Trump Fluffer Fired From NBC/MSNBC

Beltway politics-as-horserace hack and Trump fluffer Mark "Handsy" Halperin was fired today by NBC and MSNBC, where he had served as a "both sides do it" yakker and reliable booster of Rethuglicans and pathological liar and sexual predator Donald "Rump" Trump.  When news broke last week that Halperin had sexually harassed numerous women while he was employed by ABC, both organizations suspended him. He's also lost book contracts and other gigs following the multiple allegations, which he's admitted to.

The #MeToo movement has succeeded in outing sexual harassers and predators in recent weeks, and again focused on the women who have accused President P*ssygrabber of sexual assault, after his own admission on the Access Hollywood tape that he felt empowered to grab women sexually because of his celebrity. The White (Supremacist) House's propaganda unit denied all of the allegations just last week.

(photo: Turds of a feather stick together)

Sorry, Media - Hillary Clinton Isn't Losing Ground

Despite the on-going media drumbeat suggesting Hillary Clinton's support is sagging, let's see what the composite trend lines are for her against the Republican field (click on image to enlarge):

Courtesy Daily Kos Elections

As David Nir notes:

The chart above shows a combined average of every single national poll taken since March 1 of this year that pits Clinton against the 10 leading Republican candidates—197 matchups in all, courtesy of Huffington Post Pollster. The key takeaway, as you can see from the blue and red trendlines, is that the race has been remarkably static.

In fact, at the beginning of March, Clinton led the GOP field by an average of 50.3 to 42.6, or 7.7 percentage points. Now, in late August, she leads 48.7 to 41.2, or 7.5 percent. Clinton's "collapse," in other words, is 0.2 percent! No serious analyst would consider that anything more than a rounding error. (And we're not cherry-picking the start date, either: The picture is the same if you dial it back to Jan. 1.)

And about those Clinton "unfavorable" numbers the media likes to quote?

Now of course any politician wants her favorability numbers to be in positive territory. But it doesn't matter nearly as much as you might think, because if you're running for president in this 50-50 nation of ours, there's a very good chance your opponent is also under water. Clinton's favorables, according to HuffPo's average, stand at 42-50 today—not great, but Jeb Bush's are quite a bit worse, at 33-47. Yet we haven't seen panicked media reports about Jeb's lousy numbers. That ought to tell you something.

What it tells us is something we've known for a long time:  the media (in particular the Beltway pundits, New York Times and once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle) has an obsession with taking Hillary Clinton down, and in that regard it's willing to be the stenographer for any right-wing Republican operation that feeds them bogus "stories."  It's been frustrating and aggravating to watch them flog this narrative, but knowing that it hasn't had any significant effect so far is encouraging.

The Media Would Please Like You To Ignore Republican Extremism (UPDATED)

We're going for an extended dive into Paul Krugman's op/ed in the New York Times because it echoes the point many of us have been making for a long time about the insipid political press in this country.  While he doesn't name names, we and others have over the years:  Dan Balz, Chris Cillizza, Ruth Marcus, Maureen Dowd, Fred Hiatt, Chuck Todd, Ron Fournier, Mark Halperin, George Stephanopoulos (giants all!) and countless others in the print and electronic media. (Note that we're not even covering the objectively right-wing media here, simply the corporate  "mainstream media.")  And, no matter how deep into the weeds the Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid Party goes, the media is there to assure us that everyone and everything is still normal:

The point is that while media puff pieces have portrayed Mr. Trump’s rivals as serious men — Jeb the moderate, Rand the original thinker, Marco the face of a new generation — their supposed seriousness is all surface. Judge them by positions as opposed to image, and what you have is a lineup of cranks. And as I said, this is no accident.

It has long been obvious that the conventions of political reporting and political commentary make it almost impossible to say the obvious — namely, that one of our two major parties has gone off the deep end. Or as the political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become an “insurgent outlier … unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science.” It’s a party that has no room for rational positions on many major issues.

Or to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious — not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume.

Until now, however, leading Republicans have generally tried to preserve a facade of respectability, helping the news media to maintain the pretense that it was dealing with a normal political party. What distinguishes Mr. Trump is not so much his positions as it is his lack of interest in maintaining appearances. And it turns out that the party’s base, which demands extremist positions, also prefers those positions delivered straight. Why is anyone surprised?

Remember how Mr. Trump was supposed to implode after his attack on John McCain? Mr. McCain epitomizes the strategy of sounding moderate while taking extreme positions, and is much loved by the press corps, which puts him on TV all the time. But Republican voters, it turns out, couldn’t care less about him.

