Earlier today, Bret Baier apologized for a report that an indictment was imminent against Hillary Clinton and that her private email server had been hacked by foreign intelligence services. Unfortunately, that apology came two days after Fox News spent more than two hours hyping stories the network has now retracted. But Baier is not the only supposedly “straight news” Fox host who has helped enable FBI agents out to get Clinton.
As I wrote earlier, in a must-read article in The Daily Beast, reporter Wayne Barrett notes the connection between Trump supporter and Fox News regular Rudy Giuliani and a man named James Kallstrom. Before becoming mayor of New York, Giuliani was a federal prosecutor who worked closely with the FBI there. It’s that FBI office, Barrett notes, that is investigating Anthony Weiner’s alleged sexting with a minor and “who pressed [FBI Director James] Comey to authorize the review of possible Hillary Clinton-related emails on a Weiner device that led to the explosive letter the director wrote Congress.”
Then there’s this from Barrett:
Kallstrom is the former head of the New York FBI office, installed in that post in the ’90s by then-FBI director Louis Freeh, one of Giuliani’s longtime friends. Kallstrom has, like Giuliani, been on an anti-Comey romp for months, most often on Fox, where he’s called the Clintons as a “crime family.” He has been invoking unnamed FBI agents who contact him to complain about Comey’s exoneration of Clinton in one interview after another, positioning himself as an apolitical champion of FBI values.
Barrett then points to this interview, in October, 2015, when Fox News host Megyn Kelly helped to validate Kallstrom’s “Clintons are criminals” message. For good measure, she implied the Obama administration was helping them get off. Even before Kallstrom opened his mouth, Kelly said in her introduction:
KELLY: Breaking tonight, the Clinton e- mail scandal expands to the White House. As FBI agents investigating Hillary Clinton accuse President Obama of sabotaging their case.
The “sabotage” was President Obama saying, on 60 Minutes, that Clinton’s emails were not a national security problem. Before trotting out Kallstrom, Fox reporter James Rosen used his appearance to run through some of Fox’s greatest anti-Obama hits about his supposed animosity toward law enforcement.
Then “straight news anchor” Kelly had this exchange with Kallstrom (with my emphases):
KELLY: Jim, thank you for being back on the program. So, you know a lot of the agents involved in this investigation. How angry must they be tonight?
JAMES KALLSTROM, FORMER FBI ASSISTANT DIRECTOR IN CHARGE: Well, I know some of the agents, Megyn. I know some of the supervisors and I know the senior staff. And they’re [PO’d], I mean, no question. This is like someone driving a nail, you know, another nail into the coffin of the criminal justice system and what the public thinks about it. You know, that’s the real hurtful part. You know, the public sees this and, you know, people shouldn’t wonder why the government, in general, is held in such low esteem.
KELLY: They’re going in there. They’re seizing four computer servers from the State Department just last week. They’re doing their jobs. They’re trying to figure out whether National Security was compromised and yet, you’ve got the commander-in-chief out there declaring this over, for all intents and purposes, in that “60 Minutes” interview.
KALLSTROM: Yes. I mean, it’s over the top. I mean, first off, all this will do is make them more committed, not that they need being more committed. Because they’re going to do the right thing. I know these guys. I spent 28 years there myself. So, I know how it works. And they’re going to find the truth or they’re going to say there is no evidence here. They’re going to tell the truth about what happens. And we have to be big boys and we have to stand-up and say what that truth is and deal with it, you know, the way our criminal justice system demands. I know Jim Comey really well.
KELLY: He’s a director.
KALLSTROM: He’s a great guy. I worked for Governor Pataki when we backgrounded him to be the U.S. attorney in New York, as a good friend, he has a good backbone that he’ll do the right thing. He has a 10 year term and he doesn’t serve necessarily at the pleasure.
KELLY: Uh-hm. But the FBI doesn’t get to make the final call. They have to present their findings to the Department of Justice and might there be fear now that this is all going to be for not because the fix is in.
So, Kallstrom was for Comey before he was against him.
