HOW WE GOT HERE: Professor critiques the president's ties!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2017

Part 2—With decades of similar nonsense: Just try to fathom the craziness of that perfectly non-crazy vote.

Candidate Clinton was running for office against Candidate Donald J. Trump. No major candidate has ever dissembled, misstated and self-contradicted more crazily than Candidate Trump.

And yet, that voter in Pennsylvania switched her vote from blue to red for the reason described below. When compared with the ludicrous Trump, Clinton was seen as the liar!

SULLIVAN (2/13/17): Angey Hartman, 50, lives about an hour away in Benton, where every day she walks to the newspaper box to buy the Bloomsburg Press Enterprise.

An antiabortion Christian, Hartman voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. But she flipped from blue to red after deciding that Clinton was untrustworthy and weak on national security.

“I didn’t want to feel like she’d be lying to me,” said the stay-at-home mother, whose autistic son attends Luzerne’s community college. Her husband, a laborer at Girton Manufacturing in Millville, voted for Trump, too, she said.

No candidate ever dissembled, misstated and self-contradicted more crazily than Candidate Trump. Within the political context, he'd been making ludicrous claims since early 2011.

And yet, this voter flipped her vote because Clinton was such a big liar!

Angey Hartman's vote for Trump was, of course, just one vote. That said, the craziness of that vote wasn't especially crazy.

That vote reflected 25 years of laziness, lethargy and dumbness on the part of Our Own Liberal Team. It reflected a powerful, decades-long narrative pushed by the mainstream press corps—and, eventually, by many within Our Own Tribe.

This narrative was aimed at Bill Clinton, then seamlessly transferred to Candidate Gore. For twenty months during Campaign 2000, the mainstream press just kept inventing troubling "lies" by Gore.

Despite our self-admitted brilliance, we liberals just say there and took it. Sixteen years later, this narrative beat us again, in one of the most embarrassing defeats any group has ever arranged to sustain.

Good God! Last November, the Democratic candidate was widely perceived as the big liar as compared to Candidate Trump! When you lose an election that way, you've established yourselves as one of the most incompetent groups who ever drew breath on the planet.

Did the Green Bay Packers ever lose a game to an 80-pounds-and-under sixth grade team? If they had, it would perhaps have been as embarrassing as the way we self-impressed liberals managed to lose Angey Hartman's vote.

This raises an obvious question. Is it possible that last November's outcome is, in some very minor way, perhaps an unflattering reflection on Us?

We liberals love to trash The Others, the people like Hartman, taking special care to highlight their bigotry and their dumbness. Is it possible that the world-class dumbness in this story in some way belongs to Us?

If you know our liberal tribe, you already know the answer. Nothing will ever make us see the role we've played in our endless defeats. We're a parody of a satire about bubble-encased true belief.

Can anything ever make us see the roads which led to November's defeat? We are quite brilliantly able to see the racism of Everyone Who Isn't Exactly Like Us. In our manifest group dumbness, will we ever be able to see the other roads which led to that gong-show defeat?

Almost surely not. But in last Saturday's New York Times, the editors displayed a bit of the wider cultural dumbness which helps explain how we managed to get here, to this ridiculous place.

For the next several weeks, we plan to describe the various ways we created our own defeat. For today, let's take it slow and easy. Let's discuss Professor Ford, he of the Stanford Law School.

Last Saturday morning, a thoughtful piece by Professor Ford dominated the New York Times' op-ed page. Thanks to a sprawling, imaginative, hard-copy layout, the professor's column ate three fifths of the page above the fold. It continued a bit below that.

The professor's column—he's from Stanford Law—concerned a deeply significant aspect of Donald J. Trump's puzzling presidency. Believe it or not, these were the hard-copy headlines in our most brilliant newspaper:

The Ties That Blind
What do those shiny, badly-knotted neckties say about the president?

Actually, yes; you're reading that right! Professor Ford, from Stanford Law, had penned a piece about the way Donald J. Trump knots his ties and secures them to his person.

(The piece took up enormous space because its text was published in lines of print which ranged from very short to much longer. Cleverly, this let the printed text affect the outline of a necktie! Which is what the piece was about!)

Professor Ford was attempting to answer a basic question: What can we learn from Donald J. Trump's shiny ties, which are badly-knotted?

If you have two brain cells to rub together, you may already know the answer. We can learn nothing from Donald Trump's ties, though the thoughtful professor said different.

We won't bother quoting today from this jackass column. We'll proceed directly to our own question:

What might we learn, from this jackassed piece, about the ways we liberals managed to lose an election to Donald J. Trump?

Our answer spreads back over several decades. The sheer inanity of this column reflects on the failings of the upper-end professoriate, whose perceived wisdom we gullible liberals have never been able to quit.

Is it possible to be a bigger ninny than the man who wrote that column? Don't bother asking that question! We liberals are congenitally unable to see the way this foppish academic guild has failed us in the past quarter century, through action and inaction.

The sheer inanity of that column also reflects on the New York Times, whose behavior we liberals have never been able to bring into focus. In large part, that's because our career liberal leaders refuse to discuss the New York Times, an institution which plays a key role in the development of their all-important careers. Good jobs at good pay!

Finally, the sheer inanity of that column will remind any sentient liberal of the types of indignities we've tolerated down through the years. During the twenty months of Campaign 2000, we sat by and stared into space as the more liberal candidate was assailed for his deeply troubling wardrobe—for his boots, his suits, his polo shirts; for the "earth tone" color of one of his suits; for the number of buttons on his suit jackets (three); for the nefarious purposes put on display by the choice of those polo shirts!

For the way he "let a woman teach him to be a man!"

We sat by as Chris Matthews brought a body language expert onto his show to pretend to discuss such manifest nonsense—to pretend to explain how the candidate's choices showed how "that woman with all the hair" had transformed him into "this new today's man-woman." To pretend to discuss the way a three-button suit was a sexual signal to voters like Hartman.

Today, Matthews is sold to us as Darling Rachel's very bestest, most brilliantest friend. Back then, we just sat there and took it, in the lazy, low-IQ way which has long defined our tribe, which loves Rachel's mugging.

Will we liberals ever be willing to see the truth about our defeats? Not likely!

That would require an honest assessment of the world-class dumbness residing in Us. We much prefer to tell ourselves about The Others, the racists.

Out on The Farm, Professor Ford "is writing a book about dress codes." So the New York Times told us this weekend in its identity line.

The professor wrote his stupid piece to pimp his important forthcoming book. The Times ran to put his nonsense in print, just as it ever was.

Will we ever be willing to say that this bullshit has to stop? If you have those two brain cells, you may know the answer.

Tomorrow: If we might borrow from our Woolf, we're now declaring ourselves to be "siting bolt upright... Awake."