The Republicans won another congressional race – this time in Georgia – that according to the mainstream media the Democrats were going to win, thereby demonstrating the unpopularity of President Donald John Trump.
It’s the third race that the Democrats have targeted to win back and that the mainstream media have predicted the Democrats would win. The Democrats also lost races in Kansas and Montana after similar hype by the mainstream media.
A Republican candidate also won a less high-profile congressional race in South Carolina.
It’s like deja vue all over again. The mainstream media, which hate Trump with a passion, are utterly convinced that everyone in the nation feels like they do. The mainstream media are convinced that voters are going to turn out in droves to elect Democrats to prove to Trump that he is going in the wrong direction. The problem with the predictions by the mainstream media is the same problem the mainstream media had in the presidential election – they allow their own personal beliefs to blind them to reality.
Even the polls show that the vast majority of Trump supporters still support Trump. But for some reason the mainstream media can’t get it through their liberal heads that there were enough Trump supporters in this country to elect Trump president, and if the overwhelming majority of those supporters continue to support Trump, there are enough of them to keep electing congressmen.
What is incredible is that the mainstream media, despite the third loss in a row, are still predicting that the Democrats will pick up 24 seats and win control of the House in 2018.
It’s incredible that they can take defeat and say that it points to victory.
*****
According to Jared Kushner, his research into streamlining the government revealed that in the Defense Department they are still using 8-inch floppy disks. That’s incredible. The very first computer I bought for The Rhinoceros Times in 1991 wouldn’t take a big floppy because the technology was already considered obsolete.
I wonder where they get the floppy disks. It’s the Defense Department, so they may have them specially made for $10,000 apiece.
Of course, that is more advanced than the North Carolina court system, which still uses paper. It would be a huge technological advance for the North Carolina courts to start using floppy disks. The federal courts are light years ahead of the North Carolina courts when it comes to technology.
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If you have any doubts about the political divisions in this country, the response to the shooting at the Republican congressional baseball team practice is proof that the country sees events in an entirely different color.
Democrats see the shooting as proof that the country needs stronger gun control laws – although it’s hard to imagine anything other than an outright ban on private citizens owning weapons that would not have allowed the shooter to legally purchase the rifle he used.
The Republicans point out that without the armed Capitol Police detail present, all the Republican congressmen would likely have been shot because a baseball bat is no defense against a gun. The difference from their point of view is that there were armed officers present to protect them, but if Majority Whip Steve Scalise had not been present with his protective detail, the congressmen would have been sitting ducks.
The Republicans see it as proof that citizens need to have access to guns to protect themselves.
*****
The level of political vitriol in this country has reached levels not seen some say since the Civil War, but the Democrats did hate President Richard Nixon and managed to run him out of office.
It’s easy to forget that Nixon’s crime was covering up a really stupid burglary, not in having anything to do with the burglary before it happened.
The current level of animosity can largely be attributed to one woman – Hillary Clinton – who in her heart still cannot admit that she lost the presidential race.
Candidates lose political races all the time – some are hard fought and close, others lose big. Hillary Clinton was in a hard fought race but she lost big. It takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. Trump won 306. It’s unfortunate for all those Hillary Clinton supporters out there, but that isn’t close.
What is incredible, when you think about it, is that even after Trump won Florida and North Carolina, Hillary Clinton still thought she was going to win. Even after Trump had been declared the victor by the Associated Press, people in the Hillary Clinton campaign were convinced that somehow she was going to win.
She didn’t win, but she thinks she did, which is a problem for the country. Hillary Clinton could have given her spiteful self-serving concession speech, gone home and kept quiet, but she didn’t choose to do that. She is still fighting back, challenging the legitimacy of the Trump presidency because she knows that somehow Trump stole the election.
I even think Trump would admit that Hillary Clinton should have won. The cards were all stacked in her favor when she won the nomination, but she managed to lose. The evidence that she ran a horribly flawed campaign was proven by the fact that until the vote totals started coming in on Nov. 8, her campaign staff was sure she was going to win and thought that it might be a huge landslide. So the people working for her, who were supposed to have their fingers on the pulse of the American people, had no idea what was happening in most of the country.