Last night, Kallstrom was back on The Kelly File. This time, he insisted he had never talked to “actual agents” involved in the Clinton case and never said he had. Even as he suggested he had inside knowledge.
KALLSTROM: I never did claim I talked to the actual agents. I would never do that. I would never call up people that were investigating something and even put them on the spot. I wouldn’t do that. But I’ve talked to hundreds and hundreds of people in the FBI. Mostly retired people and some people that are currently on the job that are not directly involved, but, you know it’s a small organization.
You know, they know what’s going on. And the agents are furious. And I haven’t walked anything back. I didn’t walk anything up that deserved to be walked back. So, I don’t know what they’re talking about.
Kallstrom had just done a 180 from his 2015 interview with Kelly. He also contradicted the confusing mess of what he had reportedly told Barrett:
Kallstrom adamantly denied he’d ever said he was in contact with agents “involved” in the Clinton case, insisting that he didn’t even know “the agents’ names.” He asked if this story was “a hit piece,” and contended that it was “offensive” to even suggest that he’d communicated with those agents. When I emailed him two quotes where he made that claim, he responded: “I know agents in the building who used to work for me. I don’t know any agents in the Washington field office involved directly in the investigation.”
Later, though he acknowledged that “the bulk” of the agents on the Weiner case are “in the New York office...”
Kelly referenced Barrett’s Daily Beast article in her interview, so she had clearly read it. But rather than press Kallstrom to clarify who he has been talking to and claiming to talk on behalf of, Kelly agreed with him that he has not walked anything back and moved on. Nor did she challenge Kallstrom's credibility when he declared:
KALLSTROM: I don't think [the FBI is] Trumpland, but I think its people that are sick and tired of the lack of the rule of law being brought forward and due process being brought forward and they're frustrated that they cannot conduct investigations properly. And the Department of Justice is stone walling at every turn.
I mean just look at the WikiLeaks stuff. I mean, it's clear. It's very clear what's going on, and it's not going to change. It's not going to change until there's a different president. And if Hillary Clinton's the president, that's not going to change and we're going to have a constitutional tussle, big time.
Barrett’s article concludes:
Fox is the pipeline for the fifth column inside the bureau, a battalion that says it’s doing God’s work, chasing justice against those who are obstructing it, while, in fact, it’s doing GOP work, even on the eve of a presidential election.
This is not Sean Hannity we’re talking about here, but the supposedly new face of Fox News, Megyn Kelly. Put together with Bret Baier, the new face of Fox looks a lot like the old one.
Watch Kallstrom on the November 3, 2016 The Kelly File below, and on October 16, 2015 underneath.
Thank you for the recommendation. Are those things good for dizzy spells? That’s my biggest complaint right now.
Don’t forget: a) He’s close to the Bush family and b) he’s an establishment Republican. Trump is a huge threat to the establishment. I would not be surprised if he was not behind some of the anti-Trump leaks during the campaign. In fact, I expected it.
Hillary (20 years the most admired woman on the planet) by 120+ electoral votes. You saw it here first, folks.
I believe Tuesday evening will show Clinton prevailing in Nevada as well as Florida, NC and New Hampshire – almost completely due to the early voting efforts. In that event, the election will be over very quickly and the soul searching can begin.
Nate Silver is continuing to be extremely cautious about what his model indicates. It’s unfortunate to see him erupt like that at the Huffington Post, as he’s normally a lot more reserved than that – but it tells us that emotions are running high even among the statisticians. Silver’s model still has Clinton winning 2:1, and shows that the states we discussed are close enough that early voting could easily tip them one way or the other. Silver’s model also keeps him in a careful position where if the election tipped either way, the model would be correct. No matter what happens on Tuesday, he will still be able to stand up for the reliability of his system. The other poll aggregators are being a lot more aggressive, which probably feels better for them on an emotional level but can be extremely risky if things don’t go the way they are thinking. Just look at the prognosticators Fox News was touting a month or two ago who were confidently predicting a Trump sweep based on various custom systems they’d run over previous election situations. Silver is making sure he is never lumped into that group of “overly exuberant” analysts. It may be frustrating for those of us who would like a more definitive statement – but it’s the safe and cautious approach for which he is known.