Can Mr. Trump actually win the nomination? I have no idea. But even if he is eventually pushed aside, pay no attention to all the analyses you will read declaring a return to normal politics. That’s not going to happen; normal politics left the G.O.P. a long time ago. At most, we’ll see a return to normal hypocrisy, the kind that cloaks radical policies and contempt for evidence in conventional-sounding rhetoric. And that won’t be an improvement.  (our emphasis)

This moment, with Rump Trump acting as the Republican id, is almost unique in our recent history.  The more polished demagogues/ cranks that occupied both the Kiddie Table and the main event last Thursday are the kind of "leadership" the party has fostered over the years:  as Krugman says, they cloak their "radical policies and contempt for evidence in conventional-sounding rhetoric."  And as a reward, the corporate "mainstream media" applauds them as having "talent" and being "well-qualified."  But it's much harder for them to ignore Rump Trump, so they try to make him an un-serious side-show, the better to hide both their lack of courage and their unpreparedness at the resultant birthing of an ugly political movement they themselves midwifed.

UPDATE:  Case in point - here's how the once-great Washington Post Bezos Bugle  "reports" on the Trump brouhaha this morning on the front page:

Republican leaders who have watched Donald Trump’s summer surge with alarm now believe that his presidential candidacy has been contained and may begin to collapse because of his repeated attacks on a Fox News Channel star and his refusal to pledge his loyalty to the eventual GOP nominee.

Fearful that the billionaire’s inflammatory rhetoric has inflicted serious damage to the GOP brand, party leaders hope to pivot away from the Trump sideshow and toward a more serious discussion among a deep field of governors, senators and other candidates.

Mix wishful thinking with cluelessness about the already-toxic "Republican brand" and stir with a "deep field" of "talent" and "well-qualified" candidates;  serves two Republican-wired stenographers at the Bezos Bugle.

Insipid Political Analysis, Cont.

Hunter at Daily Kos picks up on a Chuck "Not My Job" Todd line that this is "the strongest Republican party presidential field in 36 years", bolstering the evidence that, when it comes to analyzing Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid Party politics, our elite media sucks:

And here we have our problem: This notion that the current Republican field is "strong," the strongest in a generation, if it were not for the meddling of sideshow Donald. The current Republican field is numerous. It is not strong. A bag of mice is not stronger than a pit bull, no matter how much it wiggles, and a 16-person presidential field made up almost exclusively of embarrassments is not stronger than two, three, or five candidates who demonstrably might know what the hell they are talking about. Which are the strong candidates, then? The universally despised-by-his-peers senator? The other senator who achieved electoral success bequeathed by his father, and who has accomplished precious little since? The governor turned Christian radio shock jock? The senator who abandoned efforts to get his party to be slightly less racist after polls showing the party didn't think much of the idea? The indicted fellow? The not-indicted one? The one who touts union busting as his ostensible foreign policy credential? The universally acknowledged-as-a-failure last president's brother? If there was any one of these candidates capable of building more than a ramshackle case for leadership of their deeply fractured, ostentatiously paranoid party, they would not have fifteen mostly embarrassing opponents. Even the party financiers are finding themselves flummoxed on which of these three-legged horses to back.

So, step aside, Dan "I Got No" Balz and Amber "Waves of Grain" Phillips, you have some real competition for insipid political analysis by a Beltway "pudnit."

Pols and Pundits: Betting on Obamacare Failing, And Losing

Pardon our indulging in a little more schadenfreude over the success of Obamacare in its first enrollment cycle.  After years of gibberish about "death panels," tripling insurance premiums, beellions being kicked off of their insurance plans, deficit busting, and the end of Freedom in America (courtesy of right-wing media, the Koch brothers and other lying malefactors), we have millions more Americans being covered by affordable health insurance.  While the dead-ender right isn't finished with Obamacare (and will never give up), they may yet pay a price for going all-in on opposing this humane and decent achievement.  Here are snippets of some worthwhile readings:

Greg Sargent:

The announcement of eight million Obamacare sign-ups may finally be enough to jolt commentators into realizing that maybe, just maybe, the Republican plan to build an entire campaign against the law for the next six months might suffer from a few imperfections. The President, for his part, seized on the moment to urge Democratic candidates to stand proudly by the law’s achievements — and to attack Republicans for wanting to strip them away.

Josh Marshall:

On Obamacare, the Republican party has bet big on failure for four years. Now the results are in. And they lost. Big time. 

