The mainstream media have had their world turned upside down.
Just imagine for a moment. On Nov. 8, everyone associated with the mainstream media, down to the cooks and bottle washers, knew that at the end of the day their chosen one, Hillary Clinton, would have won a landslide victory over that rich guy who never learned to bow down and do homage to the mainstream media as a candidate is supposed to. Many of their friends would be getting cushy government jobs and would provide those still in the media business with an endless source of inside information about defeating global warming and sticking it to the rich.
Then, after staying up until nearly dawn, the mainstream media types went to bed not believing the nightmare that couldn’t possibly be unfolding before their eyes.
Everyday when they wake up, it is with the intense wish that Nov. 8 will have turned out to have been a bad dream, and every day it becomes more like reality in a world turned upside down.
As you might imagine, it makes reporting on the evolving Trump presidency more than a little difficult.
On one show I heard an otherwise responsible reporter talk about all the horrible things that Donald Trump had done, only to be reminded by the host that Trump is still a private citizen and hadn’t done anything yet.
On another show I heard the absurd criticism of Rex Tillerson, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, that he had absolutely no government experience and this broke with all precedent in modern times.
The otherwise intelligent person failed to mention that the man appointing him also had absolutely no government experience and the American people broke with all precedent by electing him president.
If the American people had wanted someone who would have appointed the same tired old political hacks to every position of power in the government they would have elected Hillary Clinton.
But it’s a wonderful example of how out of kilter the mainstream media are in attempting to cover Trump, a man they made fun of during the entire campaign.
In fact, if Hillary Clinton hadn’t listened to the mainstream media, she might have actually gotten out and campaigned, at least in the final weeks.
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You would think that the mainstream media would get tired of reporting the same old story and getting it wrong every time. The mainstream media are now reporting that perhaps as many as 20 Electoral College delegates who are pledged to vote for Trump won’t.
Doesn’t this sound just like what the mainstream media said about the Republican National Convention, where delegates to the convention pledged to Trump were, according to the mainstream media, going to vote for someone else so that Trump wouldn’t get the nomination?
It’s the same story written by the same people. After the Electoral College officially elects Trump, the next story will be that Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts has said he won’t administer the oath of office or some other such silliness.
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I love all the press the story The New York Times made up about the Russians controlling the presidential election is getting.
Let’s accept what is really speculation in the article as true, and the Russians did attempt to help Donald Trump win. So what? The US attempts to manipulate elections all over the world. Why shouldn’t Russian President Vladimir Putin attempt to get someone elected president of the US who he can have an intelligent discussion with? Someone who would be smart enough to get a Russian translator to help with a “reset” button? I mean, how competent do you have to be to look up one word in Russian?
But so what? Why is this even news? What the intelligence agencies, which by the way are run by Democratic appointees, have is a bunch of circumstantial evidence that the Russians hacked into the computers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). According to The New York Times, the Russians hacked into both the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee (RNC). However, Reince Priebus says that is wrong. He said that the RNC’s computers were not hacked and the FBI has assured him that they were never hacked.
But what if it turns out that most of the speculation in The New York Times story turns out to be true, then what? There are no do-overs on presidential elections. If the Russians found a way to influence the voters, then they did.
However, when you consider the brilliance of the Electoral College, you realize how difficult it is for anyone to mess with the outcome of a presidential election because the president of the US is not elected in one nationwide election but in 50 state and one District of Columbia races. You can’t fix one race, you have to fix 20-some races, and that’s tough.
But why get all bent out of shape about it? Is the fact that other countries want to have a say in electing our president news? The impression the news media are trying to give is that Russia actually manipulated voting machines and vote totals, and there is absolutely no allegation of that. It boils down to the belief by some that the Russians hacked into the DNC computer system and that of the Hillary Clinton campaign and then had those emails released to the public.
Of course, if, in the case of the DNC, the DNC hadn’t been doing anything wrong, that wouldn’t have made much difference. But as it turned out the DNC, which was supposed to be neutral during the primary, was working with the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Then there were the emails of Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta. Nobody is saying that these aren’t real emails. If they are real emails, then why shouldn’t the voters have some view into what is going on behind the scenes? The emails proved that the mainstream media were working as an arm of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
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Lessons learned from the Donald Trump victory include: Don’t believe half of what you read in the mainstream media and doubt the half that you do.
Not in modern times has there been a candidate as mistreated by the press as Trump, or a candidate as worshipped by the press as Hillary Clinton.
Look at just one small aspect of the coverage. Trump, who is a worth somewhere in the $5 billion to $12 billion neighborhood, was cast by the press as a business failure because several of his companies had declared bankruptcy. As the gambler said, “you never count your money when you’re sitting at the table.” The success or failure of a company is judged, not on whether it has hit rough spots or not, but how financially healthy it is at the end of the day.
As a businessman Trump has been enormously successful. You can argue that he is a jerk, took unfair advantage of tax and bankruptcy laws and has been married too many times, but the man has made billions of dollars and employs thousands of people.