After showering some rain on Hillary, let me offer a huge, compelling ray of election win sunshine her way.
I ran into (and tweeted about) this Jon Ralston article yesterday regarding Nevada early voting. It’s a bombshell – no exaggeration! Since then liberal blogs (e.g., Daily Kos, PoliticusUSA) have run with it and even Fox News mentioned it today.
In a nutshell, Ralston has crunched the numbers and made a very compelling case Hillary has Nevada sewn up because of a Hispanic surge in early voting. No October Surprise can overcome Hillary’s Nevada early voting advantage. Hillary’s Nevada early voting advantage swamps any election day scenario.
http://www.ktnv.com/news/ralston/the-nevada-early-voting-blog
Why does this matter since Nevada is only 6 electoral college votes? Well, Daily Kos has put out an electoral map which assumes Nevada goes to Hillary then gives Trump wins in Florida, North Carolina, and New Hampshire. Hillary still wins with 275 electoral votes. I’d drop that to 274 because there’s a breaking story a Washington state pro-Bernie elector has gone public he refuses to vote Hillary.
http://m.dailykos.com/stories/2016/11/5/1591615/—Trump-is-Dead-in-Nevada-John-Ralston-Trump-has-NO-Path-to-the-Presidency?detail=facebook
Not slam-dunk proof of a Hillary win but I’m seeing a compelling case her firewall is very likely to hold.
Want more proof? Even Chris Wallace getting softballed during Maria Bartiroma’s embarrassing “Sunday Morning” futures Trump hour long infomercial admitted the polls seem to be shifting back Hillary’s way. The conventional wisdom being expressed by Foxies is any poll shifting has been Republicans coming home reluctantly to Trump but still not in the percentages Republican candidates have drawn in the past. The shifts aren’t due to Comey’s October Surprise.
As far as I’m concerned, there’s almost no difference between Fox and Trump other than the packaging. The message is the same and they each get it from the other.
I’m still having dizzy spells and I told a friend today I think the election is making me sick. I truly believe that. I’ve had dizzy spells my entire life but none as bad or as prolonged as this one.
As for the polling, did you all see this?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nate-silver-election-forecast_us_581e1c33e4b0d9ce6fbc6f7f
Here’s Silver’s response:
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/794994593574113282?link_id=0&can_id=3e3c4a6c7c8bbe446901b50b4e2ac8d4&source=email-nate-silver-is-unskewing-polls-in-trumps-direction-heres-how&email_referrer=nate-silver-is-unskewing-polls-in-trumps-direction-heres-how&email_subject=nate-silver-is-unskewing-polls-in-trumps-direction-heres-how
Frankly, I don’t know who to believe. Silver does have Hillary’s chances ticking up a bit, though in his latest.
And even Silver is saying that Clinton could reasonably take Florida and North Carolina as well as Nevada, and not by the long shot Trump needs to run the table.
I’ve also appreciated Sabato on this cycle. He’s been fairly reasonable throughout – including pouring water on the more fanciful ideas of Megyn Kelly at times. He’s consistently had the race for Clinton and still does. There was one poll this week that I believe Kelly tried to cite as good for Trump and Sabato said as politely as he could that it was not worth the paper it was printed on.
The biggest surprise in this race for me has been Karl Rove, at least up to early this past week. Likely due to his disgust with Trump, he was presenting a calm, reasonable face in discussing how the polling numbers look, which has never been good for Trump. He’s started to get excited this week about Trump maybe having a chance and he’s made some predictions I really don’t believe, but I strongly doubt we’ll see a Rove meltdown like 2012 on Tuesday. (Frankly, I don’t think he’ll ever do that again – he must have seen how that came off during his exile from Fox News in its aftermath…)
I think Lawrence O’Donnell said that. I like it.
