Victor Davis Hanson writes: After the election, Democrats could not explain the inexplicable defeat of Hillary Clinton, who would be, they thought, the shoo-in winner in November. Over the next three months until Inauguration Day, progressives floated a variety of explanations for the Trump win—none of them, though, mentioned that the Clinton campaign had proven uninspired, tactically inept, and never voiced a message designed to appeal to the working classes.
When a particular exegesis of defeat failed to catch on, it was mostly dropped—and then replaced by a new narrative. We were told that the Electoral College wrongly nullified the popular vote—and that electors had a duty to renege on their obligations to vote for their respective state’s presidential winner.
“Fake news is something quite different. It is not merely a public figure’s spinning of half-truths. It is largely a media-driven, and deliberate attempt to spread a false narrative to advance a political agenda that otherwise would be rejected by a common-sense public.”
Then followed the narrative of Trump’s racist dog-whistle appeals to the white working classes. When it was reported that Barack Obama had received a greater percentage of the white votes than did either John Kerry in 2004 or Hillary Clinton in 2016, the complaint of white chauvinism too faded.
“The methodology is to manufacture a narrative attractive to a herd-like progressive media that will then devour and brand it as fact—and even lobby for government redress.”
Then came the allegation that FBI Director James Comey had given the election to Trump by reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails just days before Election Day. That fable too evaporated when it was acknowledged that Comey had earlier intervened to declare Clinton without culpability and would so again before November 8.
Then came the trope that Vladimir Putin’s hackers stole the election—on the theory that the Wikileaks revelations had turned off the electorate in a way the Clinton candidacy otherwise would not have. That storyline then evolved into the idea of Russian propagandists and Trump supporters variously peddling “fake news” to websites to promulgate myths and distortions—as a grand plan to Hillary Clinton and give Trump the election.
More specifically, it was alleged that Trump’s exaggerations and fabrications—from his allegations about Barack Obama’s birth certificate to rumor-mongering about Ted Cruz’s father—had so imperiled journalism that the media in general was forced to pronounce there was no longer a need to adhere to disinterested reporting in the traditional sense.
“No one has described the methodology of fake news better than Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security advisor for Barack Obama and brother of the president of CBS News, David Rhodes.”
The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour confessed that they could not be fair in reporting the news in the era of Donald Trump. Apparently, being fair had become tantamount to being a co-conspirator in Trump falsity. The New York Times in a post-election op-ed explained why it had missed the Trump phenomenon, admitting, but not necessarily lamenting, that its own coverage of the election had not been fair and balanced.
“Ben Rhodes cynically bragged about how the Obama administration had sold the dubious Iran deal through misinformation picked up by an adolescent but sympathetic media (for which Rhodes had only contempt).
Yet all politicians fib and distort the truth—and they’ve been doing so since the freewheeling days of the Athenian ekklesia. Trump’s various bombastic allegations and claims fall into the same realm of truthfulness as Obama’s statement “if you like your health plan, you can keep it”—and were thus similarly cross-examined by the media.
“As Rhodes put it, ‘The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.’”
Yet fake news is something quite different. It is not merely a public figure’s spinning of half-truths. It is largely a media-driven, and deliberate attempt to spread a false narrative to advance a political agenda that otherwise would be rejected by a common-sense public. The methodology is to manufacture a narrative attractive to a herd-like progressive media that will then devour and brand it as fact—and even lobby for government redress.
Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen has never been to Prague to negotiate quid pro quo deals with the Russians. Trump did not watch Russian strippers perform pornographic acts in the bedroom that Barack Obama once stayed in during a visit to Moscow. Yet political operatives, journalists, and even intelligence officers, in their respective shared antipathy to Trump, managed to lodge these narratives into the public consciousness and thereby establish the “truth” that a degenerate Trump was also a Russian patsy.
No one has described the methodology of fake news better than Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security advisor for Barack Obama and brother of the president of CBS News, David Rhodes. Read the rest of this entry »
Only three presidents scored worse than Obama since Gallup started doing these surveys in 1945.
As President Obama left the White House, the mainstream press was falling over itself proclaiming how popular he was.
“Obama leaving office on a very high note,” was a typical headline.
Yet despite the media’s fixation with polls, the press completely buried one of the more newsworthy poll findings — a Gallup report that came out last Friday, which took a final look at the President Obama’s popularity over his eight years in office.
