d been savagely beaten by a group of black protesters.
If you really believe that all white people are despicable racists — or at least the white people who don’t vote Democrat — you will not be able to muster even the pretense of empathy or concern when white people are attacked. White middle class voters have taken note of this, understandably. And now they are a bit hesitant to vote into a power an ideology that detests them.
Plus this great line about the perpetually clue-deprived Lena Dunham: “A regular woman doesn’t wake up the morning after an election and declare that the results made her vagina hurt.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Beltway chin-pullers expediently focused on Trump’s white and conservative supporters who are rightly sick and tired of social justice double standards. But they ignored the increasingly vocal constituency of hyphen-free, label-rejecting American People Against Political Correctness who don’t fit old narratives and boxes.
And the same “Never Trump” pundits and establishment political strategists who gabbed endlessly about the need for “minority outreach” after 2012 were flummoxed by the blacks, gays, Latinos, women and Democrats who rallied behind the GOP candidate.
The most important speech of the 2016 election cycle wasn’t delivered by one of the presidential candidates. It came from iconoclastic Silicon Valley entrepreneur/investor and Trump supporter Peter Thiel who best explained the historically significant backlash against the intolerant tolerance mob and phony diversity-mongers.
“Louder voices have sent a message that they do not intend to tolerate the views of one half of the country,” he observed at the National Press Club last week. He recounted how the gay magazine The Advocate, which had once praised him as a “gay innovator,” declared he was “not a gay man” anymore because of his libertarian, limited-government politics.
“The lie behind the buzzword of diversity could not be made more clear,” Thiel noted. “If you don’t conform, then you don’t count as diverse, no matter what your personal background.”
Trump’s eclectic coalition was bound by that common thread: disaffected individuals tired of being told they don’t count and discounted because their views do not properly “match” their gender, chromosomes, skin color or ethnicity. That is exactly why the more they and their nominee were demonized, the stronger their support grew.
Trump needs help, she says. And these people need jobs and power, she doesn’t say. The elite, her people, lost the election, but they should have the victory anyway, because a “young man” and a “beautiful lady” spoke of fear. Throughout the whole political season, Trump was battered with the fear of fear, and now he’s won and he’s told to pander to the people who said whatever they could to oppose him, the people who stoked the fear that he needs to prioritize calming. As if it could ever be calmed, as if his opponents will ever stop stoking it.
The Democrats will now control next to nothing above the municipal level. Donald Trump will be president. We are going to be unpacking this night for the rest of our lives, and lives beyond that. We can’t comprehend even 1 percent of what’s just happened. But one aspect of it, minor in the overall sweep, that I’m pretty sure we can comprehend well enough right now: The Democratic Party establishment has beclowned itself and is finished.
However, he also says that those rebuilding the party “have to do so in a way that doesn’t erode the anti-racist or anti-sexist planks of the modern party, which are non-negotiable.” So, in other words: Though Shalt Not Question the Holy Social Justice Warriors, and we’re going to keep calling our political opponents racist, sexist bigots, because that worked out so well this year. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Liberals rioting in the streets might want to heed Dionne Alexander’s message:
“You are the exact reason Donald Trump won the election. We’re tired of you crybabies!”
Speaking of tantrums, Trump calls on supporters not to attack anyone (not that they actually were)…and CBS refuses to air the clip. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Washington Post runs a piece declaring states “a relic of the past.” I’m betting most Americans are far more likely to see the Washington Post as a relic of the past…
From reading the various mainstream media accounts of these events, one comes away with the distinct impression that they are grassroots actions that began organically among ordinary, concerned, well-meaning citizens.
But alas, if one were to think that, one would be wrong.
Contrary to media misrepresentations, many of the supposedly spontaneous, organic, anti-Trump protests we have witnessed in cities from coast to coast were in fact carefully planned and orchestrated, in advance, by a pro-Communist organization called the ANSWER Coalition, which draws its name from the acronym for “Act Now to Stop War and End Racism.” ANSWER was established in 2001 by Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, a group staffed in large part by members of the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party. In 2002, the libertarian author Stephen Suleyman Schwartz described ANSWER as an “ultra-Stalinist network” whose members served as “active propaganda agents for Serbia, Iraq, and North Korea, as well as Cuba, countries they repeatedly visit and acclaim.”
