Tag: messaging

I went on three network Sunday shows. I spoke for 35 minutes on three network Sunday shows. You know what got picked? The fact that I said alternative facts, not the fact that I ripped a new one to some of those hosts for never covering the facts that matter to America’s women, 16.1 million women in poverty as we sit there, the 12.4 million who have no health insurance. Everybody should feel outraged. The billions of dollars we have spent as a nation on public education, only to have millions of kids trapped in schools that fail them and never really promote and protect their intelligence and prepare them for the world that they all deserve. They shouldn’t be restricted by the zip code where they live. They should be lifted up.

This has all been a colossus failure, and nobody wants to talk about that. They want to talk about it’s always zing. It’s always playing gotcha. There’s no question that when you look at the contributions made by the media, money contributions, they went to Hillary Clinton. We have all the headlines, people should be embarrassed. Not one network person has been let go. Not one silly political analyst and pundit who talked smack all day long about Donald Trump has been let go. They are on panels every Sunday. They’re on cable news every day. Who’s the first editorial—the first blogger that will be left out that embarrassed his or her outlet? We know all their names.

I’m too polite to call them by name. But they know who they are, and they’re all wondering, will I be the first to go? The election was three months ago. None of them have been let go. If this were a real business, if the mainstream media were a thriving private sector business that actually turn a profit, which is not true of many of our newspapers, Chris, 20 percent of the people would be gone. They embarrassed, they failed to protect their shareholders and their board members and their colleagues.

And yet we deal with him every single day. We turn the other cheek. If you are part of team Trump, you walk around with these gaping, seeping wounds every single day, and that’s fine. I believe in a full and fair press. I’m here every Sunday morning. I haven’t slept in a month. I believe in a full and fair press. But with the free press comes responsibility. And responsibility is to get the story right. Biased coverage is easy to detect. Incomplete coverage impossible to detect. That’s my major grievance, is the media are not—they’re not giving us complete coverage. President Trump has signed all these executive orders this week. He’s met with these heads of states. He’s done so many things to stimulate the economy, to boost wages, to create jobs. Where’s the coverage?

Special Snowflake to the President, Kellyanne Conway, bringing it, uh, bigly to FOXnews’ Chris Wallace (who rather wisely just let her ramble on, it would seem). She’s right about one thing, people should be embarassed and people should be outraged. Just different people in different slots than you would have it.

I’m a PC

A long piece by Ta-Nehesi Coates on Obama (and, basically, race in America) that is predictably excellent, but this little scene really sticks out to me:

The [systematic and complete GOP] obstruction [throughout Obama’s presidency] grew out of narrow political incentives. “If Republicans didn’t cooperate,” Obama told me, “and there was not a portrait of bipartisan cooperation and a functional federal government, then the party in power would pay the price and they could win back the Senate and/or the House. That wasn’t an inaccurate political calculation.”

Obama is not sure of the degree to which individual racism played into this calculation. “I do remember watching Bill Clinton get impeached and Hillary Clinton being accused of killing Vince Foster,” he said. “And if you ask them, I’m sure they would say, ‘No, actually what you’re experiencing is not because you’re black, it’s because you’re a Democrat.’ ”

This is a genuinely and deeply important perception by Obama. It is undeniable that racism figures into much of the baseline Obama hatred/denial (“not my President!” “not a citizen!” and so forth), but baseline crazy is baked right into the mix for any Democrat that holds high office. Period. And an over-reliance on just characterizing this stuff over the last eight years as racism in blanket fashion is definitively of a piece with the “PC run wild” attacks that Trump used to great effect.

Even more importantly, though, is the fact that it’s all too easy to forget what the ground rules are for Democrats as candidates or office-holders. Expect this kind of shit. Run against it. Point it out in off years any time you are near a live microphone. You can never just “move forward,” unilaterally disarm, and take what you perceive to be the high road. Use your foreknowledge and expectation of these asinine talking points to preemptively mock and aggressively belittle your opponents based on the predictability of their spew as opposed to the far easier shortcut “oh, that’s just racist.” Because once you throw those qualifiers in, people on the convincible peripheries just stop listening. It is far easier to show them the crystal clear pattern of noise and falsehood, especially if you’re the one bringing it up and preemptively bludgeoning your opponent with it, than it is to get them to stare into the maw of decades and centuries of systematic privilege from which they have likely benefited…and but also magically admit to that, accept your point, change their worldview, and march right down to vote “D” for the rest of their natural lives.