Lawrence O’Donnell last week had a pollster on looking at the Florida early voters. Without repeating all the details, he claimed it was a far more reliable sample than random polling. His take was beyond rosey for Hillary.
More reliable IMHO is my state’s own Larry Sabato who is giving Hillary Florida and a comfortable electoral win. His analysis came after the FBI stink bomb. He factored it in and largely wrote it off.
So, yes, I can point rays of sunshine Hillary’s way. There is no doubt I’d rather be a Hillary voter than an Orange Hitler voter right now. Fox is obviously in a mad panic.
I stick with Nate Silver because he plays it careful and conservative (not in the political sense). Daily Kos and HuPo projections have barely budged with their crazy high favoring Hillary. Personally, I have more faith in Nate than all of the above though Sabato is a rock solid analyst and reasonably persuasive.
Back when Nate had Der Furor at ~15% he posted you don’t interpret that as him having next to no chance. 1 in 7 simulations he had Trump winning. Now it’s 1 on 3.
Hence my nervous bed wetting. 😅
Please Santa, an editor.
Election night may be very short if Florida is called early. I think it’s a lot bluer than people think. Also there is the intimidation factor this year. Donald Trump appeals to the worst goddamn people. And a lot of those people are petulant bullies. The spouses of said bullies probably can’t wait to throw the lever for Hillary in the privacy of the voting booth.
I think the number of vote republican and nothing else people is <33%. Plus or minus a few percentage points.
I think we’ll find in the long run that Fox News is not more bent on destroying the Clintons than they were on destroying President Obama. They hate them equally, and will not pass up an opportunity to demonstrate their hatred. The reason for the hysteria now is that they can see themselves dealing with Hillary Clinton for the next four years, along with a more cooperative Senate. I think their immediate panic is that their Supreme Court obstruction gambit is about to fail, and most of the people at Fox News are hell-bent on that issue alone.
We agree that it’s ridiculous that so many people have fallen for the right wing lies about the Clintons. As I’ve said, this is the result of a constant repetition of smears that have been floating around for nearly 25 years. They started with the hate speech of Rush Limbaugh in the early 90s and then got amplified by Drudge and Fox News in the latter 90s and have accelerated since then. How many times do sane people have to remind everyone that Hillary Clinton was NEVER fired from the Watergate commission? How many times do sane people have to remind everyone that the Clintons are career politicians, not career criminals? But every single time we stamp out one of these idiocies, another right winger brings the corpse out of the casket again and starts singing that old song again. Most people don’t pay that close attention to this stuff – so when they hear the same story over and over and over, they assume that some part of it must be true. I’m frankly surprised there aren’t more people who think awful things about the Clintons, given how long the right wing has been smearing them. Think of it this way – there’s about 25-30% of the public that’s more right wing and already believes anything rotten about the Clintons. What those numbers tell us is that another 20-25% of the country is gullible enough to fall for the nonsense. The rest of the country doesn’t buy it. To me, that’s actually hopeful.
I have a feeling CNN isn’t covering the FBI scandal that heavily right now because a) they’re afraid it will make them look like they’re just trying to find a “Trump scandal” three days before the election and b) they don’t want to do anything further to potentially affect the outcome. I believe we’ll see a lot more coverage once the race is over. I hope we do.
I strongly disagree with the notion that there’s been a “dramatic drop off in black vote” for Clinton. That’s not what the numbers show. The numbers show she’s getting 85-90% of what President Obama received. That’s actually good news, and I’m hoping it maintains through Tuesday. Fox News and AM radio want you to think that she can’t get black voters, but I’m not buying that one. And they can trot out Leslie Wimes as many times as they want, but it’s not going to work.