Since its inception, ANSWER has consistently depicted the United States as a racist, sexist, imperialistic, militaristic nation guilty of unspeakable crimes against humanity—in other words, a wellspring of pure evil. When ANSWER became a leading organizer of the massive post-9/11 demonstrations against the Patriot Act and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it formed alliances with other likeminded entities such as Not In Our Name (a project of the Revolutionary Communist Party) and United For Peace and Justice (a pro-Castro group devoted to smearing America as a cesspool of bigotry and oppression).
Time, finally, for something vaguely resembling a comprehensive post-election roundup.
As this keeps threatening to turn into a very long and unwieldy post, I’m going to break it up into chunks, with this installment centered on vote totals, race outcomes, and statistical facts about the election. We’ll save analysis, implications, and the saltiest examples of liberal tears for another time.
Assuming the current results hold, Trump flipped six states Romney lost (Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan), plus Maine’s second congressional district, which gives Trump 306 electoral votes.
That’s the highest electoral vote totals for a Republican since Bush41 blew out Dukakis in 1988 (426).
Hillary might still edge Trump in the popular vote (right now she’s up by 3/10ths of 1%).
Clinton lost over 5 million votes from Obama’s 2012 totals. Trump was down less than a million from Romney’s totals.
Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson pulled in over 4 million votes, triple his 2012 showing. Green Party candidate Jill Stein pulled in over 1.2 million votes, which was almost triple her 2012 showing as well.
Evan McMullin (or, as Ace of Spades refers to him, “Egg McMuffin”) pulled in less than half a million votes, about a third of which came from his native Utah, where he beat Johnson and Stein. He did not win any counties in Utah, though he did beat Clinton in a few.
1996 was the last time West Virginia (formerly a reliable Democratic state) went for the Democratic presidential candidate. This year they went for Trump by nearly 69%, including every county in the state. Despite that, WV Democratic Senator Joe Manchin says he’s not switching to the Republican Party. Machin, 69, is up for reelection in 2018.
Republicans lost two seats (in Illinois and New Hampshire) but maintain control of the Senate. Louisiana will have it’s top two runoff December 9, where Republican John Kennedy will be heavily favored, likely giving Republicans a 53-47 edge.
Republicans only lost six House seats, easily maintaining control. Three Dem pickups were in Florida (where Republicans flipped two sets themselves), two in Nevada, one in New Hampshire, one in Virginia, and one in New Jersey. Republicans also picked up one House seat in Nebraska. Republicans are guaranteed to retain control of Louisiana’s third congressional district (two Republicans in the runoff) and likely to retain control of the 4th as well.
Not a single U.S. House seat in Texas flipped parties, which means that incumbent Republican Will Hurd retained the 23rd Congressional District over Democrat Pete Gallego. CD23 is the only true swing U.S. House district in Texas these days, and Gallego had been the incumbent when Hurd ousted him in 2014.
Senator Tim Scott was reelected to a full term. Scott still remains the first black Senator from the South since reconstruction.
Republicans also picked up three governorships, in Missouri, Vermont and New Hampshire, giving them 33 to the Democrats 15.
The North Carolina Governor’s race may not be decided until November 18. If Democrat Roy Cooper’s razor thin lead over Republican incumbent Pat McCrory holds, that will be the Democrats’ only gubernatorial pickup this year.
“Eastern Kentucky voters rejected [Democrat] House Speaker Greg Stumbo on Tuesday as Republicans appeared poised to take control of the Kentucky House of Representatives for the first time since 1921.”
Texas county-by-county Presidential race results. Clinton taking Fort Bend county is a surprise to me; Romney won that by six points in 2012, and Clinton beat Trump by about that much this year.
Libertarians maintained automatic ballot access in Texas because their railroad commission candidate pulled in 5.3% of the vote, over the 5% threshold. The Green Party, however, did not, and will have to submit 50,000 petition signatures to make the ballot in 2018.
National Review (ad blocker blocker warning) notes that the “Trump won because of racism” talking point is demonstrably wrong:
Mitt Romney won a greater percentage of the white vote than Donald Trump. Mitt took 59 percent while Trump won 58 percent. Would you believe that Trump improved the GOP’s position with black and Hispanic voters? Obama won 93 percent of the black vote. Hillary won 88 percent. Obama won 71 percent of the Latino vote. Hillary won 65 percent. Critically, millions of minority voters apparently stayed home. Trump’s total vote is likely to land somewhere between John McCain’s and Romney’s (and well short of George W. Bush’s 2004 total), while the Democrats have lost almost 10 million voters since 2008.