Maybe they should have gotten out of the Hillary Clinton campaign headquarters in Brooklyn more often and talked to people in the rest of the country. If they had, they would have found a huge wave of disgust with the Washington establishment sweeping across the country.
You see this all the time in local races where there is no polling. Candidates who will end the evening with 20 percent of the vote walk into the Old Guilford County Court House convinced they have won. It’s easy to see why this happens around here. We are polite in this part of the world and the only people that have spoken to the candidate about the race in the grocery store, or at a football game, are people who are going to vote for them because everyone else either avoids them or the topic.
A candidate goes to a high school football game and 20 people come up to the candidate and tell her they are going to vote for her. The candidate looks at the thousands in the stands and figures they are all going to vote for her as well. The truth may be that those 20 are going to vote for her and most of the rest are not.
But this isn’t supposed to happen in a national race. One problem was that Hillary Clinton’s campaign believed their own press releases, and when the mainstream media ran those press releases as if they were real news stories, the campaign read them again and were convinced even more that they were true. Who is going to doubt the veracity of The New York Times and The Washington Post?
It was certainly true that among the mainstream media and the political elite Hillary Clinton won big, but no matter how famous you are or how much some network pays you to read from a teleprompter in front of a camera, you only get one vote.
So the loss was extremely difficult for Hillary Clinton because she was completely blindsided. According to the book Shattered, about her campaign, she hadn’t even looked at a concession speech until after President Barack Obama called her and told her that she had lost and it was time to concede.
And from that moment to this one she has not taken it well. If she loved this country half as much as she says she does, she would be supporting her president, or if she can’t support him she should at least be quiet.
Her troops are “resisting” because she told them to.
They believe the election was stolen despite all the evidence to the contrary because Hillary Clinton says that it was.
*****
I wish Trump would fire the special prosecutor. He would take enormous political heat, but he takes enormous political heat for everything he does.
However, if he doesn’t fire the special prosecutor he should find the biggest leakers in the attorney general’s office and assign them all to investigate the Clinton Foundation. If that wasn’t a pay for play scheme then one doesn’t exist. In this case Bill Clinton was the bagman. He was the one that went out and collected the money when Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, granted favors.
Assign the leakers to do a full four-year investigation of the Clinton Foundation and let them leak everything they find to the press so it will constantly be in the media.
*****
The News & Record gave huge play to a poll that found the majority of those polled didn’t support Trump. This is hardly news at all.
One thing we now know about traditional polling is that it isn’t accurate, but it’s not inaccurate all over the place, where sometimes it is discovered that the polls show conservatives losing when they are winning and sometimes the polls show liberals losing when they are winning.
No, the polls consistently favor liberals. In the 2014 midterm elections, the polls were predicting a big win by Democrats; instead there was a big win by conservatives. In 2016, in primary after primary the polls consistently predicted that Trump would receive an average of 4 percent to 5 percent fewer votes than he received. And then there was the general election when, based on polling, all the major media outlets predicted that Hillary Clinton would win.
The networks were not even talking about whether or not Hillary Clinton would win because that was a given based on polling. What they discussed – until the vote totals actually started coming in – was whether Hillary Clinton would have the coattails for the Democrats to take back the House as well as the Senate.
The networks, other than Fox, even refused to call states for Trump long past when they would have normally been called because they refused to believe their own exit polling. They couldn’t believe that people would actually vote for Trump considering all the horrible things they had been reporting about him for months.
The polls were dead wrong on nearly every aspect of the election. Hillary Clinton didn’t win and, in fact, didn’t come close to winning despite what you have read elsewhere.
It is absolutely meaningless that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote because the popular vote isn’t how the presidential election is won. It’s like claiming a football team won the game because they gained more yards than the other team. The popular vote in the presidential election doesn’t mean anything, as Hillary Clinton has learned the hard way.
So knowing that the polls are highly inaccurate – and not inaccurate because of flaws in the system but inaccurate because of the political leanings of the pollsters that control the results – why would anyone consider a poll showing that Trump lacked support newsworthy?