Please also remember that Nate Silver’s calculation does not actually show the true Electoral College count. His 290.6 or what have us is based on where he’s thinking the chances are of actually taking the various states. If Clinton actually takes the swing states she looks like she’ll be taking, her EC number will actually be 323 – that includes North Carolina and Florida where the polling is fairly even but does not consider, as you were mentioning, the early voting, etc. I also am keeping in mind that even Silver isn’t seeing Trump gaining ground on turning Clinton voters to him. What Trump has benefited from is existing GOP voters settling for him and not saying that they will stay home or not vote for the top of the ticket. Clinton’s voters are still with her. I do not see Hillary Clinton or her surrogates in “full panic mode”. I see them closing out their campaign with a big finish – something they should absolutely do. There is no need for them to close out quietly. (And I note that the right wing is indeed panicking if they think it’s some kind of issue that Jay Z used profanity in his rap performance for Clinton last night. I love that they think there’s hypocrisy here – they’re comparing rap lyrics, which are known to be profane, and which the attending audience understands and expects to hear, with Donald Trump’s coarseness toward everyone. Now, if Hillary Clinton was singing Jay Z lyrics in her speech, then I’d have to concede something there, but that would be memorable for many other reasons…)
You’re absolutely right that Trump has a narrow path to win – something he has always had. His path requires that all the right things happen for him and all at the same time. It requires that he have a Ronald Reagan 1980-style landslide where all the cards go right for him and everything goes wrong for Hillary Clinton. I agree this is possible – these things are always possible. I just don’t think it’s particularly likely. If I’m wrong on this count, then the country will have made a disastrous choice that would have extremely dire consequences for a lot of people. We’ll essentially be living in two countries – much more so than we already are.
Everything we have seen indicates that we will have a messy day on Tuesday but one that should result in a situation that does not allow Trump to have any credibility in his attempts to challenge the vote, as I expect he will. I do not expect him or his supporters to concede, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see outlets like Fox News openly challenging the legitimacy of a Hillary Clinton presidency.
The good part about Wednesday morning is that this immediate situation will be finished. The hard part is that the right wing will just be loading up their cannons for another 4 years of constant viciousness. It is my hope that the Clintons’ long-established political skills will enable them to fight this nonsense off and get some work done with both parties.
I get what you’re saying. I agree with what you’re saying. I even still think Hillary is going to win. All that said please hear me out.
I couldn’t stomach today’s “Fox & Friends’” extreme push to put a stake in the heart of the Clinton campaign while pimping Trump. Their stuff has grown so nasty and deeply disturbing I suddenly can’t find the humor in their blatant partisanship. Fox is a lynch mob no longer just interested in tipping the scales. They’re out to destroy Hillary.
Actually, I can live with that since they are what they are. Until I spent a couple of hours today watching CNN. CNN, quite frankly, disgusts me. They’re acting like they’re ESPN hyping a football game. The vast, vast majority of their election coverage is nothing but the horse race to drum up audience excitement. Even that wouldn’t be but so bad if they weren’t addicted to false equivalency to keep it close. In fact, I think CNN is actually going the extra mile to give Trump the benefit of the doubt to tip the scales his way. Is it to make the horse race tighter to boost ratings and election excitement? Is it to convince conservatives they no longer are no longer the “Clinton News Network” (good luck with that)?
No matter how much Trump lies. No matter how much demagoguery spews from his pie hole. No matter how ridiculous his policy positions are on the stump. CNN just doesn’t bother much investigative journalism to fact check and expose his bulls—t for what it is. Then they feel compelled to ignore Hillary’s policies to chatter about her corruption and how many blue states can it flip.
Today CNN reported 51% of Americans think Hillary is a criminal. Let that sink in. We’re no longer talking about alt-right crackpots fed by Drudge and Breitbart though that sick Republican subculture is in the mix. We’re not just talking run-of-the-mill right-wingers picking this up from Fox News though they’re a substantial base. No, a majority of Americans now think Hillary is a criminal. Fox News perpetuates this but that’s expected. My shock is the false equivalency media such as CNN plays a huge role in this misperception well.
