The New Neo

Trump on the ropes

Posted on October 18, 2016 by neoOctober 18, 2016

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think that Trump’s chances of winning the presidency—never very good in the first place—are now vanishingly small. Here’s someone who agrees, and has this observation to make:

When a man whose entire candidacy and public standing is predicated on the myth that he is a winner has to face in every single moment a reminder that he is going to face one of the biggest, most humiliating losses in presidential history on the biggest stage imaginable, you better believe he will lash out. We cannot predict exactly the manner it will play out, but we have seen the embers already and they are ugly.

Well, yes. But that leaves out an important point, which is that this behavior is not new for Trump. And he’s not lashing out because he perceives he’s losing. In fact, I’m not even sure whether he does perceive he’s losing, because his narcissism may protect him from considering that possibility, and he will blame others rather than himself if it does happen.

As will many of his most fervent followers.

However, in addition to basing his candidacy on “being a winner,” he has also based it on his propensity to lash out. So of course, now that he is under greater stress in the stretch, that behavior is increasing. It’s what he knows, what he does, and what has given him his well-deserved reputation as a fighter. Many of his supporters very much like that about him: “He doesn’t play by those Marquess of Queensbury rules.”

No, he doesn’t. And one thing that article didn’t mention is the fact that one of the people Trump is lashing out at most vociferously and most often these days seems to be Paul Ryan. For example, this interview of Trump’s combines his dissing Ryan with an emphasis on knowing or not knowing “how to win,” and an assertion that he—Trump—will win (it was immediately preceded by Trump’s statement “Well, I don’t want to be knocking Paul Ryan…”):

When asked by ABC News’ Tom Llamas before a campaign event tonight in Green Bay, Wisconsin, whether he believed Ryan wanted him to win the race to the White House, Trump responded, “Well, maybe not, because maybe he wants to run in four years or maybe he doesn’t know how to win.”

“Maybe just doesn’t know how to win. I mean, who can really know. But I know I’m in his territory and they are all screaming for Trump,” Trump said, referring to the fact that his campaign event was in Ryan’s home state. “The head of the [state] Republican Party just left me. He shook my hand. He says, ‘You are gonna win Wisconsin.’ And I know one thing, we are gonna do very well here.”

Earlier, Trump “had called Ryan a ‘very weak and ineffective leader’ and claimed ‘there’s a whole sinister deal going on’ with Ryan and the Republican establishment.” It’s been a theme of Trump’s right along to criticize Republicans nearly as much as he has Democrats (maybe, at times, even more), and it’s one of his appeals to many of his supporters angry at the GOP and angry at anyone who doesn’t get on board the Trump train.

But here are my questions: if Trump really expects to become president (and let’s say he does), why would he want to lessen the number of Republicans in Congress? Why would he want to offend and alienate them? Does he not think he will need their help once he got in office? Does he think it would be easier to work with Democrats than Republicans? Or does he plan to circumvent Congress?

Or does he think about any of these things at all?

The brilliantly orchestrated news drop

Posted on October 17, 2016 by neoOctober 17, 2016

Here’s a piece about how brilliantly orchestrated the “Trump the sexual harasser” news drop was.

A careful drip, drip, and then a flood.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the right could learn how to do this? There’s a little problem, though: the whole thing must be coordinated with a cooperative and willing press. For the right, most of the time (or perhaps all of the time), even bigger news can’t get traction because instead of spreading the news, the press stifles it.

That is quite the uneven playing field. And yet—unless the right can come up with better alternative news sources, and plenty of them, and do it quickly—that is the playing field we’ve got.

And here’s an interesting piece about what we’ve learned from Trump’s campaign, although I can’t say I agree with everything in it. I object in particular to this, at least in part:

One huge advantage held by professional politicians is that they’ve already been vetted, faced opposition research. Trump, despite having been a public figure for more than 30 years, never faced the same scrutiny, as we learned in the dizzying final weeks of the campaign. Why? Because it was never in anyone’s direct interest to take him on. If he had run for any significant lower office, the resources of a political party would have been focused on destroying him by digging up dirt from his past. Any public figure with skeletons in his closet should assume they will be not only found but fetishized.