Of course, substance policy success and political outcomes aren't the same thing. And just as importantly they do not always run on the same time scale. So it is entirely possible. I would say it is likely that the GOP will still derive benefits this November from the core of voters who are extremely upset about Obamacare, extremely motivated to vote and also happen to be the same people who routinely turn out in disproportionate numbers in mid-term elections. But on the core of the policy, which I think there is good reason to believe will align with political outcomes in the future, the results are in. And they lost. 

And, finally, Lucia Graves at the National Journal calls out specific Republican journalists pundits who, in toeing the hyperbolic party line on Obamacare, are seeing their predictions of doom blow up in their smug faces.  The list of numbnuts is much longer than Graves has space or patience to cover, unfortunately =cough= Fox "News" =cough= Krauthammer =cough= Will =cough=.  Of course, the "mainstream media" is/was often complicit in peddling Republican lies in their typical "he-said, she-said" narratives (because,  as NBC's  Chuck Todd has schooled us, it's not the media's job to sort out the truth!). Nonetheless, history will surely and righteously enroll all of them in its Book of Shame.

More Broken Media - Pundit Fail Edition

Surprise, surprise.  The same broken media (see posting below) that mindlessly bought into right-wing neo-con Iraq war fever has mindlessly bought into right-wing Very Serious Pundit deficit/ austerity chicanery.  Whooda thunkit?   Sic transit gloria America.

(click to enlarge)

(Tom Tomorrow, via Daily Kos)

Politico: "Predicting Is Hard Work!"

The Rethuglican-wired dimbulbs at Politico (or as Charles P. Pierce calls them, "Tiger Beat on the Potomac") would have us believe that, gosh and golly, we just don't have any clue who's going to win this election! Punditry is hard (especially when you don't know how to read and interpret polling)! Here's 538's Nate Silver with a nice, eviscerating tweet:

Yeah, we think most of those clowns are so heavily invested in the horse-race narrative that any other reality-based one would cause their hopes and dreams for a Rethuglican restoration to go "poof. * " By the way, Nate's latest projection (close your eyes Rethuglicans) is that Obama has a 79% chance of winning. And that's conservative compared to Sam Wang's 96-99% certainty over at Princeton Election Consortium.

Let's get out and vote, Democrats, Independents and thinking Republicans and make sure these projections come true.

UPDATE: One Hackwhacker voted this morning, and there was a healthy crowd, but no lines. Good feeling ensued.

* Sorry!

A Pre-Debate Question of the Day

Does it matter anymore whether a candidate lies openly, since the media isn't concerned with a candidate's honesty? Charles P. Pierce has this to say about it:

"Far too many people in this business have accepted the Etch-A-Sketch argument to the point at which whether something is true or not is measured by its effectiveness as a tactic. 'He had to run to the right in the primaries and then 'pivot' to the center in the general' — that's something that makes the political wiseguys look smart, but, taken literally, it means that the entire election process in the world's oldest self-governing republic is a contest to find out who can most smoothly move from one set of lies to another, and it is also a recipe for depriving the people who ultimately will make that decision of the kind of information they need to do so."

We're at a tipping point in more ways than one. The most dishonest candidate in modern times is close to winning the election from the incumbent, and the Beltway media is focused on body language and tactics. Shame on them, and on us for not demanding better.

Sunday Morning Reading - Dumb and Dumber

Dumb: Dana Milbank, back in his Beltway Kids snark mode, has a sad that Obama hasn't met his lofty expectations and saw "worrying signs" at the convention. Really? You might want to get a glass belly button so you can look out at reality and still keep your head up your ass. As for Milbank's assertion that Obama is "narrowly favored to win," he might want to check out Nate Silver's numbers.

Dumber: Apparently George "Quill" Will, now completely off the rails, is having Glenn Beck write his columns now.

Twittering Into Irrelevancy

James Wolcott's blast at the Beltway media and punditocracy in Vanity Fair is today's reading assignment. The article begins with:

"Washington has always been out of synch with the rest of America, but since Obama's election, pundits seem more stubbornly and stupendously irrelevant than ever. Have three decades of being wired for Republican power blown their jittery, Twittering minds?"

Wolcott has the DC politico/journalist environment nailed, as he swiftly skewers such fixtures as David "Dancin' Dave" Gregory and George "Quill Pen" Will. All issues are seen through the prism of "bipartisanship" (that is, cooperate with obstructionist Rethugs or else) and the daily news cycle idiocy (who won, who lost, who's up, who's down). That the American voter has overwhelmingly chosen Democratic policies in two consecutive elections is lost on the Beltway grandees, who must think this Democratic business is just a passing fad and await the Rethug restoration. . .any decade now.