In case you missed it – NPR essentially was bribed to do positive cover of Obama’s Iran Deal. Point to really understand: the MSM is venal. And don’t be thinking that this is a new development – the press has always been bought by someone. It just used to be that all sides of the debate had purchased media outlets to get their story out. Round about 80 years ago, that ceased and the press generally remained bought by the liberal side. The people in the MSM are not Tribunes of the people, nor purveyors of truth…and it is worse these days because most of the people running the show are ignorant (and I mean that – as in they don’t have the foggiest notion of what they’re actually talking about) and merely regurgitate talking points provided to them by political operatives. There are a few shining exceptions but even in such cases, take what they say with a grain of salt because you never know how much the over-arching Narrative has penetrated their thinking and thus prevents them from looking at the facts from a different point of view.
Related: Katie Couric, caught red-handed lying in her “documentary” about firearms, semi-confesses to her lie.
Glenn Reynolds: Trump is the response to political correctness gone wild.
Related: Victor Davis Hanson –
So how did a blond comb-over real-estate dealer destroy an impressive and decent Republican field and find himself near dead even with Hillary Clinton — to the complete astonishment, and later fury, of the Washington establishment? Simply because lots of people have become exhausted by political and media elites who have thought very highly of themselves — but on what grounds it has become increasingly impossible to figure out.
And to complete a Trump trifecta for today – Yes, Trump Can win.
And if you really want to depress your Democrat friends, note that the back-up plan if Hillary flames out is Biden-Warren.
EU goes after “illegal, online hate speech”. You might think this means they’ll be going after neo-Nazis, racists and assorted hate-mongers…but my experience on Twitter, at least, tells me that such groups are allowed to spew all the hate they want. But, try to point out that, just perhaps, Progressive SJW’s are not 100% correct and you’ll get in trouble. There’s a reason for this – and I figured it out when the ACLU went to bat for the Nazis in Skokie but never seems to go to bat for the free exercise of Christians…Nazis pose no threat to the power of the left, Christians do.
Blogs For Victory 
Let me see if I ‘ve got this right.
The Republican Party tells us to vote for a man who has been rejected by something like 60% of Republican primary voters, who has included in his campaign a promise that he will assume the duties of Congress by continuing the practice of President Obama in simply ruling by presidential fiat if Congress will not vote the way he wants it to vote. When a highly respected conservative author asks what seems to me to be a very legitimate question—-“What can we do if this man IS elected and then does what he said he would do, and takes over the role of Congress?”—-the show on which he posed this question is removed from the airwaves.
For someone who has run on the fantasy of being “anti-Establishment” Trump sure has a lot of powerful friends in high places, watching his back and making sure inconvenient questions like this are silenced. The media have gotten Trump as far as he is so far, and the last thing they can risk is someone starting to ask what we can do if we really do end up electing a tyrant who, after all, has run on the promise of becoming a tyrant. Oh, there is the disclaimer that the questions posed were really an incitement to assassination, but that’s so thin and transparent it is laughable.
What happened? Well, author Brad Thor, who might not appeal to Trumpbots because he speaks in actual coherent sentences which represent actual coherent ideas, was on the Glenn Beck show. Speaking of the problems America might face if we elect Trump—problems which, by the way, are nearly identical to problems arising from a Clinton or Sanders presidency—-Thor said:
“With the feckless, spineless Congress we have, who will stand in the way of Donald Trump overstepping his constitutional authority as president?” Thor asked. “If Congress won’t remove him from office, what patriot will step up and do that if, if, he oversteps his mandate as president, his constitution-mandated authority as president, I should say.”
“If he oversteps that, how do we get him out of office?” he continued. “And I don’t think there is a legal means available. I think it will be a terrible, terrible position the American people will be in to get Trump out of office, because you won’t be able to do it through Congress.”