Hillary Clinton herself couldn’t name any achievement as secretary of state other than flying more miles than any previous secretary of state. She also could not name any accomplishments during her eight years in the Senate. Before that her job was to be the wife of Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas and then president.
The press continues to tout her as the most qualified person ever to run for president. Based on what? My assumption is that would be because she had lived in the White House and knew which doors stick, and where all the bathrooms were. She was elected to the Senate, but she didn’t do anything once she was there, and she was secretary of state, but so what.
I think Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was commander of Allied forces in Europe during World War II was more qualified.
Teddy Roosevelt had been vice president, governor of New York, assistant secretary of the Navy and a colonel in the Army. No one could say Roosevelt didn’t do anything. His record of accomplishments would be longer but he became president when he was 42, so he didn’t have much time.
And what about George H.W. Bush? He had been vice president for eight years, director of the CIA, ambassador to China and the United Nations, chairman of the Republican National Committee, a congressman and a Navy pilot.
If you get to count the fact that Hillary Clinton was the wife of a president then it should count that Bush was the son of a senator.
The amazing thing, or it’s not so amazing, the sad thing is that some mainstream media type writes or says that Hillary Clinton is the most qualified candidate ever to run for president and nobody challenges it. The statement gets repeated until it is accepted.
There is a reason why the mainstream media are tanking, and it isn’t because of the internet. It’s because it has become so partisan and so dishonest.
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One of the things that candidates at every level should have learned from Trump is that they can answer questions honestly.
It’s disturbing how terrified candidates, even at the county and city level, are of responding to a question with a short, straightforward answer.
Trump proved that you can say what you want and still get elected. It would be wonderful if more candidates followed his lead.
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The News & Observer did a funny piece about North Carolina barbecue and the presidential election.
Hillary Clinton had barbecue in Charlotte at some fancy-dancy place that wasn’t really a barbecue restaurant; it served all kinds of dishes but was also a place where you could buy barbecue.
Donald Trump had barbecue at Stamey’s on Gate City Boulevard in Greensboro.
What the article didn’t go into was how the decisions were made by the respective campaigns on where to eat barbecue. Judging on how the two campaigns were run, I imagine Trump ended up at Stamey’s because he said to somebody, “They keep telling me I need to eat some North Carolina barbecue. Is there anywhere around here to get some?”
Somebody said, “Stamey’s,” and off they went.
With the Hillary Clinton campaign, they surely focused grouped North Carolina barbecue and found a strong divide between eastern and Lexington styles. They also found enormous barbecue loyalty. So if you ate at one place you might turn off the fans of another. In the end, they decided to go neutral. Not really a barbecue place, but not a place that would make anybody mad and that served barbecue.
It’s the way the two campaigns were conducted from the beginning. Hillary Clinton seemed to think that if she could hold on to her base that she would win. Trump rightly thought that if he continued to be Donald Trump, the American people would elect him president over the crowd of politicians who have never done anything useful in their lives.
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I’m starting to get a little worried about some of my liberal colleagues on the news shows. I’m afraid their heads might explode when they finally realize that Trump is president. They talk about the recent election as if some unspeakable tragedy occurred because the candidate who they supported seems to have lost. Maybe it’s lack of experience or youthful optimism, but sometimes the candidate you support loses.
I suppose they are still in the denial stage of grief. But one day they are going to wake up and realize that Donald Trump is president and all of these people who they completely disagree with are Cabinet secretaries. It’s going to be tough on them, and what in the world are they going to do for four years while Trump is running the country?
Didn’t some of those liberal mainstream media types predict that the stock market would tank if Trump was elected? And stocks have gone nowhere but up.
It is funny when another Cabinet secretary is announced and the mainstream media types are all aflutter because they disagree with him or her on the issues, as if they expected Trump to appoint people to his Cabinet who didn’t agree with him.
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Trump seems to be trying to get along with the Democrats, but I hope that once he is in office he removes the Secret Service protection for Hillary Clinton. She was first lady 16 years ago; there is no reason for the government to continue to provide her with free drivers and errand boys, which is reportedly how she treats the Secret Service team assigned to her.
If Hillary Clinton wants 24-hour protection she can afford to pay for it herself, or she can go live with her husband, Bill Clinton, who as an ex-president has Secret Service protection for life.
Then Trump needs to defund National Public Radio (NPR) completely. According to one report, NPR only gets 10 percent of its funding from the government. If that is true then it shouldn’t be any problem to either make up that 10 percent in donations or cut costs by 10 percent and continue on a little leaner.
I suspect that the percentage is far higher than 10 percent. But 1 percent is too high. NPR has chosen to be highly partisan, and if you are funded by the government and make that choice you had better be sure to be partisan for the party that wins. NPR missed that boat and should pay the price.
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You have to love the old school Democrats like Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi. Under their leadership the Democrats lost control of the White House and both houses of Congress and most of the state legislatures in the country, yet they say everything is fine in donkey land.
