Saturday, August 8, 2015

Looks like Trump Has Won Another News Cycle



Donald Trump is obviously unhappy with the Fox News handling of his appearance at Thursday night's debate, and was, predictably, pretty vocal about it. There was that one comment though, where he went, as Erick Erickson from RedState.com put it--"a bridge too far", when he basically implied that debate moderator Megyn Kelly was hard on him because she was having her period. (Trump insists he was referring to bleeding out the "nose" and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a "deviant". As a grown person, I certainly don't believe he meant "nose" and am pretty sure he's calling an awful lot of grown people "deviants" right now.)

This is, as I have called this primary before--cuckoo bananas. With a handful of comments directed at Fox News, he's got his followers turned against Megyn Kelly, a smart conservative broadcaster whose centerfold looks and lawyer's instinct have made her pretty popular (and she is receiving an enormous amount of sexist shit right now)and Erickson, an influential conservative blogger who is nobody's idea of a champion of political correctness, might as well be a born-again social justice warrior in the eyes of some Trump folks.

Well, um. That escalated quickly.

But the result is, Trump gets talked about incessantly--again. He's, as the Charlie Sheen Hashtag put it #winning. Or maybe, a little bit more appropriately, as the old journalism saw says--"If it bleeds, it leads." I wonder if, anticipating that this is what Trump-style means to political news, it was this, and not Trump's prompting, that made former Mayor Giuliani (allegedly)contact Fox to request gentler treatment for The Donald.

It also makes me wonder a little bit about that call that was supposed to have taken place between Trump and Bill Clinton. I wasn't sure what to think about that before. I still don't exactly know. But I wonder if ol' Bill didn't tell him, "You may not be the leader that the GOP needs right now, but you sure are the leader they deserve." And then he hung up. Then he laughed.

2 comments:

Formerly Amherst said...

Salutations, Vicky Vixen,
I have come to think of myself as a conservative, independent victim. Victim of the banality of the political process. As far as I'm concerned, whether you are talking about Trump or Bernie Sanders, it's simply a demonstration that government doesn't work.

In Switzerland their government is so stable that it is not uncommon for citizens not to even know who their president is. It is not because they are low-information voters. The system is so stable that people can rely on the rules for years to come. The taxes are not going to change. Their banking practices will not change. Their position relative to other countries is not going to change.

As a consequence, while we live in chaos, they live in stability. It must be nice.

The only other observation I will make is that it is a shame that listening to all this banality has become a substitute for an intellectual life. Apparently, people who wish to concern themselves with something that is not on TMZ like to think about the soap opera that is our political process.

You know, V. S. Naipaul once said that the reason South American has so much poitical instability is because they do not have an intellectual life. If people are glued to this soap opera that is largely imposed on us because of technological advances and what has been referred to as screen suck, our national intellectual life has become the equivalent of True Confessions magazine. In our parents' day, popular media was something like Look and Life magazines. They regularly had articles by such people as Hemingway, Paul Tillich, major scientists, etc. So the average person who wanted to be up to date had to read something besides drivel.

Naturally, this is all part of the descent of Kali Yuga. Our noses stay continually stuck in the muck like a black magic mantra, and so the possibilities of moving beyond materialism are few.

Approximation Prophet said...

No I think the problem just might be that equating Sanders and Trump doesn't set off blaring air raid sirens in your brain, and the millions of Republicans who dont even give it more than a millisecond of thought. So no sir, I blame you, you voted for these monsters who built a monster by whipping up the rubes with cries of fags! Abortions! And taxes! Who are now surprised the monster is turning on them. You enabled this. You sir, not liberals.

So I'm glad you're thinking, but kindly f off.

Sanders = Trump? There's the root of your problem there.

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