Joke

The polls indicate the Donald Trump is tanking. His own stupid moves along with a relentless series of "October surprise" attacks by the mainstream media have had their affect. He's will likely lose the election. But before you convince yourself that everything you've heard about Trump is true and that the loss is justified, let's step back for a moment.

First, you have every right to hate Donald Trump because he often acts like an a##hole. I get it, and I tend to agree. But there's more:

• You can jettison critical thinking and buy into the narrative that he is a racist, a bigot, and a misogynist, although real evidence (except cherry-picked sound bytes) for those positions is scant. 
• You can fall into PC-thinking and argue he is Islamophobic, although his position on Muslim immigration is supported by over 70 percent of all Americans.
• You can argue that he is attacking freedom of religion, but he has never suggested that a Muslim-American citizens cannot practice their religion; he has, however, suggested that Islam bears some of the responsibility for Islamic terror attacks on our soil. He is not wrong.
• You can posit that he "lacks judgment," but is his judgment any worse than the judgment of a person who ran an unapproved, insecure private email server that put national secrets at risk?
• You can suggest that he is "unhinged" or "lacks temperament" because he uses twitter to attack his political enemies, although maybe it's just the fact that he punches back hard when attacked by the Dem and GOP elites that really troubles you.
• You can jettison rational thought and agree that he wants to start a nuclear war, or a religious war, or a war with Mexico, although he has been anti-war in many instances for many years.
• You can even suggest, despite his clearly moderate politics over the years, that he is a right-wing extremist.

After all, Hillary Clinton has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to tell you these things in thousands upon thousands of TV commercials, on the stump, and at the debates. I understand. You're going to believe what you want to believe.

But here's the thing. It's not just Hillary—an inveterate liar—who promoted the narrative that has shaped your view of Trump—it's a media that is now so far into the tank for Clinton that it makes no attempt to hide its hatred of Trump. Michael Goodwin writes about The New York Times, but in reality, he's talking about almost every major media outlet including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Univision, MSNBC, the NYT, The Boston Globe, the LAT, and Yahoo News, along with many, many others when he writes:

Opinions, all uniformly anti-Trump, now ooze from the paper’s every pore, with headlines on front-page “news” articles indistinguishable from daily denunciations on the editorial and op-ed pages.

This is not a mere continuation of the old liberal bias that infected the Times, the Washington Post and the broadcast networks for years. This is a malignant strain of conformity that strips away any pretense of fairness in favor of strident partisanship.

The signal that the Times abandoned its traditional church-state separation of news and opinion came in an article by the paper’s media reporter two months ago. In his August piece, Jim Rutenberg declared that most reporters saw Trump “as an abnormal and potentially dangerous candidate,” and concluded they had a duty to be “true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment.”

As the media rant against Trump using "facts" that are force fit to support their narrative, they judiciously avoid any news or comment that might reflect badly on his opponent. And therein lies the rub. The main stream media is now actively supporting the Democrat candidate—not only in their opinion pages—but in the way they deliver the "news." They bury the many negative news stories about Clinton or simply refuse to report those stories at all. Just a few nights ago, the MSM spent a collective 23 minutes during the evening news half hour talking about claims of "sexual abuse" against Trump and less than 1 minute talking about the many important policy questions raised by Clinton campaign email leaks—including her positions on open borders, global trade, Wall Street connections, and the statement that she maintains "public and private positions" on most important policy matters. 23:1. Hmmm.

The media will likely succeed in its effort to elect Hillary Clinton to the presidency. And because she is their candidate, the media will work very, very hard to protect her once she is in office. It will disregard the many scandals that will emerge over the next four years and downplay the many failures that will be part of Obama 3.0 policies and decisions.

But the media's victory will be shallow, because public trust in the media, already at the lowest levels in history, will drop even further. The "malignant strain of conformity that strips away any pretense of fairness in favor of strident partisanship" has angered a lot of people, including yours truly, and it may very well shape the votes of many citizens. The media and the principles of ethical journalism it purports to practice is now viewed as a joke. There's only one problem—the joke is on all of us, and it isn't funny at all.

UPDATE:
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David Gelernter calls Donald Trump an "infantile vulgarian" and yet, he intends to vote for Trump because the alternative is worse. He suggests the Hillary Clinton's dishonesty, corruption, and incompetence are perfectly acceptable to all Democrats because most refuse to look at the real Hillary honestly. He also notes that her dishonesty, corruption and incompetence are acceptable to the elites of both parties because they often exhibit toned down forms of the same dishonesty, corruption and incompetence. He then writes:

Impeachment is Trump-voters’ ace in the hole. It’s an abnormal measure, but this is an abnormal year. Impeachment has temporarily dropped out of sight because of special circumstances. Republicans impeached Bill Clinton but got burned in the process; Mr. Obama, as the first black president, was impeachment-proof. Any other president would have encountered serious impeachment talk on several occasions, especially when he ignored Congress and the Constitution and made his own personal treaty-in-all-but-name with Iran.

But Mr. Trump will not have Mr. Obama’s advantages—to say the least. Mr. Trump will be impeachment bait ...

Nothing can stop Mr. Trump from shooting off his mouth, but that’s all right. I want America’s enemies off-balance and guessing. For eight years it’s been Humiliate America season—buzz our ships, capture and embarrass our men, murder an American ambassador—a resoundingly successful attempt to spit in our faces and tell each one of us to drop dead. Thanks, Mr. President. Enough is enough. You know that Hillary is Obama Part III. We can’t let that happen. Parts I and II have brought us close enough to catastrophe.

That is the problem for those whose integrity or nobility won’t allow them to vote for Mr. Trump despite their dislike of Mrs. Clinton. There is only one way to take part in protecting this nation from Hillary Clinton, and that is to vote for Donald Trump. A vote for anyone else or for no one might be an honest, admirable gesture in principle, but we don’t need conscientious objectors in this war for the country’s international standing and hence for the safety of the world and the American way of life. It’s too bad one has to vote for Mr. Trump. It will be an unhappy moment at best. Some people will feel dirty, or pained, or outright disgraced.

But when all is said and done, it’s no big deal of a sacrifice for your country. I can think of bigger ones.

There's one more thing—a vote for Trump is a hard poke in the eye to a media that has become viciously biased. Wouldn't it be fun to see media heads explode at ABC, CBS, NPR, CNN or MSNBC, at the NYT, the LAT, or the Boston Globe? It sure would! Won't happen, but during these dark days as Clinton prepares to run the table, it's really something amusing to think about.