USA Freedom Girls sue Trump campaign: https://t.co/bI4kPXkqLK pic.twitter.com/XeKlUC7ugo
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) September 6, 2016
TRUMP: Exposure was their reward! Arrogant dancing fucks.
CHRISTIE: They did work for you. Pay 'em.
TRUMP: I don't wanna set that precedent— Owen Ellickson (@onlxn) September 6, 2016
NYMag‘s Jon Chait, for all his flaws, is the perfect person to rebut Frank Bruni. For your enjoyment, “Did Trump Happen Because Liberals Are Too Mean?“:
The leading theory of why Republicans nominated Donald Trump is that Republican voters like Donald Trump. This theory has the virtues of simplicity and truth, but the handicaps of being boring and quite rude to nearly half the electorate. And so an alternate theory has circulated that is more complex and also more flattering to Republican voters. This theory holds that Trump prevailed at least in part because liberals blew their credibility by hyperbolically denouncing previous Republican presidential candidates, thereby conditioning Republicans to ignore the warnings when Trump came along. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni gives this theory credence in a column headlined “Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump.”
Bruni argues that liberals have spent years whipping up unjustified hysteria against a series of Republican nominees who deserved far better. His examples underwhelm. “McCain was described, in some quarters, as a combustible hothead who couldn’t be allowed anywhere near the nuclear codes.” You see? Liberals said the same thing about McCain that they now say about Trump! Except, if you click on the hyperlinks, Bruni’s two examples turn out to be a random diarist at Daily Kos, a sort of open-mic blog, and Infowars, a far-right website that now supports Trump…
The cry-wolf theory has an obvious allure for anti-Trump conservatives who wish to absolve their movement of any responsibility for their repellent nominee. The attraction to Bruni is more fascinating. His account of Republican nominees victimized by undue criticism abruptly stops in 2008. The Republican candidate who would come next in his historical chronology, but whom Bruni omits from his narrative, is George W. Bush. Bruni covered Bush as a campaign reporter for the Times in 2000. His legendarily soft coverage struck exactly the tone Bush preferred. It ignored policy and presented the campaign as a personality contest between a goofy but lovable regular guy and a stiff, unlikable jerk…
In a 2001 campaign memoir, Bruni half-sheepishly confessed that Bush had charmed him… Yet his memoir explains this as the by-product of Bush’s irresistible charm and comes nowhere close to grappling with what turned out to be one of the most important and consequential failures in the history of American journalism. That Bruni now accuses other journalists of crying wolf about Republican nominees is nothing short of astonishing. Bruni is like the boy who was in charge of spotting wolves, and assured everybody that it was just a bunch of adorable little puppies, and then, after the “puppies” turned out to be wolves that devoured all of the livestock and several children, wrote a book saying maybe he should have been a tad more vigilant but, hey, you gotta admit, those were some cute puppies…
RaflW
I have been out of the country for 8 days (hey, I’ve had 2 cappuccinos already, and the sun has been up for 3 hours!). I gotta say, being away from this endless rolling disaster known as the US press corpse has been excellent for my wellbeing.
So has all the olive oil of the Mediterranean diet, I’m sure. Hope I still fit in my plane seat tomorrow.
Steeplejack
WTF?! I thought there were only three USA Freedom
GirlsKids, not five. But I am not going to revisit that awful, awful video to check.qwerty42
Chait became more PO’d as he wrote that (the awful coverage of the 2000 campaign should be a lesson taught in whatever remain of Journalism schools in the future). the concluding para:
Liberals may be accused of many sins, but enabling Trump is not one them. Liberals have spent a quarter-century warning that the Republican Party was descending into unhinged, knee-jerk, anti-intellectual reaction. What Trump reveals is not that liberal warnings about the growing ignorance and derangement of the Republican Party were taken too seriously, but that they weren’t taken seriously enough.
hellslittlestangel
@Steeplejack: The USA Freedom Kids have achieved fame, with all its pitfalls as well as its glories. Sometimes after a hard-partying weekend, the Kids aren’t in the best shape to get back up on the stage — and that’s when the Substitute Freedom Kids shine!