But, alas, Serious Democrats are against this sort of thing; my dears that simply isn’t done. And this is why they fail.

On Trump’s Final Argument for America: “Corruption”

Lessig lays down what I think are the key take-aways for the Democratic party. Read the whole thing, but I think he nails the “barring disaster, here’s the way forward:

"Trump is not going to “drain the swamp.” He is not going to reform the system. In two years, if the Democrats finally learn to speak the language of America, there will be an endless list of examples of just how the Republicans once again sold out. 2018 could be a shot for the Democrats to gain control of Congress. And if it gains control with the right commitments, it could then enact the reform that would begin to convince America that it might—finally—have a democracy.”

Yep. Not going to come easily, but assuming the institutions survive, this is how we do it.

On Trump’s Final Argument for America: “Corruption”

You know what the magic word, the only thing that matters in American sexual mores today is? One thing. You can do anything, the left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it’s perfectly fine. Whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there’s no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police. But consent is the magic key to the left.

Rush Limbaugh. I really thought I had lost the ability to be astounded by the never ending spew of the far right…and then this happens. Here’s a man apparently discovering the concept of consent but finding the whole idea a little exotic and unbelievable. I really, truly want to know what color the sky is in Rush’s world. Stay woke, Rush.

Clinton: Or maybe he doesn’t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody’s ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax.
TRUMP: That makes me smart.
Lemkin: For some reason, I expect to see this exchange in continuous ad rotation right up until blood starts coming from my eyes and or my whatever.

We need a government that will deliver serious social reform — and make ours a country that truly works for everyone. Because right now, if you’re born poor, you will die on average nine years earlier than others.

If you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white. If you’re a white working-class boy, you’re less likely than anybody else to go to university. If you’re at a state school, you’re less likely to reach the top professions than if you’re educated privately.

If you’re a woman, you still earn less than a man. If you suffer from mental health problems, there’s too often not enough help to hand. If you’re young you’ll find it harder than ever before to own your own home.

Theresa May, presumptive incoming Prime Minister of the UK. For all the recent turmoil in the UK, it’s hard to imagine a US in which the conservative leadership had paragraphs even remotely like these in their stump speeches.

I said that when I ran four years ago [and I’m saying it again now]— the first thing I’d do is abolish the State Department and start all over [… If the only] tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Every problem that the State Department has, the answer is diplomacy. Why? Because if it’s not diplomacy, they don’t have a job.

Rick “Don’t Google My Name” Santorum brandishing the sort of crystalline logic that powered him to a second place finish last go-round and but thus far in the 2016 cycle has left him seated at the kiddy table.
When do we get to peak abolish-on-day-one? Who will be the first GOP candidate to come out for abolishing our entire system of government ON DAY ONE? I suspect we’re closer than we think to just such a pronouncement.

There may be no more iconic image for the sorry state of America in the waning days of Our Glorious Conservative “revolution.” A crumbling bridge partially shut down dead center in what’s supposedly the glittering capitol of the most wealthy, most powerful nation in the world today. If only we’d faced historically low employment and historically low interest rates for the past decade or so such that we might actually invest in our country. Come get a big cup of Your Freedoms, everyone.

Historically, Obama’s lowest ratings are higher than the lowest of any President since John F. Kennedy. That’s right. At Saint Ronnie Reagan’s lowest, he was at just 35 percent. George W. Bush once hit 19 percent. Back to the present, Congress has an approval rating of below 13 percent, yet somehow, it’s Obama’s approval ratings, at more than triple that, that makes headlines and makes congressional candidates turn tail and run.

The Big Lie The Media’s Telling You About Obama’s Approval Rating (via azspot).

Likewise, exit polling yesterday showed voters disliked GOP Congress more than they disliked Obama. But let’s not mess with good The Narrative; this way the stories damned near write themselves!

Source: addictinginfo.org