Sort of like opening Al Capone’s vault
Big deal turns out to be nothing.
[NOTE: The reference in the title is to this dud from Geraldo Rivera.]
[ADDENDUM II: For some weird reason I originally wrote “Jimmy Hoffa’s” in the title of the post instead of “Al Capone’s,” even though the link was clearly about Capone’s vault. I’ve corrected it.]
There’s a lesson in this for all of us. Don’t ever be so convinced of something that you stop thinking about it. If Donald Trump gets re-elected in 2020, there is no doubt it will be at least in part due to the near-infinite number of rakes his enemies stepped on because they were absolutely sure the cartoonish version of Trump they had in their heads was the real thing so it was okay to instantly believe ANYTHING bad about him.
Mike
MBunge:
Hey no fair!
You have just described a post I have already planned for tomorrow, something I just finished a draft of around 15 minutes ago.
Democrats in Congress:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WZLJpMOxS4
Serious thinkers are deeply concerned about this briefing and what wasn’t revealed. Troubling questions remain to be asked. /s
This is a crisis for Democrats. Their left wing has driven them so far left and into so many weird conspiracy theories, I see no solution for them. I will make a small wager that Hillary becomes the nominee again just to keep the party from flying apart. They have conceded the 2020 election already.
Would somebody please cue up sad trombone for the dems?
They keep trying but so far the sky does not fall on Trump. They seem to be stuck on the story of Chicken Little and can’t move on. Barr and Durham visiting Europeans is freaking them out so cue allegations against those gentlemen.
Do the Democrats by their dirt from Acme? meep meep
To hypocrites, like most Dems, “scandals” are only bad Rep actions.
If Dems do the crimes, they’re so minor as to be not even newsworthy.
But since Reps are evil, it’s OK to lie about what they did to make innocent actions appear to be crimes.
An IG report that doesn’t show Rep crimes is hardly worth even looking at, much less call it news.
What a sh*tshow for the Dems! I’m not seeing a way out of this for Speaker Pelosi, though McCarthy may have presented her with a lifeline.
neo:
Great minds, as they say.
I continue to be fascinated by the conscious and unconscious motivations behind Trump hate. Not that there aren’t plenty of legitimate issues of concern but there’s something deeper going on.
When comparing Trump-hate to Bush-hate, Bush-hate at least had a major world-shaking event to focus on.
And while Clinton-hate was bad and maybe at its peak as bad as Trump hate, that peak didn’t come until AFTER his enemies actually caught Clinton doing something.
I’m not old enough to remember Nixon-hate but, again, there was the Vietnam War going.
But take the worst criticism Bush or Clinton or Nixon ever got and it’s like Trump gets that every month, if not every week. And while social media can account for the omnipresence of that criticism, it doesn’t explain its vehemence.
As I mentioned here before, thinking badly of Trump in 2016 made sense. And some people’s opinion of Trump should deservedly be just as bad if not worse in 2019. But there’s a lot of people whose view of Trump should have improved over the last three years, even if only slightly, given how he’s actually performed as President and they’ve stubbornly refused to rethink or reconsider him at all.
There’s something non-rational causing that.
Mike
MBunge:
I think these are the reasons for the intensity.
(1) Social media plays a big part in amplifying it.
(2) The media was biased then but it is far more biased now and far more willing to lie.
(3) The left thought it was just about to win it all in 2016, and instead it was snatched away. And by “all” I don’t just mean that particular election. I mean becoming the dominant party forever.
(4) Nixon and Clinton and Bush were relatively conventional politicians in their history prior to becoming president. Same for Reagan, although less so. Reagan and Clinton and Bush had been governors prior to their elections, and Nixon had been a senator and then the VP for Eisenhower, who was popular with both sides. Therefore they were seen as within the typical type of person who had become president in the past—even Reagan, who had been an actor, served his apprenticeship as a bona fide governor. On the contrary, Trump did not.
(5) What’s more, Trump not only had never held public office, but he was a reality TV star and although a very successful man in real estate, he’d always been a publicity hound and something of a butt of jokes. The fact that he was now president was unconscionable in a way that felt different to them.
(6) Trump became president in an atmosphere that was already incredibly divisive and angry, and overtly so.
(7) In the time of the others, there was still a bipartisan basic respect for the Constitution and the government and the country’s welfare. That’s gone and has been for some time.
“…to keep the party from flying apart…”
Except that Hillary, having unleashed “the dogs of war” (as it were), is a major reason why the party has been “flying apart” in the first place.
(Though one certainly would not want to forget the Messiah, whose carefully cultivated a policy of—fundamentally—planting the “dragon teeth” of rampant partisanship and indiscriminate executive privilege….)
Oops:
“…who carefully cultivated…”
Let’s step way back and look at what the “job” of the mass media has been for the last century or so. Media people get much of their immense power by being the only practical way for high government officials to present information to the rest of us. But if the president has the talent to tweet out directly and pungently what he thinks and intends, who needs the mass media? This is a direct and profound — indeed job-killing — threat to an entire industry, and on some level everyone working in mass media instinctively realizes this and would sleep easier if Trump were out of office.
Fits right in with today’s Democrat hysteria–
See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/10/wow-woman-pushes-constituents-to-eat-the-babies-at-ocasio-cortez-town-hall-video/
AOC has been screaming that the “clock of DOOM” is ticking, we only have a few years left, and we need to take immediate and drastic, drastic steps, so here would be a fitting new campaign slogan:
“We haff to eat the babies.”
The babies didnt die until we burned up all our wood
considering, we ate her raw, she tasted pretty good
and the fascist health inspectors, dug us out and mailed us home
in a winter in the Colorado Rockies..
-Lemmings Broadways show that predicted your reality – Thanks john belushi
Chevy Chase sings “Colorado” – Early ’70s Singer-Songwriter Parody
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh5X5QWvXZk
Technically, the vault in question belonged to Al Capone, not Jimmy Hoffa.
I’m not old enough to remember Nixon-hate but, again, there was the Vietnam War going.
I am. Nixon was hated by the left, especially for his exposure of Alger Hiss as a communist agent. Then he defeated Helen Gahagan Douglas, LBJ’s paramour, in the 1950 Senate election calling her “The pink lady” implying she was a left winger. Then he almost beat Kennedy in 1960 in spite of vote fraud in Chicago and Texas.
Plus, of course the war, which he did not start.
I remember an old meme (pre-internet) circulating with a list of the perceptions of men vs. women in business, such as, “He is agressive; She is bitchy.”, etc.
The MSM is doing the same thing with Dems vs. Reps.
CJ; Matt Harris:
Indeed! Will fix.
You don’t need a weird reason Neo. Your material is amazingly accurate.
The respect of Dems for Reps has been going down along with the discrimination against hiring Reps as professors in academia.
We will NOT get a lot less polarization until that is fixed. Necessary; probably not sufficient, altho it probably only happens with other things. Like a big Rep victory in 2020 in the House and a lot of clear laws against discrimination, in effect, based on political positions — for any org receiving Fed money; loans, grants, contracts. (Virtually all colleges, except maybe Hillsdale.)
Your fix from Jimmy Hoffa (whose body was maybe not really found in Detroit) is good, now it’s a big dud, from big Al Capone.