Source: USA Freedom Kids, Behind The Music
Patricia Kayden
So Dems are to blame for idiot voters like srv who supported a blatant bigot when they had 16 other Clowns to chose from? Well isn’t that special?
Naw. A party which dog whistles bigotry finally got a candidate who speaks his bigotry plainly and the bigoted voters jumped at the chance not only to vote for him but to beat up people at his rallies all on his command.
So I guess people like Bruni are bracing themselves for David Duke as the Repub candidate in 2020. Can’t wait.
Aleta
The Freedom Kids might just be the one scandal that makes Trump’s polling dip instead of rise. And if the Dems could hire them to tour Florida, maybe crank out a comic book and a set of dolls in blue for them to sell ….
The Ancient Randonneur
Good grief Frank grow a fucking pair and stop whining like a toddler who hasn’t taken his afternoon nap. Those mean old liberals are easier to deal with after you’ve restored yourself.
Steeplejack (phone)
@hellslittlestangel:
God, they’re going to be like Menudo or those other boy bands—interchangeable parts that they swap out at puberty to rotate in new grade-school meat.
stibbert
Freedom Girls might get better relief by suing their own management for incompetence & exploitation of child labor. Mebbe also, they could get a restraining order against their parents.
Van Buren
In the universe that I live in, Republicans have been demonizing/crying wolf over every Democratic nominee since forever. Yet we seem to keep nominating experienced, articulate, and reasonable candidates. Why is that?
GMVictory
Really? His argument is “Look what you made us do!”
That’s what my dad would say when he was smacking the hell out of my mom.
drylake
As the polls continue to show Trump maintain his relative position vis a vis HRC, my animus towards those moronic enough to support him reaches greater intensity by the day, so it’s going to be a tough two months, I fear.
I have, however, a good line of attack, even if it has no chance at all of achieving any circulation: a couple of months ago I had a conversation with an extremely sharp grad student from China’s best university (OK, it’s Tsinghua, and such rankings are relative after all). When the talk turned to the US elections, I shared my opinion that the US was down the drain should DT be elected. Her response? That was exactly why her ultra-left friends (and in China these people are also extremely nationalistic) were rooting for DT: the end of the evil hegemon and a free hand for China!
Sad to say, I don’t think DT supporters are smart enough to realize the implications.
Keith G
@RaflW: The last two days were an anomaly of disconnectedness for me, There is no history of kidney stones in me or my greater family, yet one made its presence known Monday afternoon. I spent a good deal of yesterday in a very well-run Emergency Medical Center hooked up to fluids and a morphine drip.
I didn’t think of it until I was scanning the news this morning, but I had not Interactived in any major way with news of the world since sometime Monday morning. On my way out the door heading to the hospital, I grabbed my Galaxy tablet that has several movies on it. I spent the rest of the day in a blissful opate induced haze catching up on movies. I am definitely better now that the stone is gone and I feel better because my brain wasn’t so bombarded with crap from this election.
BTW…. That damned Obamacare Marketplace worked again.
NorthLeft12
And the beat goes on….
Oh my dog! How shameless can you get? And Bruni still has a job, wait, don’t tell me, at the New York Times , right?
I am beginning to sense a pattern here.
Kay
The crucial event was Trump’s birtherism. Republicans choked and that’s when he rose.
We should also probably mention the people who gave him a split screen with the President.
God almighty- the ultimate “both sides”
Birtherism is it– it’s when he connected with the GOP base. They had one shot to do the right thing and they blew it. You don’t always get more than one chance- sometimes it’s just one.
Kay
The 6 week birther crusade is to Trump what the 2004 speech at the DNC was to Obama. It’s central to his story. That’s why he should be asked about it.