“Obama even did worse overall than Richard Nixon, whose average approval was 49%, and was less popular overall than George W. Bush, who got an average 49.4%.”
That poll found that Obama’s overall average approval rating was a dismal 47.9%.
Only three presidents scored worse than Obama since Gallup started doing these surveys in 1945: never-elected Gerald Ford (47.2%), one-termer Jimmy Carter (45.4%), and Harry Truman (45.4%).
Obama even did worse overall than Richard Nixon, whose average approval was 49%, and was less popular overall than George W. Bush, who got an average 49.4%.
That sounds newsworthy, doesn’t it? But you’d never know this if you relied on the mainstream press for information. That’s because not one of them reported on Gallup’s finding. Read the rest of this entry »
That puts him behind Richard Nixon, who resigned, and George W. Bush, who saw his approval rating drop as low as 25 percent near the end of his term.
“Obama’s approval ratings also fell to 38% in September 2014, shortly after the Islamic State terrorist group released videos showing the beheadings of U.S. journalists captured overseas.”
Gallup, in an analysis released Friday, published the average approval rating for all twelve presidents who have served since World War II.
“After his first year he received sustained majority approval only once more during his first term in office. Fortunately for him, that came during his 16th quarter in office — around the time he was re-elected in the fall of 2012.”
John F. Kennedy ranks highest with an average approval rating of 70.1 percent. He is followed by Dwight Eisenhower (65.0 percent), George H.W. Bush (60.9 percent), Bill Clinton (55.1 percent), Lyndon Johnson (55.1 percent), Ronald Reagan (52.8 percent), George W. Bush (49.4 percent), Barack Obama (47.9 percent), Gerald Ford (47.2 percent), Jimmy Carter (45.5 percent) and Harry Truman (45.4 percent). Read the rest of this entry »
As Barack Obama bids farewell to his presidency, keep in mind these five scary powers that President Trump will inherit from him.
Remember when those pesky other branches of government wouldn’t bow down to Obama’s whims, and the president famously bragged about going it alone? Now Obama’s out and it will soon be Donald Trump wielding his pen and phone.
As Barack Obama bids farewell to his presidency this week, keep in mind these five scary powers that President Trump will inherit from him.
1. War Without Congress
During the Libya intervention, Obama decided that he didn’t need Congress to approve massive bombing campaigns and regime change.
Obama has done legal gymnastics to justify using the same authorizations that George W. Bush got to fight al Qaeda and the Taliban to send our armed forces to places like West Africa, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria —not to mention staying in Pakistan and Afghanistan and going back to Iraq—all without Congress.
So if the Mexicans won’t pay for his wall, President Trump could just as well decide to bomb them.
2. Kill Lists
Obama made up his own rules on targeted killings, denying that courts could review his “kill list” and only paying lip service to drone guidelines when he thought Mitt Romney might win in 2012. That never actually happened, and even in his last months in office, Obama has continued to expand the reach of our flying robots and special operations forces.
In the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency, the U.S. dropped 26,171 bombs in seven countries.
So President Trump can now vaporize any person he puts on his kill list, even American citizens, even outside of acknowledged battlefields, even if civilians die—all without due process.
3. Access to All of Your Information
Obama expanded the powers of secret courts that provide little more than a rubber-stamp for mass surveillance of Americans.
He supports weakening encryption, general warrants that cover millions of people, and a host of powers with the ultimate goal of giving spooks what the NSA has called “Total Information Awareness“—access to your every word, move, purchase, and relationship, all without your knowledge.
Orwell would have been impressed, and Trump certainly will be.
4. Prosecuting Whistleblowers and Journalists
The leader of the self-anointed “most transparent administration” in history has prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all other presidents in history, put together. His administration exploded the number of classified documents and fought the ACLU and New York Times in court to keep its legal interpretations secret.
Oh, and Obama’s Justice Department spied on journalists and investigated them as co-conspirators.
Based on what Trump thinks of the media, reporters should take care not to violate any secret laws going forward, especially in secret drone zones.
5. Screwing Immigrants
Many undocumented immigrants trusted Obama with their personal information in exchange for his promise not to deport them. That may have been a huge mistake. First off, he’s deported more people than any president in history, so that should have been a red flag. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s either that or the Magical Intersectional Muslim Transwomen Coalition.
