Star scribe sees Trump support holding strong!

MONDAY, MARCH 20, 2017

Frankly, as always, that's Rich: We watched the House committee hearing this morning. In an hour or so, we're heading off for a chic Washington, D.C. renunion dinner with our high school classmate, Name Withheld, who lived one block over on Georgetown Avenue, just down from the Alameda.

These factors will reduce our posting today. We'll simply ask you to ponder one point by Frank Rich in this new, deeply sad piece for New York magazine.

We'll return to Rich's piece within the next few days. That said, is it time for a change Over Here in our own liberal world? No one makes this need more obvious than Rich, the dumbest star in the liberal firmament of the past twenty-five years.

His new piece for New York is extremely dumb. But that's been true of most of his oeuvre since he worked so hard to put George W. Bush in the White House. Bush and Gore were peas in a pod, he insisted again and again.

As a general matter, Rich is begging liberals, in his new piece, to Never, Ever Make the Mistake of Attempting to Speak to Those People. Please don't be polite about Them. Please maintain your loathing!

You just can't reason with Them, Rich declares. Frankly, in classic Rich fashion, he offers this as part of his evidence:

RICH (3/19/17): The most insistent message of right-wing media hasn’t changed since the Barry Goldwater era: Government is inherently worthless, if not evil, and those who preach government activism, i.e., liberals and Democrats, are subverting America. Facts on the ground, as [Arlie] Hochschild saw in Louisiana, do nothing to counter this bias...Reagan’s old dictum remains gospel on the right (Vance included): “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” In Portsmouth, Ohio, the epicenter of opiate-pill mills and of Quinones’s book, Trump won by a landslide. As he did in Ohio’s Butler County, where Vance grew up and which now ranks eighth among all American counties in the increase in the rate of drug-related deaths between 2004 (when opioid fatalities first spiked) and 2014.

As polls uniformly indicate, nothing that has happened since November 8 has shaken that support....

Please don't stop loathing Those People, Rich explicitly says in his piece. Any attempt to reason with Them will be utterly pointless!

As evidence, Rich notes that nothing has shaken the love Those People feel for Donald J. Trump. Polls uniformly show this, he says—and he can't be talking about Portsmouth, Ohio polls, since Portsmouth polls don't exist.

According to Rich, polls uniformly show that nothing has happened to Donald J. Trump's support. Except, uh-oh:

According to these Gallup data, Trump's approval/disapproval figures were basically even in late January, when he drew the largest crowd in human history to his sun-splashed inauguration. Less than two months later, he has been seventeen points in the hole, on average, over the past three days in Gallup's daily tracker.

In two months, Trump has lost almost twenty percent of his support.

To Rich, this can mean only one thing: "As polls uniformly indicate, nothing that has happened since November 8 has shaken [Trump's] support." Is it possible that Donald J. Trump is writing this stupenagel's stuff?

Good God, Rich is dumb! But so what? Despite or because of this fact, he's been a liberal icon for years. (When he appears on the Maddow Show, he's of course introduced and pandered to as "the great Frank Rich.")

Given Rich's manifest dumbness and his love of tribal loathing, nothing makes our point more clear. It's time for a change in the mainstream press—but it's also time for a big major change in the ways we proceed Over Here.

We'll return to Rich's piece in the next few days. Frankly, Rich has been peddling bullroar forever. It's high time we cancelled the sale.