There’s certainly a general truth to the fact that a professional has usually been fully vetted. But for Trump, it isn’t relevant, because as a public figure for many decades, for Trump all the information was out there. No, we didn’t have that Billy Bush tape, but we already had its equivalent (or even worse), and it was all just out there to be easily obtained by Googling or reading a basic biography. I did it; anyone could have done it, too. I wouldn’t even dignify it with the word “vetting.” It required minimal effort, and there was such an embarrassment of riches that it was impossible to cover it all.

The press could have easily done it. Candidates could have easily done it. The latter were afraid to do it—as I mentioned two days ago—because they thought they could wait for the other candidates to drop out first, and they didn’t want to draw Trump’s considerable fire prematurely.

This is not 20/20 hindsight on my part. I wrote about the phenomenon in January of 2016:

Commenter “Wooly Bully” said that “Trump has a very large closet that holds many skeletons.”

I don’t know about Trump’s closet; the phrase usually refers to something heretofore hidden.

The thing that strikes me about Trump is that a great deal of his bad behavior is out in the open, fully accessible. And his behavior had been very bad. I don’t mean things like infidelities, although that’s certainly part of his past. I mean things that are directly relevant to his ability to govern.

The material is fully accessible, as I said””I’ve encountered quite a bit of it, and probably only the tip of the iceberg, because prior to this campaign I’ve never had the slightest interest in Trump’s biography. But it’s right there in public, in terms of articles and books. However, it’s not common knowledge to most people…

This information is all in the public domain, and so far his opposition isn’t using it. Perhaps his GOP opponents haven’t used it so far because they thought he’d fade on his own. Or each one of them didn’t want to become his special target. Or they thought they could attack him on his politics. That hasn’t seemed to work so far. But it seems to me that, if a guy is making a lot of promises to you, and telling you what a great negotiator and dealmaker he is, and that’s why you should elect him””he’s a doer who does great things””you’d do well to look at some of his deals that went bad, his behavior during them, and the consequences. If he’s a liar, he might just be lying to you.

One thing I think we can safely say is that the Democrats will use this stuff against Trump if he is the nominee…

In that piece I focused on Trump’s behavior in Scotland when building his resort and predicted that the Democrats would use this line of attack in the general, pointing out his anti-common-man and elitist stance there. Although I was wrong about that—it turns out that the Democrats haven’t needed to use it because they found other avenues that give them more bang for their buck—I certainly expected many other lines of attack from them, as well. Many. The two they seem to have fastened on have been the sexual stuff and the idea that Trump is a loose cannon who might start a nuclear war.

[ADDENDUM: In terms of a successful news drop by the right, I recall the Swift Vets in 2004. I don’t have time to go back and look at all the sources right now and link to them, but to the best of my recollection the Vets tried to get their story out to the press in a press conference and with press releases, and it was barely covered initially. That’s why they ended up putting out a book and some ads, in an attempt to get past the press. The press reacted by smearing them (as of course did the Democrats) and trying to debunk them. But it didn’t quite work; the Swift Vets are considered to have been at least somewhat instrumental in Kerry’s defeat. It helped that Kerry was such a terrible candidate, and that he had relied so strongly on his military history in promoting himself.]

“Cornhead” endorses Trump

Posted on October 17, 2016 by neoOctober 17, 2016

You can read what he has to say at his blog.

Those of you who read the comments here already know much about Cornhead’s thinking on the 2016 race. But he lays it all out in that post, which begins:

I am confident that I am the only person in America who has personally seen Hillary Clinton six times, Donald Trump five times, Bill Clinton twice and Chelsea Clinton once at campaign rallies.