Daniel Greenfield writes: After a competitive race between the FBI and sexism, the left decided to blame “white people” for Hillary’s defeat.
Racist white people refused to vote for a white woman who was married to the country’s first black president. Samantha Bee, who enjoyed 15 seconds of fame replacing John Oliver, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart as the whiny obnoxious lefty id, declared that white people ruined America.
“Spare me the euphemisms. White people made Trump president,” a Washington Postheadline blared. “White people did this. And maybe (hopefully) not my friends — but certainly their cousins, their uncles, and their friends,” a racist Vox writer shrieked.
“White people elected Donald Trump,” Vice bleated. “White people put Trump in office,” Fusion whined.
Majorities of white people did indeed vote for Donald Trump. Oddly enough the left’s culture war of hating white people has only made them more likely to vote for anyone other than the left.
Funny how that works.
Trump won by boosting margins and turnout among working class white voters. The same group that the left trashes in its tirades about “white people”. When Samantha Bee says that white people ruined America, she isn’t talking about herself or the white hipsters sharing her videos on social media. We all know it means the bad kind of white people who shop at Walmart instead of Whole Foods, who drink Pabst unironically, who don’t listen to TED talks or own their privilege, who didn’t graduate from Amherst or from any college, but who fly American flags, drive pickup trucks and serve in the military.
A whole lot of those folks used to vote Democrat. Some kept on voting that way until fairly recently.
But the left grabbed the wheel of the Democrat Party, shoved the white working class out the door and replaced it with a glittery rainbow coalition of illegal aliens, Muslims and transgender activists who lost the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and all but a handful of state legislatures.
Forget losing the South. That’s old news. Republicans won Pennsylvania and have the biggest legislative dominance since Eisenhower. Trump came the closest since Nixon to taking Minnesota and Republicans now have a state senate majority. Do we really need to talk about Wisconsin, Ohio or Michigan?
What happened?
White men were racist and sexist. The white men who had voted for Obama but switched to Trump were more sexist than racist. The white women who voted for Trump over Hillary were, in the words of Hillary’s communications director, suffering from “internalized misogyny”.
Or maybe they just didn’t like being hated. Here’s what the left’s social justice politics had to offer them.
“White Women Failed Hillary Clinton. They Also Failed Other Women”, “White Women Sent a Terrible Message on Tuesday”, “Blame White Women for Country’s Failure to Shatter Glass Ceiling” and “White Women Sold Out the Sisterhood and the World”. Maybe even the galaxy and the universe.
The latter article whined that, “Most white women don’t want to be part of an intersectional feminist sisterhood” because they “identify more with white men than they do with black women, Latina women, Muslim women, transwomen” and defected from “the coalition of nonwhite, nonstraight, nonmale voters who were supposed to carry Clinton to a comfortable victory”.
Why would they ever do that?
In that intersectional feminist sisterhood, white women occupy the lowest possible rung and are constantly denounced for their privilege. White feminism is a slur. Why didn’t white women want to stick around in the intersectional sisterhood where they can be inferior to Muslim nonstraight transwomen and fight for their right to blow themselves up in the ladies’ room of a Target? Read the rest of this entry »
The 35-year-old businesswoman and hotel heiress told the Australian Network, Ten’s The Project that she voted for the billionaire businessman over Hillary Clinton. She explained why.
A selection of interviews with libertarian thinkers, who say the billionaire bully might be better than Obama and Hillary on foreign policy, education, and more.
Since the election of Donald Trump, we’ve been talking to libertarian policy experts about what a Trump presidency will bring to health care, education, foreign policy, and the justice system. The people we talked to are Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, Lisa Graham Keegan, former head of education in Arizona, historian Thaddeus Russell, legal scholar Randy Barnett, and defense attorney and legal blogger Ken White of Popehat.
To our surprise, the mood is one of skeptical optimism. All agree that Trump is likely to hand off the details of policy and day-to-day operations to his cabinet secretaries and administrators. In many cases, those people are almost certain to be preferable to ones selected by Hillary Clinton. And even when when they are not, there’s reason to believe that a resurgent Congress and bureaucratic inertia will put a stop to Trump’s worst desires. Read the rest of this entry »
It was the only major public survey that consistently showed Donald Trump winning.