CNN’s coverage of the FBI scandal is atrocious. They obviously are putting scant resources, if any, into investigating it. It rarely comes up in panel discussions and when it does the liberals on the panel are timid as mice. They obviously see it as not real or not important. WikiLeaks email hacked by the Russians interfering in our election and potentially tampered with? Can’t get enough of it so they dove into the latest batch even though they admitted it contained nothing but had to breathlessly emphasize how it added to the perception Hillary is a corrupt criminal.
Daily Kos had an explosive article noting Nate Silver’s 538 “has Florida, North Carolina and Nevada leaning Trump.”: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/05/1591602/-Nate-Silver-s-538-Model-Needs-Some-Serious-Tweaking
Let that sink in. Kos pretends Nate Silver’s model is incorrect because it isn’t factoring in early voting. Good luck with that line of thought, Daily Kos, and your happy spin it’s all going Hillary’s way. I’m not hearing that elsewhere particularly with a dramatic drop off in black vote that’s not necessarily being made up in Hispanic vote in critical places.
Sure, Nate has Hillary still squeaking by at 290 electoral votes but Trump has better than a 1 in 3 chance of winning the election. CNN for the first time has Hillary under the 270 secure electoral votes she needs to win. So she’s got to grapple for toss-ups.
The problem I see with Nate Silver isn’t he isn’t factoring in early voting which is a tall order and unpredictable given limited data which forces assumptions like Democrats are voting for Hillary. No, the problem with Nate Silver and CNN which is flipping states blue to red every passing moment is poll lag. The October Surprises, particularly the corrupt interference of the FBI, are so late coming polls can’t keep up and are roughly a week behind. The campaign internal polls are more up to date but then we see Hillary and her surrogates canvasing blue states in full panic mode. Huh? That can’t be good.
We know where the momentum has been up until very recently – all Trump. The only question is have the polls stabilized or is Trump still gaining ground? Is there a natural ceiling of Trumpsters as everyone assumes or are independents going to break for Trump given a slim majority of Americans now think Hillary is a criminal? Is Hillary only go squeak out some wins based on early voting before the October Surprises which would beg the question could Trump have won if everyone voted on November 8th?
I can go on and on with speculation. Sure, the bottom line is Trump has a narrow path to victory if the pundits are to be believed. Sure, that’s how I still lean. All that said, I’m going to have some sleepless nights until Wednesday morning. That sucks and I blame our sloppy, inept media for my insomnia.
It looks to me like the GOP has taken an interesting lesson from their defeat in 2012. After Romney lost that year, they were told that they needed to expand their base and reach out to other demographic groups like Hispanics if they wanted to actually win the White House in the future. They were told to be more inclusive. This approach was openly rejected by hardcore right wingers like Rush Limbaugh and Hannity (copying Limbaugh) – their idea was to not compromise on anything ever. So it would seem that rather than trying to get more people into their tent to vote with them, the right wing answer has been to try to discourage people from the other tent from voting at all. A pretty obstinate strategy. Let’s see how that works out for them on Tuesday – my instincts say they’ll need to go back to the drawing board.
The Fox News and right wing spin about Clinton has ALWAYS been to tell you that she’s going to lose. During the primaries, they repeatedly tried the meme that “Clinton is stuck battling an old socialist!” with the idea that Clinton was somehow weak because Sanders was popular in the early race. Then they tried the meme that “Clinton and the Dems have rigged the system against Sanders and that’s the only reason she’s winning”, which was a demonstrable lie that too many people have sadly believed. (As they have many other lies about the Clintons through the power of repetition since the 1990s) Then they tried going back and forth between those memes. Alternatively, Clinton was supposedly too weak to finish off Sanders and also this incredibly powerful supervillain who was manipulating the system. Then the right wing threw in the meme of “Clinton is scared of a repeat of Obama”. All of these memes proved to be false, and Clinton predictably won the primary campaign with ease.
Then the right wing tried the meme that “Sanders’ voters will vote for Trump, not Clinton! She’s gonna lose!” This was another easily disprovable meme, as the numbers have proven since then. The actual percentage of Sanders voters who would vote for Trump, or refuse to vote for either, is actually even smaller than I had thought it would be. I was thinking 5-10 percent of the Sanders base would stay home. Turns out that this is looking to be less than 5 percent. Of course, Fox News keeps trying to find those isolated people, like Leslie Wimes or the one Elector in Washington State who doesn’t want to support Clinton. But it plays into the overall theme that Fox News wants you to believe about Clinton – that she’s weak and failing and won’t win.