And all this happened even as Democrats doubled-down on their own identity politics.
But all this is based on exit polls. How do we know they’re any more accurate at capturing the electorate than those other faulty polls?
More exit poll analysis from Oren Cass. The thrust is that Trump did better among nonwhites than Romney. But when he gets down to differences of less than 2%, he’s counting angels on the heads of pins.
Remember all that MSM talk about Trump turning Texas into a swing state? Instead he turned Michigan and Wisconsin into swing states.
Here’s a Tweet that encapsulates a New York Times interactive map indicating which areas of the country voted notably more Republican or more Democratic in the Presidential race than in 2012. Note the strong surge of Trump voters in the rust belt.
Qatar gave the Clinton Foundation $1 million for Bill Clinton’s birthday while Hillary was head of the State Department, in violation of Department policy and Clinton’s own “ethics agreement,” and without Hillary informing the State Department. “While Qatar was obvious engaged in pay to play, what makes this instance even worse, is that Hillary and Bill were confident enough they could simply get away with it by never telling the State Department of the new influence money.”
When the Clintons left the White House in 2001, pilfering over $190,000 worth of china, flatware, rugs, and furniture as they cleared out, they claimed they were flat broke. Their net worth today is now in excess of $150 million, accumulated not by traditional means of work and investment, but rather by pay-for-play influence peddling through speeches and Clinton Foundation fundraising — with the tacit understanding that the Clintons would be in a position to return favors to donors after Hillary won the 2016 presidential election.
The Clintons symbolize the institutionalization of corruption in Washington, which now permeates almost all the government agencies. Even the so-called independent Federal Reserve has been corrupted by politicians whose profligate deficit spending puts pressure on the Fed to maintain a zero-interest policy that artificially masks the real cost and risk of a growing unsustainable level of debt.
For the better part of eight years of the Obama administration, polls have consistently shown that nearly 70% of Americans believe that the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Separately, a recent MSNBC poll shows “liar” is the most common word that comes to mind when voters think of Hillary Clinton. Another recent NBC poll shows that only 11% think of Hillary as honest and trustworthy. Even if one doubts the accuracy of these polls, how is it possible for a majority to think the country can get on a better track by electing as the next U.S. President a liar who embodies the corrupt status quo?
The mystery of the Clinton Foundation’s missing $20 million in Haiti relief funds. Money that came from Frank Giustra and Carlos Slim. Also involved: Jean Marc Villain, who oversaw the fund while going through his own bankruptcy, and who “violated state laws in 2001 when he did not file donation reports for the Haitian-American Political Caucus.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Chris Wallace: “I think the media could not do a worse job than this year….It’s like watching a badly refereed basketball game where we’re seeing make-up calls and we’re seeing particularly print going – and I’m not a Trump defender at all – but going after Trump in ways that I think violate every canon of ethics for news reporting.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The fact that the Clinton campaign is panicing over Michigan, deploying both Bill Clinton and Obama there, also lend credence to the theory. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
False story alert: That story about a “murder suicide” of an FBI agent who leaked Clinton scandal info from the non-existent “Denver Guardian” is a hoax.
The latest Los Angeles Times poll has Donald Trump up over Hillary Clinton by 5.4 points. That’s the largest lead Trump had since the “Clinton collapse” story broke.
Polls are screwy this year, and Trump has a way of defying all conventional wisdom, but given the in-the-tank media loudly proclaiming “No, Hillary’s polls are just fine, I tell you! Just fine!” in the wake of the FBI and Wikileaks revelations, the LA Times poll seems significant.
So the big Wikileak topic today, the Friday before the election, is a John Podesta email which mentions “spirit cooking,” which involves “blood, sperm and breastmilk.”
(Blink. Blink.)
Cue Scott Adams:
Do any Clinton scandals NOT involve sperm? #SpiritCooking
Caveat: This is one of those stories where this tiny little email is being spun out into “sex cult” and “Satanist” headlines. I find it hard to believe that Clinton’s inner circle are dabbling in Neo-Satanism, because that would mean worshiping something other than money and power. But maybe Podesta might want to break his silence on this one email because what the hell, dude?