They can’t tell this story and continue to skip the beginning. He didn’t “come out of nowhere”. He came out of a nationally televised 6 week long birther campaign launch.
rikyrah
@Kay:
and, is at the core of the Black community’s disdain for him.
You can’t do Trump without the birtherism.
Kay
@rikyrah:
Birtherism was outrageous. It’s straight-up racism and always has been. Never before and never since has an ordinary state record received so much scrutiny. Imagine if this was applied regularly- you’d hand someone your driver’s license and they’d say “I’ll need to call the state motor vehicle agency”. It’s worse than that really- they HAD the verification from the state recorder. The document was authenticated. There are no more questions. Done.
It was about making him “the other”- 100% based on his race. His word isn’t good enough. He produces the document and they demand that the state records clerk authenticate. She authenticates and that’s not enough- the goalpost changes.
That’s an old, old idea- the notion that certain people need much more validation than other people. It goes back to black people needing a white witness to disprove a crime. There’s 150 years of precedent. It should jump right out at them, but it didn’t. Unforgivable.
rk
I was assured by by our local troll NR yesterday that it was “democratic party corporatism” which led to Donald Trump. But I see that professional trolls/journalists have another theory.
Kay
@rikyrah:
They shouldn’t have equated him with the President, either. WTF? A split screen? Prosecutor and defendant? How does Donald Trump get this legitimacy? They gave it to him.
It’s their fault. They all choked at the crucial moment and they didn’t get another shot.
rk
@rikyrah:
It wasn’t just the birtherism. It was also questioning his qualifications. I don’t remember if it was Trump who started it, but I remember the demands that Obama show his college transcripts. And this when they did not bat an eyelid when Bush boasted of being a C ‘ student at Yale.
Kay
@rk:
Well, if we all completely ignore the 6 week campaign launch in 2012. I get that they’re all ashamed but that’s what happened.
Trump didn’t just stumble on this on the internet. He made “several calls”. Trump himself. The GOP nominee for President of the United States. He’s a racist moron and anyone who was interested in finding that out doesn’t need more than “several calls”. The disqualifying event happened in 2012, but they’re cowards and they didn’t disqualify him. Now the shit sticks to all of them.
RaflW
We’ve also been vocally worrying about a courtesan press more interested in access than journalism. We seem to be right about our predictions of that danger, too. Which enrages said press, one of the most vain and delicate of professions.
Kay
@rk:
It’s really important to understanding it. They gave Trump a position of power- they put him on the same level as someone who had a legitimate question. Much more than that, really. A person who wasn’t a reality tv star wouldn’t get that kind of exposure. They covered their ass in media by poo pooing it – they’d recite the script- but what people were seeing contradicted that. They were seeing Donald Trump get national media coverage for 6 weeks questioning the President. That’s a powerful image.
Kay
@RaflW:
If Trump wins and Democrats take the Senate they can subpeona records on his past and his business interests/associates/debt and assets and his tax returns. That is the one and only way Trump will be vetted- after he wins.
It’s ludicrous. He’d have to reveal more to get a bank loan than he’s revealed running for President.
trnc
Of course, it’s sad that these kids were victimized in two ways – one by being totally misinformed, and the other by being stiffed. But what’s Popick’s excuse, given the well documented history of stiffing? The girls should be suing him for incompetence.
Kay
@RaflW:
Regular people can demand records after he wins, too. They’ll have some FOIA process.
The Republican Party and media are allowing this to happen- the only way to access process to demand basic information on Donald Trump is if he is elected President. That’s where they are. That’s the box they’re in.
They better hope he doesn’t win. They don’t know the first thing about him.
Kay
@rk:
It’s also bullshit that media can’t cover the Trump birtherism campaign. They don’t need Donald Trump to address it.
Call a fucking witness. Call this guy- Joseph Farah. Farah took Trump’s phone calls. Ask him. Put him on cable. Find the private investigator Trump supposedly hired.