Well, maybe not the only person. Some news people may have had the pleasure as well. But certainly one of very few, and maybe the only one who’s not been paid for it.

Those who are ignorant of history…

Posted on October 17, 2016 by neoOctober 17, 2016

…are condemned to repeat it.

Those friends who disappear

Posted on October 17, 2016 by neoOctober 17, 2016

Today I read this WaPo article by a woman whose best friend stopped communicating with her with no explanation, and how ten years later the author still grieves the loss of their friendship and is mystified by it.

I could relate, because it’s happened to me, only it was someone I’d known and been very good friends with much longer than the woman in the story, who was nineteen at the time it happened. I was about to turn fifty when my friend stopped returning my phone calls, and we had been good friends since the age of eight.

I never really understood what had happened, although I tried to find out. I wrote her a note saying that, although upset, I accepted her decision, but that it would really help me if she could just tell me what had happened, so perhaps I could learn from the experience. She didn’t reply. I called her mother, whom I knew very well from my childhood. Her mother was so upset that she wept, but when she asked her daughter what had happened, my ex-friend refused to discuss it with her, either.

About a decade later, my friend died. And although I had actually encountered her unexpectedly a few years earlier at a class reunion and we had managed a short conversation, when I’d asked her what had happened she gave some cryptic replies. They will have to do, though, and I’m grateful for them, because to have had that conversation was definitely better than nothing. But the meeting occurred by accident.

I still grieve both the end of our friendship and her death.

When I looked at the comments to that WaPo piece, I was surprised at how mean-spirited many of them were, more or less saying “Quit whining; get over it already” and/or “Have you ever wondered what you did wrong to make this happen?”

Well, I think this woman has gotten over it, because she seems to be functioning and going about her business. Does “getting over” something mean one doesn’t bear the scars, or doesn’t think about it very sadly sometimes? Is that our new standard, to wipe all pain from our memory banks in order to prove how stalwart we are? And why would people think the writer hadn’t examined whatever her own role might have been, and searched for an explanation there? Just because she didn’t devote paragraphs to that pursuit in what is meant to be a rather short essay about the effects of a loss of friendship?

As for “quit whining,” I think it’s pretty clear that the writer wanted her article to let other people who’ve had similar experiences know that their strong reactions aren’t that unusual, and to suggest to others who might leave without saying goodbye that perhaps it would be good, when “breaking up” with an old and once-dear friend, to offer a simple word of explanation.

It certainly would have helped me.

I think that people are used to the idea that there’s a lot of grief with a romantic breakup. But friendships—even deep, long-term friendships—are considered more fungible. They’re not, at least not for many people. For many many people, the loss of a friend—especially when the friend doesn’t confront the issue head-on and explain, if only in a relatively perfunctory way (“we’ve grown apart,” “I’m angry at you because…”)—the reaction can be extraordinarily painful, all the more so because there’s little acknowledgement about how painful it can be. Do we have songs about how our best friends drift away? I can’t think of any offhand (maybe you can, though), although there are countless laments about the heartache involved in the loss of a lover, and rightly so.

[NOTE: Some people might say that once a friendship has reached that point, it’s the point of no return and repair isn’t possible, so why not just walk away and make it easy on everyone. But my observation is that although walking away is usually easier on the one who makes the decision to leave, it’s rarely easier on the one who is left, although the leaver may sincerely think it will be. Telling the truth about why you left is almost undoubtedly hard for most people, but it’s much kinder in the end.

I also have had serious fallings-out with good friends that have been repaired—sometimes quickly, sometimes over a number of years. So it can be done, if both people are motivated to do it.]

Amazing air battle

Posted on October 15, 2016 by neoOctober 15, 2016

I had not remembered this story from 1994, although it’s extraordinarily memorable. I came across it on YouTube the other day and was surprised that it’s not better known.

Watch. It’s unbelievable, and yet it happened:

“Fight For Your Life,” indeed.

