MONDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2024
Could that explain the border? Could Tim Alberta have a point in the shocking thing he said?
He made the statement on Friday evening's Washington Week. We posted the transcript this morning:
ALBERTA (11/8/24): As someone who has spilled a lot of ink on Donald Trump's lies over the past decade, I just want to say this when we talk about propaganda. Arguably, the three most determinative things in this election were propaganda from the Democratic Party.
Number one: "Joe Biden is fine and totally fit to be president for another four years."
He wasn't.
Number two: "The border is closed. It's under control. There's nobody coming in."
That was not true.
And number three: "Hey, don't worry about inflation. Prices are fine. Bidenomics! Everything's great. You guys don't know what you're talking about. Actually, the economy is in great shape."
This is propaganda to millions of Americans who said, "None of that is true, and therefore, I don't trust you."
They might not trust Trump, but they don't trust Democrats either.
Ignore the word "propaganda." Is it possible that those three declarations—and yes, those declarations were constantly made—helped elect Candidate Trump?
Starting tomorrow, we'll continue to puzzle that out. We'll add a fourth major area of concern, an area Alberta skipped—the general area which has come to be known as "Woke."
With respect to such issues, we'll eventually posit a basic law of human behavior:
There has never been a good intention which can't be unwisely pursued.
For better or worse, also this:
Sometimes, our (apparent) good intentions may cloak something more primal.
For today, we'll suggest that you consider a passage from Paul Krugman's new column. It takes us back to a very basic question:
What explains President Biden's policy at the southern border over his first three and a half years? Candidate Harris was repeatedly asked, and she repeatedly ducked the question.
Does Krugman's new column suggest a possible answer to this unanswered question? Here is the passage we'll note:
Why Trump’s Deportations Will Drive Up Your Grocery Bill
[...]
Deficits—contrary to what you sometimes hear—don’t always cause inflation. After the 2008 financial crisis, warnings about deficit-driven inflation proved wrong because (as basic economics predicted) deficits aren’t inflationary in a depressed economy. Even President Biden’s big spending in 2021 took place in an economy with depressed employment, and the inflationary impact was further mitigated by a surge in immigration, which expanded the labor force and helped create the capacity to meet higher demand.
Krugman said it, and we believe it! During President Biden's term, "a surge in immigration...helped create the capacity to meet higher demand."
We devised a theory a few weeks back concerning President Biden's border policy. Our theory is more like a speculation, but we're willing to speculate that our theory could possibly even be right!
Krugman's statement brought our theory to mind. At some point, we'll spell it out.
Biden’s 2020 campaign was in essence no different on policy and tone than Harris’ 2024 campaign (with nearly the exact same staff), essentially both campaigns were the same on “issues” like the border and wokeness.
ReplyDeleteYet Biden won handily against the same opponent.
This circumstance makes it a bit easier to analyze as we can hold for the similarities and better isolate the differences.
The clear and most significant differences are the lack of widespread use of mail in ballots and the Dem candidate was a woman of color.
Somerby lists three “things” from Alberta but these are obvious strawmen, so they can just be dismissed.
Somerby seems to take issue with Biden’s policies concerning the border, but he does not articulate what his issues are, per usual.
What notions we can glean regarding Somerby’s issues with immigration, seem misguided and inaccurate. In reality, the current wave of immigration started under Trump (a result of his disastrous foreign affairs policies), and was temporarily halted due to the pandemic. In reality, the correlation between immigration and inflation is weak, at best. In reality, this country is fueled by immigration, it is a net positive, as Biden/Harris has repeatedly stated.
Somerby ends this post with a brag, but it’s laughable because Somerby is ignorant on the issue. What the brag does expose is Somerby’s Achilles heel (huzzah!), his undying need for dominance and to be relevant and influential. Sorry Somerby, you just are too poor of a thinker to gain that kind of credibility.
"What notions we can glean regarding Somerby’s issues with immigration, seem misguided and inaccurate."
DeleteGlean? Seem misguided? How about we state it this way:
When we put words into someone else's mouth, we shockingly find that other person is wrong, wrong, wrong!
Somerby doesn’t explain what he finds problematic about Biden or Harris’s policies. Ever.
DeleteI see. That's the reason for gleaning and seeming then?
DeleteWhat else is there?
Delete"What explains President Biden's policy at the southern border over his first three and a half years?"
ReplyDeleteI can't read minds, so any answer to this question is a guess. My guess FWIW is that Biden's initial border policy was undoing whatever Trump was doing. My other guess is that Biden wanted to admit as many migrants as possible, because they would eventually gain to right to vote and the majority would vote Democratic,
See above.