David Lauter reports: As election returns rolled in Tuesday night, the creator of the USC/Los Angeles Times Daybreak tracking poll was in Washington for a speaking engagement. He watched the results on television in a hotel bar, surrounded by about 20 drunken Danes who were in the capital to study the election.
“When you look at pundits and their predictions, the correlation is zero. You have to trust the numbers. Don’t get distracted by all the things you think about plausibility.”
“It was an odd experience,” Arie Kapteyn said Wednesday morning.
The same might be said of the furor that surrounded the Daybreak poll during the campaign. It was the only major public survey that consistently showed Donald Trump winning. As a result, it drew frequent and loud denunciations from many Democrats, especially as election day neared and passions rose.
“What you think personally doesn’t matter. I thought Clinton would win. But that shouldn’t change the numbers.”
But on Wednesday, as many other pollsters struggled to explain why their surveys seemed blind to Trump’s support, Kapteyn and his colleagues were among the few who could say their work got the basic issue right.
“To be honest, I was surprised.”
“To be honest, I was surprised,” said Kapteyn, a USC economist and expert on public opinion. Read the rest of this entry »
With all the attention on the leaked Colin Powell e-mails, Charles Krauthammer noted how the former secretary of state has been critical of both presidential candidates.
“Well he’s an equal-opportunity skeptic. He’s been near, particularly, to the Clintons, so he’s seen them in action. I can understand why he’d be particularly upset that he is dragged into this saga of e-mail, of cover-ups, of destroyed documents, and somehow associated with it in a very tenuous way by Clinton. And I can understand his resentment; it makes total sense.”
The number of Americans who view the former Secretary of State in a favorable light has plummeted and Clinton now faces record low poll numbers.
House Majority LeaderKevin McCarthy came under fire recently for comments the California Congressman made about Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers after the start of the House’s Benghazi panel.
“After once enjoying sky-high poll numbers as Secretary of State, scandals like Benghazi, revelations from WikiLeaks, and now multiple investigations into the legality of her email system have ravaged Clinton-she’s gone from favorably viewed and trusted as one of America’s most popular politicians to freefall, viewed skeptically and in an extremely untrustworthy light.”
He may have been forced to walk back those comments for needlessly politicizing a very serious investigation, but for those keeping score he may have been technically accurate.
The exact effect the Benghazi issue has had on Hillary isn’t fully clear, however, it is evident that Clinton’s approval rating has dramatically dropped since her time at the State Department- the number of Americans who view the former Secretary of State in a favorable light has plummeted and Clinton now faces record low poll numbers.
She is even underwater with female voters, with nearly 50% having a negative opinion of her.
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy said on Fox News. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened had we not fought.”
A recent Fox News poll illustrates Clinton’s problems.
“Hillary Clinton’s personal favorable ratings hit a low mark in the latest Fox News national poll…
Some 38 percent of voters view Clinton favorably, down from 45 percent in May. The downward shift comes from the fact that half of women now rate her negatively. Positive views among Democrats are also down since May (-11 points).”
Fox News Poll
Opinion Of Hillary Clinton
Now/ May Record High
Low 2015 August 2012
Favorable 38% 45% 63%
Unfavorable 56% 49% 31%
September 20-22, 2015
Registered Voters ± 3% Pts.
Fox News Poll
Opinion Of Hillary Clinton
May Record High
Now 2015 August 2012
Favorable 71% 82% 88%
Unfavorable 23% 12% 9%
September 20-22, 2015
Democratic Registered Voters ±5% Pts.
The Fox poll shows Clinton at a historic low.
“Overall, a record high 56 percent of voters now have an unfavorable opinion of Clinton….”
Clinton has been on a national roller coaster ride with her approval ratings ever since she first appeared as the feisty wife to then Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.
“She was actively involved in policy and the health care reform effort for her husband. And she came under fire in 1992 for stridently defending her own career, saying on 60 Minutes in 1992 that she wouldn’t be “some little woman standing by my husband like Tammy Wynette.” Read the rest of this entry »
Americans' daily coffee ritual... Come right into our friendly, rhythmic ambiance, It’s an enjoin where you can always explore our breakfast, brunch and coffee selections.