Perhaps it’s not more well-known because there were no passengers on the airplane.

Roundup

Posted on October 15, 2016 by neoOctober 15, 2016

There’s so much news today (much of it depressing, alas) that I’m just going to do something I don’t usually do, a roundup:

Romney on Trump and the future of the GOP.

Clinton operatives crow about how they scared off Chief Justice Roberts.

Big accord signed to limit a greenhouse gas—and it’s not about CO2, it’s about something we’ve heard relatively little about in comparison (hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs) and is regarded as a far more powerful determinant of global warming. It’s also ironic that HFCs were introduced in the 80s as a substitute for ozone-depleting gases.

Meanwhile, Obamacare continues its predictable (and predicted) slide.

Eramo of UVA tells her story

Posted on October 15, 2016 by neoOctober 15, 2016

In connection with her lawsuit against Rolling Stone for damages done to her as a result of their false UVA fraternity rape story, Nicole Eramo has given an interview:

Eramo told ABC News that she could not discuss her interactions with Jackie beyond what was contained in court documents for her defamation lawsuit against the magazine in order not to violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

The trial for Eramo’s $7.85 million defamation civil suit against Rolling Stone is expected to start Monday. The UVA chapter of Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity named in the article, also brought a defamation suit against the magazine, for $25 million; it is scheduled go to trial in the fall of 2017.

In the article, Jackie claimed that Eramo seemed to discourage her from going public with her allegations because she was worried about the university’s reputation and that Eramo said, “Nobody wants to send their daughter to a rape school.”

Eramo told ABC News that she never said that and she would never make a statement like that to an alleged sexual assault survivor. When asked whether Jackie made up that statement, Eramo said, “I can’t say, but I know I didn’t say it.”

I hope she wins every penny, and I hope the same for the fraternity’s lawsuit.

I wrote about the case extensively at the time, and there is no question in my mind that the periodical and its reporter were at fault and should be held accountable. I also have a dream, perhaps an unrealistic one: that the results of the lawsuit would further discourage other periodicals from being similarly reckless about what they publish in their pursuit of their own political goals.

The October surprise is no surprise

Posted on October 15, 2016 by neoOctober 15, 2016

An October surprise timed to maximally hurt the Republican candidate is no surprise at all. It is so predictable that the term “October surprise” has become commonplace.

In is no news, either, that the MSM tries to elect the Democrat. No news at all.

In the case of Trump, it was easily seen that he was the candidate the MSM and the Democrats wanted Hillary to face, because he was the weakest candidate. So as soon as they saw his candidacy had some legs and promise (which took a couple of months, because at first they found him a laughing stock), they did what they could to get on board temporarily and build him up, with the near-surety that they had more than enough ammunition to tear him down once he was safely nominated. Oh, the beauty of it!

If you think that’s a case of 20/20 hindsight, it’s not. Nor did it take 20/20 vision to predict it in the first place. It was easy. Here’s what I wrote in December of 2015, in a post entitled “Does Trump own the media or does the media own Trump?” [emphasis mine]:

So who’s using whom?

Rush Limbaugh says that Trump has the media frustrated and wrapped around his little finger:

…[T]hey can’t take him out. They can’t stop covering him. They can’t humiliate him. They can’t embarrass him. They can’t diminish his support. They’re powerless, and this has them in a panic. The media that can make-or-break anybody cannot touch Trump, and every time they try, all they do is make him bigger. They can’t explain this. They are frustrated to no end, and so are both political parties who rely on the media to be the great equalizer in all of this…

There’s no question Trump is getting more coverage than anyone else, by a huge margin. YUUUGE! So perhaps Limbaugh is right, and Trump is having a good laugh on a media that can’t do a thing about him except his bidding, and is instrumental in getting him more and more attention even though they don’t want to do it.

But here’s an alternate theory, one I happen to ascribe to.