Now for some slightly less icky Clinton Corruption news:
“The FBI has found emails related to Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state on the laptop belonging to the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner, according to a U.S. official. These emails, CBS News’ Andres Triay reports, are not duplicates of emails found on Secretary Clinton’s private server.” So CBS is stopping just short of saying “Clinton perjured herself.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
There are a lot of angles to these Clinton scandals, but the thing that transcends all of it is the rank stupidity of the people involved. There were safer and more secure ways to establish clandestine communications. Even with their setup, a modest amount of discipline would have prevented most of this from happening. All they had to do was limit mail going out of the system. When the time came to burn it down, they only had to destroy the server entirely and no one would be able to prove anything.
The argument from Team Trump in the closing days of the election is that Hillary Clinton is too corrupt to rule. He’s painting her as the face of the larger problem, which is the metastasizing corruption of the ruling class. It’s a good closing argument and it resonates, but the reason Hillary should not rule is she is dangerously incompetent and she surrounds herself with outlandishly stupid people. A society can survive crooked rulers, but it cannot survive stupid ones. Hillary Clinton is too stupid to rule.
Vanity Fair writer: The Washington Post is every bit as fair and balanced as Breitbart. (Hat tip: Instapundit.) “For the first time in my memory, some of the major media organizations in this country have now abandoned all semblance of objectivity in furtherance of electing Hillary Clinton, or perhaps more accurately, in furtherance of the defeat of Donald Trump.” False. They’ve merely stopped pretending to that objectivity.
“But no one has ever been elected president who has been so hobbled by such festering wounds as Hillary Clinton would be if she is elected on Nov. 8.”
Chelsea Clinton shared her complaints about Doug Band with “a Bush-43 kid“? That’s like Fredo Corleone complaining to the FBI that Moe Green isn’t getting a big enough cut.
The Democrats are in bad shape even if Hillary wins. (Hat tip: Jonah Goldberg’s G-File email.)
As part of their ongoing Clinton-related FOIA document dump, the FBI has released the Vince Foster investigation files. Team Clinton must be jumping out of their skin about now.
1. The Clinton Foundation investigation is far more expansive than anybody has reported so far and has been going on for more than a year.
2. The laptops of Clinton aides Cherryl Mills and Heather Samuelson have not been destroyed, and agents are currently combing through them. The investigation has interviewed several people twice, and plans to interview some for a third time.
3. Agents have found emails believed to have originated on Hillary Clinton’s secret server on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They say the emails are not duplicates and could potentially be classified in nature.
4. Sources within the FBI have told him that an indictment is “likely” in the case of pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation, “barring some obstruction in some way” from the Justice Department.
5. FBI sources say with 99% accuracy that Hillary Clinton’s server has been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that information had been taken from it.
Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said.
Agents, using informants and recordings from unrelated corruption investigations, thought they had found enough material to merit aggressively pursuing the investigation into the foundation that started in summer 2015 based on claims made in a book by a conservative author called “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” these people said.
Snip.
Senior officials in the Justice Department and the FBI didn’t think much of the evidence, while investigators believed they had promising leads their bosses wouldn’t let them pursue, they said.
In other words: Agents had jobs to do, and senior officials had Democrats to protect. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
A small law firm that has given money to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Harry Reid, President Obama and many others is accused of improperly funneling millions of dollars into Democratic Party coffers. The program was exposed by the Center for Responsive Politics and the same team of Boston Globe investigative reporters featured in the movie “Spotlight.”
The Thornton Law Firm has just 10 partners, but dollar for dollar, it’s one of the nation’s biggest political donors, reports CBS News correspondent Tony Dokoupil.
But according to the firm’s own documents – leaked by a whistleblower — days or even hours after making these donations, partners received bonuses matching the amount they gave.