They don’t need Trump. He’s refusing to answer. Call a witness. This is not rocket science.
NorthLeft12
As a Canadian, during and since the last federal election we have seen a lot of ugly facts raised to the surface about what has been done, or still being done, in our name. The hijab ruckus, Syrian refugees, and most importantly the treatment of indigenous peoples exposed the bigoted and mean spirited side of Canada.
The election and period after has served as a catharsis to allow people who were not happy about our direction and about Canada’s slipping place in the world, to vote their conscience and actually change our own perception of Canada, if not to the rest of the world.
This election could be your chance too. Trump and the Republicans he represents are pointing towards an ugly, mean, and brutal future. Pres. Obama has made great strides in attempting to stem the tide, but this is a multi-decade job. Again, the rest of the world is counting on the US to take a good path forward. We need you.
NorthLeft12
@Kay: I agree with you 100%. The Republican attempts to delegitimize twice elected President Obama were pure, unadulterated racism. The birther movement was stunningly ludicrous and even more stunningly covered by the mainstream media. A question that should have been quickly dealt with [one week and done] and dismissed, hung around for years. High profile pundits and national Republican figures discussed this “seriously” on national TV and in the most widely read newspapers in America.
Every living democrat in the US should be furious over this, not just African Americans or Obama supporters. Hell, I’ll include any reasonable American in that cohort. This was an epic failure of your media that pumped up and gave life to an odious, and scurrilous fabrication.
Frankly, if the TV media had a shred of dignity or integrity, they would have banished anyone from the airwaves who tried to promote this story after the initial two week period.
Elizabelle
This was a great thread. Bookmarking it. Thanks, Kay and Northleft and all.
Why I come to Balloon Juice.
Mnemosyne
@Keith G:
Ouch! Do you have any history of Type 2 diabetes? Apparently, there’s some evidence that kidney stones can be related to that.
Now is a good time to get caught up on Gene Wilder’s movies, unless laughing hurts too much.
nominus
I was at the dry cleaners yesterday morning dropping some stuff off. Since it’s early morning, of course they’re busy, lots of people running around taking drop-offs, running back and forth to the drive through, etc.
Older “gentleman” in front of me has a red MAGA hat on. We’re waiting for about 2 minutes when someone gets to the desk to wait on him, where he proceeds to act like an entitled asshole – telling the (obviously Asian) staff they need to get their shit together because he’s been waiting, he has things to do and places to get to. The place is a flurry of activity, it’s not like they were hiding in the back eating breakfast or something, but of course Mr Maga doesn’t see why they didn’t make everyone else wait just because he walked in the door.
Then it occurred to me: Trump’s supporters are just like him, entitled assholes who think everyone exists to serve him, and he deserves to be served first and best because he’s the best. Everyone knows an asshole like that. If you don’t know anyone like that, you’re the asshole.
gvg
Trump used birtherism, but I seem to recall it being around in 2008. I also think quite a few members of congress, especially after 2010 were just as racist and using that stupid theory.
it’s always been such a STUPID theory. I guess I treated it too seriously but the idea seemed to be that for some reason a conspiracy existed to have a black child raised Muslim secretly, elected US President but born outside the US. Why would he be born outside the US when it was easier and better for this stupid idea for his American mother to stay home while he was born.
the whole idea of being able to make a child have the qualities needed to win a future election is dumb. Part of Obama’s win and several other Presidents I can think of too relates to how his abilities seemed to fit our needs at that time. In fact I would guess there are many rich ambitious parents who have tried raising a son to be president and never got anywhere close. It would still have been a better bet to pick a child from a rich connected American family like Bush, not a poor mixed race black child with no connections. the whole idea is stupid and full of magical thinking and I get so tired of stupid thinking. yeah I can see the racism, but it’s stupid too. I guess I have a bias that thinks we would have less racism if people practiced thinking more.
LAC
Wish that Bruni would go back to food critic. Less of an odious fuck.