DeleteHow can anyone discuss what Somerby doesn’t say?
DeleteNonsense. All Mr. Biden wanted was an ice-cream and a diaper change. He's got nothing to do with it.
DeleteEven Tim Alberta feels the border is open.
ReplyDeleteHe's probably been so propagandized by the Right's years of whining about "feelings", he failed to identify that feelings, not reality, carry the day with voters.
Speaking of propaganda.
DeleteIf TimAlberta has some sort of proof that inflation hasn't fallen in the last two years, or that our borders are actually open, now might be a good time for him to lay those cars on the table.
ReplyDeleteIf he can't. At least he is speaking about propaganda from a place of authority.
"Starting tomorrow, we'll continue to puzzle that out."
ReplyDeleteThanks for the head's up. I expect Bob's election post-mortem to last weeks or months.
Possibly years (hint: Al Gore).
Two former liberals, Somerby & Kevin Drum, are now conservative. That, in itself, presents a case study of whatever phenomenon has swept the country as a whole. If Somerby were to explain his own rightward shift, perhaps we could understand what has happened to elect Trump.
ReplyDelete"A MAGA troll who recently was exposed for posing as a Black woman online, was spotted at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, the location where Trump is conducting presidential transition planning. "
ReplyDeleteIf this guy, named Joey Mannarino, could pose as a black woman, then Cecelia (who behaves like a man posing as a woman) could also be a male MAGA troll.
Oddly, Cecelia is overly concerned about non-existent trans issues, which suggests that her posing as a woman online may be not just a partisan political tactic but working out some of her own issues online. Rejecting trans people sounds like Freud's reaction formation, where she fights the whole idea of being trans while choosing to become another gender to do so. Like the idea that the most homophobic right wingers may be the ones attracted to the same sex but fighting to suppress conscious awareness of their own attraction.
The problem with Freud's diagnoses is that they are difficult to falsify. If Cecelia denies this, it will tend to confirm it in psychoanalytic minds. But Cecelia just doesn't seem like a woman, not even a divergent or atypical woman. She seems like a caricature, which is what one might get from a troll pretending to be female.
Before you condemn anyone for picking on Cecelia, remember that it is the MAGAs doing this role playing. If they weren't doing it, we wouldn't have reason to question what Cecelia's game is.
DeleteAnonymouse 10:46pm, it’s interesting that you think transwomen are nonexistent. I happen to think they exist, but suit yourself.
DeleteI don’t think we should pretend that biology is a matter of how you feel. A man can feel like woman and dress like one and that should be tolerated, but not to point of arguing that he is really a woman rather than a man with gender dysphoria.
Once again I will tell you that if you want to believe that I’m a man, have at it. I’m words on a screen here and that fact is a very good and comforting thing because your obsession with me is getting weirder and weirder.
"A man can feel like woman and dress like one and that should be tolerated"
DeleteTolerating it would be cruel and unusual.
Repeatedly kicking his ass would definitely cure him, and any compassionate person would do it.
Anonymouse 7:05am, actually that would be a crime and hopefully you would go straight to jail.. I would hope as well, that there would be a couple of transwomen in there with you and that they would dispense a little justice in your honor.
DeleteLife-saving therapy is not a crime. Unless we live in a fascist dystopia.
DeleteHere is Digby's analysis of how Trump got elected. This is not original to her, but an explanation she supports, and I do too, in fact it seems pretty obvious.
ReplyDelete"Our mediaecosystem is in deep, deep trouble and regardless of the macro political influences, we are going to be under threat of this fascist movement.
Michael Tomasky at The New Republic wrote a very good piece on this. He notes that people are rightfully stunned that we would elect someone like Trump. Didn’t they know how unfit he is? And why didn’t they?
The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.
Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.
If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.
I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails.) But in the late 1990s, and after the Internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well along with the Internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting web sites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, VC-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.
And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.
This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.
He rightly observes that this is why Trump won and why he exists in politics in the first place.
In fact, I think Trump isn’t even a political figure at all. He’s a celebrity cult leader. And the right wing media is what makes him accessible to the fan base."
https://digbysblog.net/2024/11/11/its-the-media-stupid/
[cont.] Tomasky asks you to imagine Trump winning if there were no Fox News and all we had was The NY Times and Walter Cronkite. It’s very hard to imagine. In fact, he suggests that if that had been the case, the Republicans, as they have done in the past, would have banded together to put him away:
Delete"But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence, but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015-16, Fox made Trump possible.
And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into the news-stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem."
Trump and MAGA are creatures of the rightwing media ecosystem not the other way around. It’s not that there’s some super talented “messaging” team that understands exactly how to reach all those Trump voters with what they want to hear. Their right wing media (and their audiences) are telling them what they want to hear.