Polls are only valuable if they reflect the views of the people. We know that polls in today’s world do not.
*****
Would you want someone to work for you who didn’t want to be alone with you?
The fact that former FBI Director James Comey said that he didn’t feel comfortable being alone with Trump is enough reason right there for Trump to fire him. If an employee has so little trust in his boss that he wants witnesses in the room whenever he meets with his boss, that is not a good working relationship.
Comey testified that he wasn’t afraid to be alone with former President Obama or former President George W. Bush.
The head of the FBI shouldn’t be afraid to meet with anyone. In fact, you would expect the head of the FBI to have been in enough uncomfortable interview situations that he wouldn’t be concerned about being alone with his boss, even if he didn’t like or respect him.
*****
Everybody in Washington knows that Robert Mueller and James Comey are buddies. They are more than colleagues, they are friends. So how could Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein hire Mueller to investigate Comey? It doesn’t make any sense. You might as well hire Comey as special prosecutor to investigate himself.
There is a reason why people are recused – one of them is that they are too close to the case, or someone in the case, to investigate it without prejudice.
There are thousands of prosecutors in the US, so why did Rosenstein hire Mueller when he knew that the investigation was going to center around Comey? If it is true that Mueller has added an investigation of Trump for obstruction of justice then that is already evidence that this is not going to be an unbiased investigation. If it is based on Comey’s testimony, it’s stupid to investigate it because there were, according to Comey, only two people in the room.
But then maybe Comey is lying and there were more people in the room who will back him up. Weird things happen in Washington. Bob Woodward said he interviewed William Casey when he had been unable to speak for weeks.
Casey was in a room with armed guards at the door who said they didn’t let Woodward in the room. Some people found it to be an incredible coincidence that the only time Casey could speak before he died was when Woodward somehow snuck past the guard and got in the room to interview Casey.
So Woodward walks in the room with a man unable to speak, the nurses leave, the man starts speaking and is perfectly coherent, Woodward completes his interview, the nurse walks back in the room and finds a man just like he was when she left.
Woodward is the Democratic hero who brought down Nixon, so he gets a pass.
If Mueller can bring down Trump, the mainstream media and the Democrats will give him a pass for the rest of his life too.
*****
Trump howls constantly about “fake news” and I understand why. I howl about fake news just about any time I pick up a daily newspaper, watch the news on television or listen on the radio.
When I pick up the News & Record and read about a City Council meeting I attended, I often wonder if the N&R reporter attended the same meeting. When I see reports on television, I usually know I had to have been at a different meeting.
It’s incredible at the local level, and it appears to be worse, not better, at the national level. Trump knows what is being reported about him isn’t true, but along with tweeting, there is really not much he can do about it other than complain and, at speeches, point to the press and say, “There are the most dishonest people in America.”
Unfortunately for all of us, it’s true. Where do you get the real news? It’s hard to know. The New York Times admitted that its reporters were writing opinion pieces and running them as news throughout the presidential campaign. The New York Times, once the most respected newspaper in the world, has been caught several times quoting anonymous sources and either there never were any sources or the sources were wrong.
So what can you believe? It’s a difficult question to answer.
Clearly the millions of people who voted for Trump didn’t believe what was being reported by the mainstream media.
I’ve have found myself spending a lot more time watching speeches and press conferences rather than reading about them, because I know that what I read will be so slanted that it won’t portray what actually happened.
Not so long ago, people could depend on the mainstream media to give them truthful news with a liberal slant. Now the liberal slant has gotten so intense
*****
Here’s an odd piece of advice for our president: Take a couple of weeks off.
Trump has been going nonstop for over a year. Reports are that he gets to the White House offices early and leaves late.
He does play golf on the weekends, but he often plays with people he needs to talk to. Trump is a businessman and golf is often used to mix business with pleasure. Agreements can be reached on the golf course that could never be reached in the boardroom.
Trump needs to slow down, take some time off and figure out what his next move is. He’s made some huge mistakes, although they are not what the mainstream media have been crowing about.