Ooooh! You could almost hear the shivers of dread running down the spines of the Establishment, which has after all promoted Trump, undermined his opposition, and raised him to his current heights. All the sock puppets who have rushed out to assure us that when Trump said he would rule by Executive Order if Congress wouldn’t give him his way he didn’t really mean it and we should forget he ever slipped up and blurted it out are rattled. This is the last thing they want Americans to think about. What to do? What to do?
Obviously, the first thing to do is silence this voice. The next thing is to make it clear that there are penalties for allowing such ideas to be spoken. So the show on which Thor made these comments is shut down, at least for a while. A little damage control is attempted by claiming that the comment was really a statement that we might have to kill Trump if Congress won’t do its job.
Does it matter that Thor has asked us all to pray for Trump’s safety? Hey, when you control the media you control what people are told, which is how you control how they think. Just ask Lenin and Stalin.
“What happens if a president suspends the Constitution and Congress does nothing?” Thor asked. “Safeguarding the Republic against despotism is a topic of conversation that dates back to the Founders.”
Well, I suggest that these are questions Americans should be asking NOW, in large and vocal numbers, while the GOP tries to railroad their pet through the nomination process against the will of so many of its members in the hopes of getting him into the White House.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/05/31/siriusxm-temporarily-suspends-glenn-beck-over-brad-thors-controversial-comments-about-trump/
Last week I posed the question of how a Biden candidacy would affect the election. I think it would sway it very very strongly toward the Dems. Biden is pretty well-liked, is seen as inoffensive and a good guy, and his negatives seem to be associated with some gaffes that seem, in retrospect, to be totally insignificant when compared to the Gaffemeister Trump. I think Biden would be a lot more acceptable to the #NeverTrump crowd than Hillary.
In other words, given the overwhelming negativity of a Trump candidacy, which now seems to be wholly dependent not on people thinking he would be a good president but merely on Hillary being so much worse, a switch from the Hildebeast to Uncle Joe might kill off GOP hopes for a win.
When your strategy is not to run the best candidate you have who can win on merit but to support a poor candidate and hope the other side’s choice is even worse, you are in a very vulnerable position.
Biden is more popular – and he does go for the throat…and, like Trump, he’ll just make up whatever is necessary during a debate (one might recall in 2008 how he claimed in debate that we and France had teamed up to force Hezbollah out of Lebanon…which would be news to both France and Hezbollah, which is all over Lebanon).
But, in the end, it would be another set of worn-out, has-been politicians trying to stop a Trump tornado. I still rate Hillary as the likely next President, but only barely…and if she does win, it’ll be by the skin of her teeth (latest aggregate disapproval ratings has her only slightly more unpopular than Trump). And Trump is going to be Trump all over the place in the Fall campaign.
And this is why I keep wondering why the GOP is still pushing for a Trump nomination.
Last week I started an email to a state GOP officer and it got cut short and sent before it was finished when the Ctrl key on my keyboard got stuck. I didn’t realize what was happening when my computer stopped responding, and by the time I figured it out I had sent all sorts of commands to the computer, which was very confused. In the meantime I got an irritated response from the man who was reacting to a very oddly phrased partial inquiry.
I finally got a whole question formulated and sent to him, and the basis of it is why didn’t the GOP step in early in the campaign and more to the point why, when Trump was misstating the importance and significance of the primary results and proclaiming himself to BE the nominee didn’t the GOP step in and mildly correct him every now and then, pointing out the reality of the process, to give itself the wiggle room to choose someone else if by the time we get to the convention Trump is clearly an even worse choice than we think.
I don’t know if this inaction was due to confusion, being dazzled by the machine-gun fire of Trump proclamations, internal dithering about how to handle him or what, or if Trump was always the candidate the GOP wanted and the whole process had been slanted toward that end. All I know is that the GOP is in a corner now, for whatever reason, and may very well be stuck with Trump, who is not the serious candidate and threat to a Dem victory that the media have been telling us.