And what did they know about Harris and Trump?
[Tomasky:] I asked Gertz what I call my "Ulan Bator question." If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? "You would know that she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you.”
Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”
As Tomasky points out, this is just what millions of people believe is “the news” and describes how they are absorbing it at home, work and in their commute. And I would add that Trump has also indoctrinated them to believe that anything else they hear is “fake.” So even if they happen to come upon reality, they simply don’t believe it.
This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.
Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.
[cont.] Terrifyingly, they are just getting started. They are hoovering up newspapers everywhere with their eyes on the last of our papers of record. They want total dominance and they have the money to buy it. Just look at what Musk has done with twitter.
DeleteHe says, “Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is.”But just look how the publishers of the LA Times and the Washington Post behaved in the run up to the election seeing how close it was going to be. And the weird sanewashing of Trump in the NY Times throughout the campaign. They were cowards. I wouldn’t expect much from them.
So who is going to do this? I honestly don’t know. Tomasky mentions the social media platforms only in passing but I think they are even more of a concern. And that’s where I suspect the opposition may be able to make some inroads. New media is still being created and there are plenty of directions it can go that could benefit the opposition and be accessible by people who don’t get their information through the press. Like Tomasky, I hope that people are thinking about this because between the disinformation, propaganda, oligarchical interests and authoritarian motivations we could be looking at a very bleak future beyond Trump.
And on top of the major right-wing "news" outlets, there's this:
Deletehttps://www.facebook.com/1449998494/videos/1732751187569671
By creating these useless pixels soros-bots melted 2 feet of Arctic ice, in less than an hour.
DeleteSoros-bots are killing us.
"Soros-bots are killing us."
DeleteI knew it wasn't illegal immigrants or inflation.
Bob has been blogging on Fox News for an year and writing on the rest of the media long before that. Anonymices have unceasingly said that he was wasting their time and also said that he was merely circulating right wing talking points.
ReplyDeleteWhen in hell are you complete duds going to apologize to him?
I apologize to Bob. Fox News is a propaganda outlet for fascists, just as Bob has been writing for years, and they even got a fascist elected President, twice.
DeleteAnonymouse 6:47am, that’s a good start.
DeleteWhile you're apologizing, how about some credit to the person who writes that Republican voters only care about bigotry and white supremacy. That person has been nailing it for years.
DeleteAnonymouse 9:03am,anonymouse flying monkeys merely nail their tails to the floor.
DeleteCute insult, Cecelia. I appreciate you using most of your day to come up with that beauty, but let's not lose sight of the fact that the person who said Republican voters only care about bigotry and white supremacy took a lot of shit on this site for speaking the truth.
Delete10;03,
DeleteThe fact that no one, over the course of 5 years, could come up with even one other thing Republican voters care about other than bigotry and white supremacy, was a huge "tell" that the person posting it was 100% correct.
Remember, the person who went under the handle "Rationalist", left TDH over two years ago to find the Republican voter who would prove this theory wrong. Rationalist hasn't been heard from sense.
Anonymouse flying monkey 10:03am, you are a whiney little anonymous. Unless it was a counter from me, no has said one word to you as to your hackneyed, rhetorical, flying monkey poo. The spatters of your thinking/remarks sit on this blog like a warning against convenience store chili. That’s the only purpose you serve.
DeleteCecelia,
DeleteNow you're re-writing history. The poster who correctly pointed out Republican voters only really care about bigotry and white supremacy got a lot of shit from the Right-wing trolls, who were in denial, here.
For over 99.9% of the past years here, David and I have been the only conservatives. You’ve gone after us for enjoying the blogger and you’ve gone after your fellow liberals who appreciate Bob and are not operatives. THEY read what Bob writes and either agree with it to one extent or the other or don’t agree and put up an argument rather than personal attacks.
DeleteI disagree with Bob on more things than not, but I listen and think about what he says. I agree with him as to the media. We couldn’t get a factual and objective take from that industry if we suspended them over a wood chipper.
Anonymices contest everything that Bob utters because you aren’t here to agree with him or to learn anything. Well, Bob turned out to be right as to the boneheaded mentality of the media in general and their alignment first and foremost to themselves and making the sausage. Some of what you’ve been saying about the media past this election is what he has always said and you’ve got pie on your face now. No doubt you’ll soon spin things beyond all reason with comic book tales of vast good (starring you) and evil (starring the others), but for one shining day you had a wake-up call as to your own nasty job description.
Anonymices would do themselves a favor if they got away from whoever is behind the jihad on Bob.