Trump should have told Comey he could resign or be fired on Jan. 20. Trump came to drain the swamp; if you keep the swamp rats why drain the swamp? Comey is exactly the kind of lifelong bureaucrat that Trump should be running out of office, even if Comey didn’t have a god complex.
Trump should have never allowed Rod Rosenstein to be deputy attorney general. He is another swamp rat.
The biggest problem in Washington is not Congress, whether it is run by Democrats or Republicans; nor is it the president, regardless of party. The problem is that the government is not being run by the people who were elected to run it.
The government is run by nameless, faceless bureaucrats who are paid a fortune, when perks and benefits are included, to work as much or as little as they want because they cannot be fired.
Rosenstein is a great example. He is a lifelong bureaucrat who, by appointing a special prosecutor, made a decision that is going to put the country in utter and complete political turmoil for months and probably years.
Rosenstein took an investigation that wasn’t going anywhere and hired another member of the Washington insiders club, Mueller, and now it appears he’s going to be investigating one of his buddies, Comey.
It’s a safe bet at any odds that Mueller finds that Comey did nothing wrong.
Trump may need to fire Mueller and Rosenstein and a whole bunch of other folks as well.
Look at what has been happening: Congress is spending an inordinate amount of time hearing testimony about Trump. You would think that the Republicans would have better sense, but once you get inside the Beltway for a while, it does something to your brain.
Trump should forget all about Mueller and have Attorney General Jeff Sessions fire Rosenstein.
It seems that the country should have learned something about special prosecutors, which is that their investigations should be narrowly focused or else they find more and more things to investigate and the investigations go on for years.
*****
What if Mueller discovers that a number of people on the Trump campaign staff were in the same room that Russians were in during the campaign? It’s one of things Sessions is accused of not revealing to the Senate committee when he was asked if he met with Russians as a surrogate member of the campaign.
Sessions did not include an event that both he and the Russian ambassador attended and where they may have spoken. But that seems to be the standard for collusion. If Sessions was in the same room with the Russian ambassador and Sessions was consulting with the campaign, although not an official campaign staff member, then that proves that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians.
Maybe it doesn’t even take that. Perhaps some members of the Trump campaign drove slowly past the Russian Embassy in Washington. Couldn’t they have been communicating with the Russians as they slowly drove past?
*****
I have a confession to make that may save Mueller some time in his third or fourth year of investigating. This newspaper endorsed Trump and I did look up a Russian word in an online dictionary.
I know I shouldn’t have done it because no American citizen is supposed to even admit that Russia exists, much less be curious about word. I let my curiosity get the best of me, but I don’t want to be killed like the cat.
I wondered how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could have made such a huge faux pas (I’m assuming that using French words is still OK for an American) in her sophomoric skit with the Russian foreign minister over the word “Reset” in Russian. I’d have to look it up again to explain it in more detail, but the smartest woman in the world, and the most qualified person in the world to be president, had the wrong Russian word put on the button. I wanted to see what that word was. I now know that no American who supported Trump is supposed to have anything to do with any Russian and I throw myself on the mercy of the special prosecutor.
*****
I laugh every time I read about Trump being impeached and Vice President Mike Pence becoming president. The left is not going to give up.
After Pence was chosen there was a push by the left to have Trump dropped from the ticket and have Pence run for president. At times the mainstream media talked as if it were only a matter of time before Trump was forced from the Republican ticket.
Here’s breaking news for the left: Trump isn’t going anywhere. You can’t impeach a president because someone on his staff, or who wanted to be on his staff, or who knew somebody on his staff, rode in elevator with someone that the mainstream media think may have been Russian.
This whole thing reached the level of absurdity a long time ago, but it just keeps going.
But even if Mueller is able to create collusion out of thin air, and he may be, the Republicans control the House, which is where presidents are impeached.
Two presidents in the history of the nation have been impeached and it’s not done because the leftwing newspapers don’t like the president.
Trump isn’t going anywhere he doesn’t want to go, and he manages to beat the mainstream media at their own game. He keeps winning and they keep losing.
