Politics – Page 37 – Media Nation

Top Trumpster, son promote demented conspiracy theory

Crab pizza from Comet Ping Pong. Photo (cc) 2009 by cometstarmoon.

Donald Trump’s national-security adviser, Mike Flynn, and Flynn’s son are promoting a demented conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton and pedophilia that led directly to the arrest of a man who fired an assault rifle in a DC pizza shop on Sunday. The Washington Post reports.

Flynn Sr. is not subject to Senate confirmation.

Over the weekend Josh Marshall reported on Twitter that, just before Election Day, Flynn tweeted out a story from a fake-news site called True Pundit claiming that emails on Anthony Weiner’s computer contained evidence that Clinton was involved in “money laundering, child exploitation, sex crimes with minors (children), perjury, pay to play through Clinton Foundation, obstruction of justice, and other felony crimes.”

https://twitter.com/GenFlynn/status/794000841518776320

Flynn Jr., meanwhile, provided oxygen to an offshoot of that deranged theory—namely, that the Washington pizza shop, Comet Ping Pong, is, as Politico put it, “a front for a child sex ring led by Clinton.” This nuttiness has its own Twitter hashtag, #pizzagate.

https://twitter.com/mflynnJR/status/805611056009768960

Politico also describes Flynn Jr. as someone who “has served as his father’s adviser.”

Did I mention that Flynn Sr. is not subject to Senate confirmation? I did? Just checking.

In case you were wondering, the alleged shooter at Comet Ping Pong, Edgar Maddison Welch, 28, of Salisbury, North Carolina, apparently wanted to see the tunnels where Clinton and her dastardly conspirators carry out their evil deeds.

God help us.

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Trump to Times: Eh, I didn’t mean any of it

Climate change? Never mind. Lock her up? Didn’t mean it. Torture? I don’t think that anymore.

The big takeaway from Donald Trump’s interview with the New York Times was how casually he walked away from some of the most caustic things he said during the campaign. If there’s a more striking example of a politician admitting that he essentially lied about everything to get elected, I’m not aware of it.

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Yes, media could have done better. No, it wasn’t their fault.

The media, for all their faults, did not elect Donald Trump. His supporters knew exactly what they were doing. They heard it all—the racism, the misogyny, the personal attacks, the Russia connection, Trump University, and on and on and on. And they decided they’d rather vote for a bomb-thrower than continue with the status quo.

On this day of all days, I am loath to cite polling as a way of explaining anything. But as Bill Schneider wrote for Reuters, exit polls revealed that only 38 percent of voters believed Trump was qualified to be president, compared to 52 percent for Hillary Clinton. What does that tell you?

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Prediction time

Hillary Clinton has been ahead by about four points in the polls. My guess is that she’ll actually win by around six points, based on two factors.

First, she’s on the upswing, and was even before FBI director James Comey said, uh, never mind. Second, by all accounts she has an incredibly strong get-out-the-vote effort and Donald Trump has nothing.

No prediction on the Electoral College except that it won’t be close. And the Democrats will narrowly regain the Senate.

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How the media blew the 2016 presidential campaign

Maybe none of it mattered. Maybe the media’s widely derided coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign had little effect on where we stand days before this horror show comes to its merciful conclusion.

Consider: A Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll released Friday evening showed Clinton with a four-point lead—identical to President Obama’s margin of victory over Mitt Romney in 2012. As New York Times columnist David Brooks said Friday on the PBS NewsHour, “Everyone is dividing based on demographic categories. And, sometimes, you get the sense that the campaign barely matters. People are just going with their gene pool and whatever it is.”

But even if voting patterns are largely preordained in this hyperpolarized era, that’s no reason to let the media off the hook. Journalists have an indispensable role in our political system. They have a responsibility to provide us with the information we need to govern ourselves in a democratic society. And they have let us down.

Read the rest at U.S. News & World Report. And talk about it on Facebook.

Bad news for Hillary Clinton: ‘Carlos Danger’ is back

Anthony Weiner during his New York mayoral campaign. Photo (cc) by Azi Paybarah.

At a time when no one knows anything about the latest Hillary Clinton email story beyond the cryptic letter that FBI Director James Comey sent to Congress last week, I decided that the best way to research this piece was to pour a glass of wine, grab some Halloween candy, and watch Weiner, a documentary released a few months ago.

I didn’t learn anything about the emails. But I did gain some insight, at least superficially, into the marriage between disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin, the top Clinton aide whose emails were reportedly found on her estranged husband’s computer.

Read the rest at WGBHNews.org.

The state of the Clinton email investigation

Based on what we know so far, FBI Director James Comey’s bombshell letter is likely to lead to very little. Having upended the election campaign with just days to go, Comey owes it to the public to tell us exactly what the FBI knows as soon as possible.