I think the media knows that Trump is the story of the election. He’s exciting, people are entertained by watching him. So they get something out of covering him—readers and viewers. Remember, though, that the vast majority of the MSM is on the left, so much of what they do is with the goal of directing their readers and viewers to what’s so dreadful about Trump, and of energizing Democratic voters so that, if Trump’s the nominee, voters feel they must vote for the sane person—who would be Hillary—even if they don’t much like her.

I have believed from the very start of Trump’s campaign that the MSM…would very much like Trump to be the Republican nominee. They believe very strongly that, if nominated, he will lose, and that his chances of losing are greater than that of certain other candidates such as Rubio (polls bear that out).

I think they are correct, although of course I don’t know for sure. But more importantly, they think they’re correct. So for them, covering Trump is win/win. They get ratings. And although they’re not trying to destroy him—not for now—they dearly want him to be the nominee, and they’re confident they can destroy him later, or that he will self-destruct with the majority of Americans.

They might be right or they might be wrong. But they think they own him in the sense of using him to fit their purposes, not the other way around.

It’s instructive look at the comments section to that December post, too.

Another way in which the MSM orchestrated all of this was described by me in another old post that I wrote a few weeks after the first one and entitled “The hype about how Trump could win: what are the facts?”:

I doubt the motives of the NY Times or Politico or other left-leaning periodicals when they continue to say he will do well against Clinton, in the absence of evidence that he would do any better against her than other Republican candidates, and the presence of evidence that he would actually do worse against her than they would.

It’s also curious to me that none of these articles seem to actually analyze the polls to come to their conclusions. I have looked at the polls, and continue to do so, and have come to the conclusion that, at least so far, they indicate that Trump would be the weakest candidate of the GOP frontrunners in a head-to-head against Clinton…

I can’t escape the idea that the liberal/left press is pushing a Donald Trump candidacy because they feel he’s actually the weakest candidate.

Much of that post of mine analyzes the polls and compares what they actually indicated (no good news for Trump in the general, if he were to become the nominee) versus what the MSM would have had you think they indicated (“Trump has a really good chance of winning the whole thing!). I wrote other posts about that as well, but my voice (and that of others agreeing with me) was drowned out by the tsunami of propaganda from hopeful Trump supporters and the more Machiavellian MSM who were promoting the idea too.

Not that I expected my voice to not be drowned out. I’m not crazy; I know how large or small my audience is (although I love you guys; I really do). And although there were other, louder voices than mine saying much the same thing I was, they were drowned out too, in the wave of Trump-supporters’ hopes, trust, anger, gullibility, frustration, and probably a host of other things as well.

What prompted this post of mine today? This article by Joe Cunningham at RedState, entitled “The Disgusting Media Sat on Sexual Assault for a Partisan Victory”:

Sixteen women as of now have come forward to say they were sexually assaulted by Donald Trump. Sixteen. It is an avalanche of absolutely bad news for the Trump campaign, and it is far too close to the end of the cycle to recover from it. The Trump campaign is finished. However, each and every one of these cases is years old. The tape that showed Donald Trump talking to Billy Bush, the very tape that started this avalanche, is itself more than a decade old. Some of the stories of Donald Trump are older than that. But, we are only now hearing about it. Wikileaks seems to have provided an answer as to why, as well: The collusion between the Media and the Clinton campaign.

I use the term “collusion” on purpose here. While not exactly the proper use, it’s about the closest I can come to describing what’s going on here. The Media is not supposed to be friendly with political campaigns. Their relationship can be ”“ and should be ”“ cordial, but it should never be in bed with one side and actively trying to destroy the other. And, of course, we all know which side is which in this scenario. The Wikileaks releases verify for us what we really already know. The Clinton campaign has relied heavily on not only favorable, but dictated of certain political events in order to orchestrate their victory.

The Media withheld stories about sexual assault until it was convenient for a presidential candidate.

Let me repeat: no surprise, because that’s what the term “October surprise” signifies, and that expression was not coined yesterday.