Right now the ONLY way the GOP can survive is if, (1) Trump manages to win, and (2) the party beats him up enough and backs Congress enough if Congress finds the will to try to restrain him, so his presidency is not a complete disaster. It will be a sleazy reality show writ large, with massive floods of Twitter one-word schoolyard taunts and the whole Trump glitz and glitter and low-class strutting and bragging we have already seen from him, but with resolve and commitment he might possibly be held in check enough to do little harm.
That is a big challenge for the GOP, and a GOP with Trump as its de facto head is not going to be the GOP it is even now. The party has rolled the dice with Trump and now finds itself in a no-win situation, unless it can accomplish the political equivalent of drawing to an inside straight. If Trump loses, the party will see upheaval that will destroy it as it is now—-either mass defections of its base or an internal revolution that will completely restructure it, but either way I don’t see any of its current administration remaining. If the party finally finds a backbone and nominates someone other than Trump and he mounts his own spoiler campaign, the party will be to blame for waiting so long to act and encouraging him and his disciples by pretending to support him and then stabbing him, and them, in the back. If the party nominates someone else who loses without a third party bleed-off of support, it will be on the party’s head for being so disorganized, chaotic, rudderless and incompetent in waiting so long to finally act.
I am absolutely baffled by the GOP. It is as if it has been playing Russian Roulette with a loaded shell in every chamber.
I think they are just unsure of what to do – or, were unsure until a few weeks ago when major GOPers started to fall in line; but even then, they only fell in line because they don’t know what to do.
The whole problem with the overall GOP leadership is that it doesn’t know what it wants to do – it has no plan. People without plans will always be blindsided by people with plans (and holding on to power, as such, isn’t a plan; it’s a reaction…and if you’re reacting, you’re losing). I’ve said since almost the beginning of this, that Trump has a plan – and he’s executing it flawlessly. That it is a con job on a lot of levels isn’t the point – the point is he knows where he wants to go and has worked out the method of getting there. The reason I think he can beat Hillary (like Trende, I make it out – at the moment – at about a 30% chance) is because I strongly suspect Hillary has no plan…if she had a plan, then an ancient hippy Socialist wouldn’t be on her back on June 1st. I figure that Hillary thought she just had it in the bag – both the nomination and the White House. Since Bernie rose and started to challenge her coronation – and recent polling started showing, at best, that she’s tied with Trump or only millimeters ahead – she’s flummoxed. I don’t think the FBI investigation is doing this to her (she’s used to such things and still – correctly – counts on her cronies to bail her out of it): I think she just doesn’t know what to do. It wasn’t supposed to be this way…I also have long felt she’s not very bright and thus simply doesn’t know how to adjust to rapidly changing circumstances. Trump is clearly a master at improvisation – he can wobble around and deliver a roundhouse in response to any trouble…while still keeping to his basic plan.
If we Conservatives want to survive all this (Hillary or Trump as President) then we’d better come up with a plan.
“I think they are just unsure of what to do..”
That’s what I thought, too, till the GOP itself started to make noises about Trump being its nominee, about supporting him. For a while there were meek little murmurings from back corners about how the party makes the rules, the party chooses the nominee, but then that all fell silent and all of a sudden the whole GOP was backing Trump and going along with the lie that the nomination was his because of the number of delegates he had lined up in the primaries.
So if we look at the two most likely scenarios—that the GOP was just flummoxed, outfoxed, stumbling over its own feet, rudderless, or that it always wanted Trump (or even anyone but Cruz and would settle for Trump) and led the whole process toward this end—-neither one of them paints a picture of a party that I trust, respect, admire, or want to be a part of.
If the whisperings were true, that Jeb was the guy the party really wanted, then the stage was set. All they had to do was let Trump annoy and alienate more and more people, stand back without offering any support for him whatsoever, let their minions know they had to keep their mouths shut and not endorse him, and then nominate Jeb at the convention as a reasonable alternative to Trump. The fact that this apparently was never a consideration tells me that they were never all that committed to Jeb.