Now we have Fox News in overdrive trying to convince everyone that Clinton’s polling numbers are in free fall and that Trump’s momentum will somehow carry him over the top, even through the unlikely scenario that he suddenly pulls off this landslide out of nowhere. (My favorite part of this meme is the notion of the “shy Trump voter”. Have these people met a Trump supporter? Seriously?) Megyn Kelly has been specifically pounding the idea that Clinton is panicked and hanging on to maybe barely win on Tuesday, with the added smear that she wouldn’t win if the election were held a month later because Trump’s support would have grown more by then. In other words – the meme that Clinton’s house of cards is collapsing and if she wins, it will only be because she was lucky that the election was held this early. I wouldn’t even know how to answer that kind of nonsense. I do know that pundits even on Fox News have admitted that the polling shift we’ve been seeing has really been about more GOP voters settling on voting for Trump rather than staying home or sitting on their hands. Nate Silver has discussed this as well, and it’s a good point. Clinton’s support has not collapsed and isn’t collapsing – we’re just seeing more GOP voters being willing to say they’ll vote for Trump than were willing to say it before.
If I was the Trump campaign, I’d actually be very worried about the number of spouses of Trump voters who are “shy” about admitting they may actually vote for Clinton. We’ve seen several of these cases in places like Texas, and I don’t think they’re isolated. It’s a lot more reasonable to believe that there are people in Trump territory who don’t want to be screamed at and/or attacked for voting for Clinton than to believe that there is this “silent majority” for Trump.
I also want to keep in mind that Fox News and the right wing tried these memes on President Obama, not once but TWICE. Am I the only one remembering the tired (and racist) notion that we heard in 2008 that America would not choose a black president once they got into the privacy of the voting booth? Am I the only one remembering the right wing smear from 2008 that Obama was only polling well because people were lying to their pollsters to sound more inclusive? How about the 2012 nonsense about “unskewed polls” and about this coming landslide for Mitt Romney the right wing so desperately wanted? How about how Dick Morris, Newt Gingrich and others flat-out lied to the Fox News audience to try to gin up Romney’s numbers in the last week? I’ll give some Fox News pundits a point for remembering that Romney’s large rallies did not translate to more votes, and even that this didn’t help Sanders – but we still have plenty of folks on Fox News and AM radio trying to say that Clinton doesn’t have the “enthusiasm” of the Trump voters and “just look at all those crowds that come out for Trump!” These are the same media people who have been trying to tell everyone that President Obama was a failure from even before he set foot inside the White House. To my mind, their history shows that they have no credibility.
I will be watching the results on Tuesday evening with great interest. Let’s see how Fox News deals with this one – 2012 was great entertainment. I’m curious to see how quickly the spinning begins after 11pm Eastern time.
Eyes, you’re not alone in noting how nonsensical the coverage has become over the past week.
Last night, Giuliani went on Hannity to try to laugh off this matter, but he was clearly sweating bullets while doing so. Giuliani now wants people to believe the “big surprise” he said Trump had in store was just a speech appearance. That’s an obvious, boldfaced lie, and I’m not sure how Giuliani thinks he’s going to get away with it. The evidence is thick that both Giuliani and Kallstrom, talking to sympathetic and angry right wing FBI agents, have tried to stir up a pile of negative coverage of Hillary Clinton, in the hopes they could pull off what Bill O’Reilly fomented about on Thursday – a “tipping effect” of negative material that the right wing wishes would carry Donald Trump over the top. The reality is that not only did they fail in this endeavor, but their efforts are now putting THEM into legal trouble.