Here’s what we seem to know: Clinton and her top aide, Huma Abedin, exchanged emails (now, there’s a big surprise, eh?). Some of those ended up on devices used by Abedin’s estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, because they shared a computer.

It is already well established that Clinton used a private email account for her official business, that she showed bad judgment in doing so, but that she did not commit a crime. Somewhere between many and all of the newly discovered emails may be duplicates that the FBI has already looked at.

There is nothing new here—just more evidence of what a mistake Clinton made in not using her State Department email account. For one thing, sensitive emails can end up in the hands of someone like Weiner.

Update: Jane Mayer of the New Yorker weighs in with essential reading on Comey’s decision to go public.

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Myths and realities about Obamacare premium increases

If you’re trying to figure out what’s going on regarding claims that Obamacare costs are spiraling out of control, I recommend this piece by Jonathan Chait of New York magazine. Chait really understands this stuff. The key takeaways:

The premiums announced for next year are about what had been predicted when the Affordable Care Act first went into effect. The reason the jump is so high now is that insurance companies initially underpriced their policies in order to get more people to sign up. And the premiums are still lower than they would have been without the ACA.
There are 50 insurance exchanges—one in each state. They are working well in states that supported the law and accepted federal assistance to expand Medicaid, and not well at all in states that didn’t. So it’s ongoing Republican resistance to the law, not the law itself, that is the source of some of the problems.
Complex legislation like the ACA often need fixes every now and again because there’s no way officials can predict with absolute certainty what’s going to happen. Unfortunately the ACA can’t be amended or fixed in the current political environment because the Republicans in Congress won’t allow it.

And thanks to Jonathan Cohn, a health-care expert in his own right, for flagging Chait’s article.

What if Trump were the Democratic nominee?

Mitt Romney on the campaign trail in 2012. Photo (cc) 2012 by Dave Lawrence.

Alex Beam’s column in today’s Boston Globe got me thinking: What would I do if Donald Trump were the Democratic nominee? Alex confesses that he was a late arrival in the #NeverTrump camp. I’m not a Democrat, but I am a liberal. Because of the unique threat I think Trump poses to our democracy, I’ve broken with past practice and said whom I’m voting for this time around: Hillary Clinton. I have great respect for Republicans and conservatives like Mitt Romney and Charlie Baker, who came out against Trump early on. But what would I do if the shoe were on the other foot?

So here’s my little mind game. I can’t think of a Democrat who’s analogous to Trump, so let’s just imagine that Trump himself had won the Democratic nomination; it’s not that far-fetched given his chameleon-like political identity over the years. And since Trump is hardly a traditional conservative, let’s imagine, too, that there’s one significant issue on which he departs from Democratic orthodoxy. For the sake of argument, I’ll stipulate that Trump the Democrat holds the same views on immigration as Trump the Republican.

Now, then. There aren’t really any moderate Republicans left on the national stage, but there are rational, sane Republicans: Romney, Jeb Bush, and John Kasich to name three. So let’s extend this experiment by imagining that Romney had somehow won the nomination. How would I vote?

On the one hand, Trump the Democrat has promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who’d protect same-sex marriage and reproductive rights, to raise the minimum wage, and to reform Obamacare by seeking to add a public option. Romney has promised the opposite, and has vowed to repeal Obamacare, even though it’s based on Romneycare. On the other hand, Trump is Trump, with all the baggage we’ve seen on display throughout this campaign.

I would like to think I’d vote for Romney, but I’m honestly not 100 percent sure. Part of me believes that we could survive four years of Trump the Democrat, and that it would be worth it so as not to unleash the right. Then again, Romney’s a sensible guy, and maybe he could find some sort of middle ground.

It’s not easy, is it?

How Trump is trying to delegitimize a Clinton presidency

Trump rally in Arizona earlier this year. Photo (cc) 2016 by Gage Skidmore.

All of the media reaction to Wednesday night’s third and final presidential debate focused on one surreal and disturbing moment. Within minutes of the close, the Associated Press moved a story with this extraordinary lede:

Threatening to upend a fundamental pillar of American democracy, Donald Trump refused to say in debate that he will accept the results of next month’s election if he loses to Hillary Clinton. The Democratic nominee declared Trump’s resistance “horrifying.”

The homepage newspaper headlines this morning amplify on that theme. The New York Times: “Trump Won’t Say if He Will Accept Election Results.” The Washington Post: “Trump refuses to say whether he’ll accept election results.” The Wall Street Journal: “Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Vote if He Loses.”

I want to offer a couple of points about Trump’s deeply transgressive act.

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