Or anyone else, for that matter. The simple fact is, the party has finally openly rallied behind a man rejected by about 60% of Republican voters, a man so toxic that many staunch conservatives can’t even consider voting for him, a man whose campaign has included many policies and agendas that are absolutely contrary to the conservative concept of governance. I’m not sure this can be explained solely by saying the party was “unsure of what to do” and then blindsided till it had to fall in line.
Now I am just a retired rancher out here in Flyover Country, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and I could see what was going on. Are we supposed to believe that people whose lives and careers ARE politics couldn’t see the same things? I’m not buying it. I think that whatever is happening includes at least two factors. One is that it is what the GOP has wanted to happen, for whatever reason, and the other is that they are counting on the outrage and resentment just fading away so they can go back to business as usual, with their guy running the party.
They might get Trump, and who knows, they might even get a President Trump, but they are wrong on the second count, and they will never recover from the surging antagonism toward them and what they are pulling.
If we Conservatives want to survive all this (Hillary or Trump as President) then we’d better come up with a plan.
One possibility would be a new party, or a merger with the Constitutional Party, and a buildup of the party while still voting for Republicans to avoid losing House and Senate seats and governorships. If I were to have anything to say about this, I would work on the state level, running candidates under that party name or, alternatively, Republican candidates chosen by that party and openly supported by that party, to build it up from the ground up. With a President Clinton the new party would have a large number of immediate members, as people disgusted with the ineptness and impotence of the GOP would flee en masse to a more desirable alternative. With a President Trump, the move would be more gradual, as his successive excesses, failures, embarrassments and general idiocracy would drive people away from the responsible party.
There is the alternative of an intra-party revolt, which also has a lot of promise, as it would not split tickets at elections and would retain party majorities in Congress, while purging the party of the hacks, the Leftists, and the elite sell-outs. This would probably be the more productive route, as it would allow for the leadership of Cruz and Lee and Gardner and other true conservatives, and would be less disruptive to the movement and offer fewer benefits to the opposition.
But the one glaring thing that simply will not go away is the belief that there WILL be a revolt, and it will make the TEA Party look, well, like a tea party. Sadly, it will have to take place around the battered body, if not the corpse, of a constitutional America.
I am voting, twice here in NC due to Democratic contests against primary voting, and still not sure if I am I am voting top of the ticket. Right now I see two candidates that have proven records of nothing less than maleficence and one that is a megalomaniac.
I will not be voting the lesser of two evils again–so there is a chance I will not be voting top of the ticket. Never left it blank before but never had I faced a “choice” like this. Third party is out of the question as well.
I will vote for Trump because that is the name at the top of the ticket that means there will be at least a CHANCE of a decent Supreme Court justice or two. With a President Clinton there is no chance at all. That is the only thing that that can force me to cast a vote for the gilded toad. I will send money directly to Republican Senate hopefuls and some House races that look like they need help, I will personally campaign against Michael Bennett here in Colorado, and when I am contacted by the GOP I will make it clear to them that when it became the Trump Party it lost my support.
I still have to decide if I am going to take the satisfaction of quitting the party and adding to the growth of the Libertarian Party—though its recent antics make it less attractive than it has been—or the Constitutional Party, or stay in the GOP and fight it from within.
The GOP doesn’t encourage feedback from the footsoldiers, but I took a chance on an email address of r.priebus@gop.com and my email hasn’t been returned as undeliverable.
I think we need to stop talking to each other and start talking to the people at the top.
“Point to really understand: the MSM is venal.”
Which is why I don’t refer to them as the Mainstream Media but the Complicit Agenda Media. They are not just “mainstream”, they are activists for the Left.
Yeah, what he says:
http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/an-open-letter-to-the-libertarian-party-i-really-tried-to-take-you-seriously-for-about-a-week/