If a Republican were benefiting, this would receive wall-to-wall network coverage, but it doesn’t even make Hillary Clinton’s top 10 scandals list. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
EmailGate is deadly for the Clintons because it reminds so many Americans of so many things they’ve disliked about Bill and Hillary for so long. The overweening sense of entitlement. The compulsive lies and dissimulations. The blame-shifting and scapegoating rather than taking responsibility. The personal profiteering while posing as upright public servants. Above all, the overpowering belief that laws are for lesser people, never for Clintons and their privileged coterie. Bill and Hillary have gotten away with this for decades, turning the Democratic Party into a vehicle for their own aggrandizement, but trying to publicly pin EmailGate on the FBI—rather than on Hillary Clinton herself—may be one step too far.
Then came the Wikileaks. And Project Veritas. And the FBI’s latest announcement about the emails on Weiner’s computer. We watched Clinton physically collapse in public. Individually, none of that news was big enough to make a difference. But collectively it framed Clinton as a drinker in dubious health, who hired bullies to start violence at Trump rallies, and runs a Mafia-like shadow-government called The Clinton Foundation, funded in part by companies that benefit from war. Add that to Clinton’s confrontational language about Russia, and suddenly Clinton looks as dangerous as Trump. The fear persuasion was approaching a tie.
Snip.
In summary, Clinton’s message this closing week is that Trump is politically incorrect, offensive to many people, and sexually aggressive beyond the point of appropriate social behavior. That’s all the stuff you already assumed about Trump a year ago. And it doesn’t scare you, no matter how badly it offends you.
Meanwhile, the current news cycle along with Trump’s supporters have framed Clinton as a low-stamina liar with a drinking problem who is running a criminal enterprise (The Clinton Foundation) that sells influence to foreign countries and companies that are more interested in war than peace. While she trash-talks Putin. That stuff could get all of us killed.
“Trump closer: How did Hillary get so rich?” “Don’t forget that the Clintons had been in federal office continuously from January 1992 to February 2013, a period of twenty-one years, while they amassed a nine-figure net worth.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
To many who knew the Clintons behind closed doors, it is unimaginable that she may be elected to the highest office in the land. There is a good chance she will actually become the most powerful person on the planet. John Adams must be spinning in his grave at the mere thought. One thing is true: Many have tried to hold them accountable. All have been thwarted at every turn.
Yesterday’s suspicious church burning reeks of a false flag operation, and should remind us of the 1990s “black church burning” epidemic that wasn’t.
Kadzik has also made numerous donations to the likes of Clinton, vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, and John Podesta’s daughter Megan Rouse. Oh, and his wife is Amy Weiss, who served as White House deputy assistant and deputy press secretary to Bill Clinton. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
According to The Wall Street Journal, the New York agents notified FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe of their blockbuster findings on October 3.
But they couldn’t access the emails they found because searching through them wasn’t covered under their existing warrant for Weiner.
They needed a new warrant. So what did McCabe do?
Nothing. He sat on his hands. He never requested one. And nothing happened for weeks.
Why is this so important?
Well, McCabe is the FBI official who oversaw the initial Clinton email investigation.
He’s come under fire recently because his wife received $500,000 while running for the Virginia state senate from the political action committee (PAC) of longtime Clinton ally and current Virginia governor Terry McAullife.
Clinton herself headlined a major fundraiser for that same PAC shortly before the group steered the cash to McCabe’s wife.
So Mrs. McCabe received a huge sum of money from a close Clinton ally around the same time Mrs. Clinton was under an investigation led by Mr. McCabe.
The whole episode smells awful.
It’s therefore no shock to anyone who hasn’t had a full-frontal lobotomy why McCabe was in no rush to request a warrant for access to emails that may derail Clinton’s ambitions before Election Day.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the only reason why a warrant to was eventually requested in recent days was because “a member of the [Justice] department’s senior national-security staff asked for an update on the Weiner laptop. At that point, officials realized that no one had acted to obtain a warrant.”
Look, Comey’s not stupid. The Washington Post reported that he was only notified of the discovery of these new emails last Thursday.
He knew the guy running the Clinton investigation was likely dragging his feet until after election.
He also knew that if he did nothing given this new discovery and it turned up damning evidence against Clinton, Republicans would rake him over the coals for taking part in a conspiracy.
So he did what any bureaucrat would do in that situation: He covered his you know what. He notified Congress of the new discovery, which let the cat out of the bag.
“For twenty years, I worked undercover in the Central Intelligence Agency, recruiting sources, producing intelligence and running operations. I have a pretty concrete understanding of how classified information is handled and how government communications systems work. Nobody uses a private email server for official business. Period. Full stop…Anyone else who did such things in the government would long ago have been tried, convicted and sent to jail.”