I think we again need to remember – in order for Trump to somehow win on Tuesday, he has to win EVERY SINGLE SWING STATE and then after that, he was to continue winning states in Clinton’s more secure states. If he were to do that, it would be a massive landslide in his favor. The polling and the demographics have never shown this happening. Trump will win the same voters he had in the primaries – angry white males who did not go to college and some angry white females who did not go to college. And if the rest of the population shows up, that portion of the white demographic simply will not be enough to get Trump very far on Tuesday.
Even Fox News personalities have admitted on different shows that Clinton’s ground game has brought out a huge number of voters in early voting. They have admitted that Trump could win the vote on Election Day but still lose because Clinton got her people to the polls over a month earlier. I also note that when the pundits note that the African American demographic isn’t as excited about Clinton as they were about Obama, the difference in that intensity is somewhere between 10 and 15 percent. Meaning that instead of 100 of those votes going to Clinton, 85 or more go to her. And those votes are NOT going to Trump. There have been stories this week about the Hispanic populations of multiple states as well, which is voting overwhelmingly for Clinton – in a much larger number than they did for Obama – which is how states like Nevada will wind up in her corner. And more to the point – the non-white vote in Florida is what Clinton will need to carry that state.
Fox News and right wing media want you to think that Clinton and her campaign are “in panic mode”, that she’s in terrible trouble and that if she wins, it’ll only be due to her being saved by the bell or some nonsense like that. In the first place, that’s both false and a projection. As was reported last night even on Fox News, the Clinton campaign has been calm and methodical throughout this process – they are confident in their numbers, particularly in how well they’ve done in the early voting. (This is why Fox News was trying to spread fear about people changing their votes afterward) The Trump campaign is trying to present a front of being confident, but they’re regularly being challenged on that, and what I’ve seen of Conway this week indicates a woman who is extremely fearful of what is coming on Tuesday. If those results turn out the way they’ve trended throughout, particularly after she’s claimed she has internal polling showing something else, her credibility will be doubly tarnished. (Obviously, her brand was badly damaged by even taking Trump as a client, but all the lying over the last couple of weeks is going to make it worse – think about how Karl Rove did after the 2012 election, where Fox News didn’t want him on their airwaves for a year.)
Bill Maher had his most amazing “Real Time” last night I’ve ever seen. Part of it was he finally got to interview President Obama but the other was the absence of humor other than his brief initial stand-up. He actually admitted he had a couple of drinks before the show to anesthetize him before discussing the alarming politicization of the FBI into something J. Edgar Hoover would be most proud of. Also, Maher was raising the alarm bells Trump stands a very good chance to be the next President with CNN having Hillary under 270 electoral votes for the first time.
Maher, IMHO, went overboard in fretting over Trump’s neo-Fascist tendencies (and that’s coming from me, a guy who thinks Der Furor is a neo-Fascist). Maher has me recalling the classic “Star Wars” line: “So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.”
http://www.starwars.com/video/so-this-is-how-liberty-dies
However, there was a discussion on how Trump has exploited and accelerated the crumbling of institutions like the media, political parties, and our government as brakes on his neo-Fascist ascendency. It was amazing to witness especially when you consider our failed popular tee-vee media is too busy babbling about ratings boosting horserace bulls—t to ponder what’s really going on.
Naturally, “Fox & Friends” was churning hard to watch right-wing propaganda on the FBI corruption story. In fact, “Fox & Friends” was so hard to watch and made me so sick to my stomach I had to switch over to CNN. CNN, that lame outlet for false equivalencies, is just babbling endlessly about the horse race they’re determined to make as close as possible to prove they’re not the Clinton News Network. CNN has ceased being a news agency. They might as well as merge with ESPN because they view politics as sports entertainment. Are they discussing FBI corruption? Oh, of course not. Do these idiots realize they will be the 1st under attack by a Trump administration intolerant of free speech unless it is ‘freely’ flattering Hail Hitler?
So the biggest political bombshell I’ve ever witnessed – the FBI interfering in a presidential election – is being swept under the rug by tee-vee media.
3 more days. 3 more days. 3 more days. 3 more days…