The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Sunday, November 01, 2020

Upset Victory?

As we close in on election day, it truly is remarkable that Donald Trump has a reasonably good chance to win, despite what the polls tell us. After all, the four constituencies—the Democrats, the media, the #NeverTrump GOP, and the deep state—are all-in against Trump and have pulled out all the stops to defeat him. 

The Democrats truly hate Trump and have been lying about him (e.g., Russian collusion, white supremacy, obstruction) for the past four years, but I suppose we can chalk that up to the viciousness of modern day politics.

#NeverTrumpers within the GOP are offended that Trump won't do what Bush or Romney tried to do—be gentlemen in the face of vicious and dishonest attacks, outright and blatant bias by the media, and a continuing stream of leaks and attacks by denizens of the deep state. In their view, better to lose as 'gentlemen' than to punch back and win, even as the threat of a leftist transformation of the country looms larger than ever before.

The deep state has over the past three decades been populated with Democrat partisans, along with GOP members who like the pre-Trump status quo. Play the game and you get rich, just ask Biden or Hillary. Support the corrupt political class and you have a cushy job for life or until you retire and then take a high-paying job with the companies to whom you awarded government contracts.

And finally, the media. Trump has called the media "the enemy of the American people." He's not wrong. Victor Davis Hansen comments:

... even during the Obama years, when studies showed the president had received the most slanted media honeymoon in news history, overt media bias was, at least, as hotly denied as it intensified. There were still a few ossified, quarter-hearted efforts now and then to mention the IRS scandal, the surveillance of Associated Press reporters, the various scandals embroiling the Veterans Administration, General Service Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Secret Service. But even that thin pretense is over now, too.

What ended liberal dissimulation about slanted reporting is a new pride, or rather an arrogance, about bias itself. The new liberated defiance is something like, “We are biased. Damn proud of it. And what exactly do you plan on doing about it?”

... When early on in the Trump Administration, the liberal Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy found that in the first 100 days all news coverage was on average 80 percent anti-Trump—93 percent negative in the case of CNN and NBC—no one seemed embarrassed. 

Again, since May 2017, the bias has not merely increased but is now a badge of honor—whether it was the months of “walls or closing in” fake stories of imminent Mueller investigation indictments of the Trump family or the serial “Trump is finished” psychodramas about the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, and the 25th Amendment. No one in the media, to this day, after the Mueller implosion, the findings of Inspector General Michael Horowitz, and the recent releases of Russian intercepts about the Clinton gambit to fabricate a “collusion” election narrative, has ever said “We were wrong”—because they really think they were “right” in pushing even untruth, given their hatred of Trump.

We can see the new arrogance manifested in a variety of ways. In the recent debates and town halls, the moderators were as praised by the media as they were a turn off to many in the public who were disgusted by their arrogance in making no attempt to appear fair. 

The most anti-Trump Fox News figure currently is Chris Wallace. Naturally, he was deemed a perfect moderator—not so much in the old style as the token conservative, but in the new liberal hope that more at Fox, too, have come to love Big Brother.

Wallace performed as expected, directing his gotcha questions to Trump and softballs to Biden. When pre-debate observers predicted that Wallace would return to his earlier 2016 debate questioning mantra of “white supremacy”—once more selectively editing the old saw of Trump’s Charlottesville remarks to eliminate his denunciation of white supremacists and the KKK—Wallace not only met but exceeded their expectations with his “When will you stop beating your wife?” hammering.

It is truly remarkable that a dishonest and biased media hasn't swung the election to the point where a Biden blowout is absolutely guaranteed. Not only has social media censored any negative stories about their candidate, Joe Biden, but even Wikipedia has gotten into the act, allowing one contributor to suggest that the Hunter Biden story is a GOP hit job and has been "disproven" (It. Has. Not.). Conservative voices that represent opposing views have been silenced via shadow banning, Google relegates searches for negative news about Biden to the back pages of the search results. One of the largest newspapers in the USA, The New York Post, has had its twitter account frozen.

The new Democratic party fantasizes about a victory that will relegate conservatives to the ash heap of history, never to win another national election in the United States. If packing the Supreme Court, adding states to the Union, and/or eliminating the electoral college will get the job done, so be it. 

But their fantasy may be dashed by yet another upset victory—one that demonstrates yet again that America rejects the condescending and sanctimonious worldview of the Left.

We'll know soon enough.