And it’s interesting to read this comment at neoneocon from “Cornhead,” written back in December of 2015:

Jeb Bush and his super PACs would do the GOP a real service if they rolled out the dirt on Donald.

Just saying Trump is a bully and that he can’t insult himself to the Presidency doesn’t move the needle.

Jeb is an idiot.

Well, Jeb calculated that targeting the others would weaken them, and that he could pick off Trump later or that Trump would self-destruct. Also, he didn’t want to draw more of Trump’s fire than necessary, because he knew how dirty Trump would fight. The others had much the same strategy until it was too late; Rubio tried a bit of the direct attack and it backfired on him.

No one in the GOP dug up the Trump sexual allegations, though. Perhaps they were afraid it would make them look low. Perhaps they tried and just couldn’t find the information because Democrats were guarding it till the right time. Perhaps…

And yes, as I wrote yesterday, the MSM and Democrats would have tried to work some sort of similar propaganda against any other GOP nominee at a carefully selected and strategic time. But none of them were anywhere near as vulnerable as Trump.

[ADDENDUM: I also recall that during the primaries many Trump supporters argued that Trump had been impervious to MSM smears and would continue to be so. Many of us responded that this argument was a case of confusing the primaries with the general, and that the dynamics in the general are different. That argument was dismissed, but so far that is what has been coming to pass.

But I don’t discount the possibility of a black swan—or two or even three of them—before this election is over. Right now, however, I would describe Trump’s chances of winning as very, very, very, very distant.]

[ADDENDUM II: Oh, and CNN’s president Jeff Zucker gave me a sarcastic chuckle when he said that “it was a ‘mistake’ [for CNN] to air so many Trump rallies ‘and let them run’ in 2015, giving the candidate an unfettered platform.”

Riiiight Jeff, of course it was a mistake. Mistaken like a fox.]

Post Office pets

Posted on October 15, 2016 by neoOctober 15, 2016

I was at the post office today and bought a set of stamps. The choices I was offered consisted of the basic one, and then a set of trucks versus a set of pets.

Pressed for time, with a line behind me which precluded asking for further alternatives and lengthy deliberation, I went for the pets instead of the trucks as the image I preferred to present to my bill collectors (the only use I seem to have anymore for stamps). Some of you might have chosen differently, no doubt.

But here’s my question: hermit crabs?? People keep hermit crabs as pets?

The post office wants you to know that people do keep hermit crabs as pets:

Well, why not? People keep turtles and iguanas, too (they each have a stamp devoted to them, as well, although the post office calls the former “tortoises“).

Intrigued by the hermit crab news, what did I do? Why, Googled it, of course, and found this (from PETA, naturally), which lists seven reasons you shouldn’t buy a hermit crab as a pet, with the following summary:

Never, ever buy a hermit crab. They are not “starter pets” or trinkets. Crabs are complex, sensitive animals who want to live in the wild, not in a cage. Even the most well-meaning person who purchases crabs will never be able to give them the life that they deserve.

If you or someone you know already has a hermit crab, check out this hermit crab care guide for helpful tips on keeping crabs happy. Hermit crabs need companionship, plenty of climbing room, substrate to bury themselves in for molting, humidity, warm temperatures, extra shells, fresh and salt water (dechlorinated aquarium salt only), and much, much more! Never release a captive crab back into the wild.

That’s a lot more trouble than I would want to go to for the dubious pleasure of caring for my very own hermit crab. So I don’t have to be talked into not buying one. But I wonder why anyone would want one (I wonder that about a lot of pets, actually, although not dogs or cats). I’m not sure I buy the sales pitch on this site promoting exactly what PETA is railing against, the idea of hermit crabs as “starter pets”:

Hermit crabs have their own personalities and are fun starter pets for families and classrooms. They are easy to care for and their crabby antics, like climbing, digging, molting and shell switching, as are entertaining as they are educational.

How entertaining and educational is that, though?