It’s great for Republicans because, judging from the last election, the Democrats have lost touch with their base, which historically has been blue collar and union workers. Now the base is made up of effete pseudo intellectuals and people on the dole.
Working men and women have moved over to the Republican Party in droves. What should really frighten the Democrats is that both white and black working class voters are voting Republican. If the Republicans can appeal to 25 percent of black voters, the Democrats will be in even more trouble than they are now.
Trump had far more black supporters than the mainstream media would admit, and they supported Trump for the same reasons that white voters did – because they didn’t believe that the country was really in a period of economic recovery, they didn’t like the idea of open borders and they believed that in the increasingly violent world the US needs a stronger military.
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It’s fun to read the mainstream media comments about the Trump Cabinet nominees. The mainstream media can’t fathom the idea that Trump would appoint someone who was not in favor of killing all industry to prevent global warming to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It makes you wonder if anyone in the mainstream media listened to Trump when he was out campaigning for over a year.
Here’s news to the mainstream media: Trump and a whole lot of other bright, well-educated people don’t believe in man-made global warming.
It’s like the appointment of Betsy DeVos to secretary of education – DeVos, a person who believes in charter schools. How could that be? In the immortal words of President Barack Hussein Obama, “Elections have consequences.”
The country hasn’t had a conservative president since Ronald Reagan, which was nearly 30 years ago. Both Bush the elder and Bush the younger were old-time Washington insiders, more moderate than anything else.
Trump may or may not be a true conservative, because evidently each true conservative gets to define what a true conservative is, but so far in his Cabinet picks he looks like a true conservative.
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The idea that burning fossil fuels is causing climate change is a fact in the same fashion that Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president was a fact right up until they started counting the votes on Nov. 8.
It is a great comparison. Everyone who knew anything agreed that Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president. There was absolutely no possibility that Donald Trump could win regardless of what the polls said; everyone was voting for Hillary Clinton so, of course, she was going to win.
What used to be called global warming – until the globe quit cooperating and despite repeated pleas from Al Gore simply refused to warm – is now called climate change, which is no different than calling it weather change. The climate changes all the time. What the global warming people can’t prove but believe to be true is that man’s activities are causing the climate to change in a way that it wouldn’t change without man.
It is an interesting theory and a lot of people believe that it’s true. But it is not, as they keep saying, a scientific fact just because a lot of important people believe it to be true.
It is a fact that a lot of people, even some important people, believe that there is no proof that man’s activities are causing the climate to change. Trump has chosen someone from the latter camp to run the EPA.
The EPA existed back when global warming was just an idea in Gore’s head. Gore did not invent the internet, but he did invent global warming.
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It was a great relief to see that Mitt Romney was not appointed secretary of state.
It makes me wonder about his dinner with Trump. Did Trump do it just to see if Romney would grovel?
Personally I hope Romney didn’t grovel. I hope Romney apologized for going overboard in his attacks on Trump and apologized for not endorsing Trump in the general election.
I would then hope Trump accepted the apology and made it clear that Romney, had he endorsed Trump, even late in the game, would be looking at a Cabinet position.
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The New York Times is proving beyond any doubt that it is so in the tank for the Democratic Party that you might as well simply read the press releases from the Democratic National Committee.
This week The New York Times announced that it has hired Glenn Thrush to join The Times team covering the Trump White House. Thrush is the reporter for Politico who sent his story to Clinton campaign Chairman Podesta for Podesta’s approval before sending it to his editors.
In the good old days, when mainstream newspapers had integrity, behavior like that would have resulted in Thrush returning to his desk to find a cardboard box and a pink slip on top of it.
But in today’s world letting the campaign manager of the Democratic presidential candidate approve your articles is a ticket to a big promotion.
So Thrush was so in the tank for Hillary Clinton that he allowed her campaign manager to read his stories. How fair do you think he will be to the Trump White House?
It is going to be an interesting transition. With Obama in the White House the left-wing White House press corps has tiptoed around to make certain that no one asked anything that might be considered offensive or even troubling.
But wait until the questions start coming from the press in the Trump White House. Nobody is going to hold back for a second.
Trump barred some media that was truly unfair and offensive from getting press credentials for his campaign events. The reporters were free to come in with the regular crowd, but they didn’t get the special treatment that reporters get.
Trump could do the same thing at the White House, where reporters can’t simply come in a different door. If, for instance, The New York Times were banned from the White House press office, it would be a real problem.
Gosh, I hope Trump waits for them to publish something really hateful and untrue about Trump, or his wife, and then bans them for six months.
It would be wonderful.
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Democrats who are suddenly opposed to the Electoral College need to step back and take a look at the US Senate. Both the Electoral College and the Senate are based on the same theory that states have limited sovereignty. If the states don’t have sovereignty then it makes no sense for Wyoming and Alaska to have two US senators, the same number as California and Texas.
A senator from Wyoming representing 600,000 people has exactly the same power as a senator from California representing 39 million people.