Leaked emails show that Hillary wants the Clinton Foundation to keep receiving foreign donations even if she gets elected President. Well, of course she does… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Victor Davis Hanson wonders “What was the Clinton telos? The end point, the aim of all their lying, cheating, criminality, dishonor, and degradation?”
The Clintons suffer from greed, as defined by Aristotle: endless acquisition solely for the benefit of self. With their insatiable appetites, they resented the limits that multimillionaire status put on them, boundaries they could bypass only by accumulating ever greater riches. The billion-dollar foundation squared the circle of progressive politicians profiting from the public purse by offering a veneer of “doing good” while offering free luxury travel commensurate with the style of the global rich, by offering sinecures for their loyal but otherwise unemployable cronies, and by spinning off lobbying and speaking fees (the original font of their $100-million-plus personal fortune and the likely reason for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision to put all her communications, mercantile included, on a private server safe from government scrutiny). Acquiring money to the extent that money would become superfluous was certainly a Clinton telos — and the subtext of the entire Podesta trove and the disclosures about the Clinton Foundation.
Snip.
As in the quest for lucre, the Clintons’ appetite for high-profile authority is endless. Just as $150 million seemed as nothing compared with the billions and billions raked in by their friends and associates, so too eight years in the White House, tenure as governor, senator, or secretary of state were never enough. In between such tenures, the Clintons suffered droughts when they were not on center stage and in no position to wield absolute power, as they watched less deserving folk (the Obamas perhaps in particular) gain inordinate attention. A Hillary presidency would give the Clintons unprecedented Peronist-like power, in a manner unlike any couple in American history.
Of course, the Clintons are not only corrupt but cynical as well. They accept that the progressive media, the foundations, the universities, the bureaucracies, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley honor power more than trendy left-wing politics; they well understand that their fans will, for them, make the necessary adjustments to contextualize Clinton criminality or amorality. Sexual predations, the demonization of women, graft, and unequal protection under the law are also of no consequence to the inbred, conflicted, and morally challenged media – who will always check in with the Clinton team, like errant dogs who scratch the backdoor of their master after a periodic runaway.
The Clintons have contempt for the media precisely because the media are so obsequious. They smile, that, like themselves, the media are easily manipulated and compromised — to the extent of offering their articles, before publication, for Clinton approval (as the New York Times’ Mark Leibovich did; leaking debate questions to the Clinton campaign (as Donna Brazile did); or saying (as Politico’s chief political correspondent did), “I have become a hack. . . . Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this Tell me if I f**ked up anything.” The Clintons view such sycophants not with affection, but with disdain, given that they are moochers no better than the Clintons, with the same base desires, albeit better camouflaged by their pretense of objectivity.
Read the whole thing…assuming NRO’s ad blocker blocker allows you to do so.
Obviously there’s too big a flood of Clinton corruption news to do this weekly, so this might be a daily feature (or pretty close to it) until the election, which is (finally!) just a week away.
More on the Podesta-Kadzik relationship. (Hat tip: Hot Air, which asks: “At this point, is there anyone working at the Justice Department who hasn’t been tainted by the stench of Clinton corruption?”)
Hmmmmmmm: “Top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has not been on Clinton’s campaign plane for the last three days, CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin reported Monday.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Scott Adams: “Allow me to offer an interpretation of events that casts Comey as more of a patriot and hero than an ass-covering weasel….In this movie, Comey did the hero thing. He alerted the public to the fact that the FBI found DISQUALIFYING information on the Weiner laptop. And he took a second bullet to his reputation.”
James Carville melts down, “Asserts FBI, GOP, and KGB in Cahoots.” He may be the first Clinton toady to completely lose it this election cycle, but I doubt he’ll be the last. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
OK, I’ve got to go ahead and put this up before another giant wave of Clinton Corruption news breaks…
Here’s some quick Twitter reaction to yesterday’s torrent of Clinton Corruption/FBI/Anthony Weiner news. But first let’s look at a prophecy fulfilled from August 31 last year:
Huma Abedin, the top aide to Hillary Clinton and the wife of perv sleazebag Anthony Wiener, was a major security risk as a collector of info
