The media and Mr Trump

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As big a problem as anything that now exists for the United States and the West in general is the far-left media who work hand and glove with the politicians of the left to pollute political debate. The genius of Donald Trump is that he is able to transcend the media and get through to the actual population in a way that no one else has previously been able to do.

Trump said it himself, the media are “unbelievably dishonest”. He says things that are so outrageous from the perspective of the left that they made him the formidable presence he is by publishing everything he said on the assumption that telling people what he says will be instantly discrediting. Yet finding out that Katrina Pierson, Donald Trump’s new press secretary, is black Tea Party activist, is quite astonishing and revealing.

Pierson says her alliance with The Donald is “perfect.”

“This is a nontraditional campaign,” the outspoken Republican and Dallas tea party activist said. “I can be a little bit more who I am. That’s what I mean when I say it’s like a perfect fit. [Trump’s] sort of not politically correct. He sort of calls it like he sees it. I’m kind of that way, too,”

Rush Limbaugh discussed all of this yesterday: How Donald Trump Plays the Media. If Trump is unique in what he is doing, non-transferable to anyone else for whatever reason, then it is a serious problem. But in the meantime he is changing the rules of the political process.

You Republicans, you can denounce Trump all day, all week, all month, and the Democrat Party and the media are still gonna say you laid the table for it. You can condemn Trump all you want, but it is not going to buy you any love or respect or admiration from the Drive-By Media and the Democrats. Now, folks, the conventional wisdom is that Trump is scum, that Trump is a reprobate, that Trump is dangerous, that Trump is obscene, Trump’s insane, Trump’s a lunatic, Trump’s dangerous, Trump’s got to go. Why join in with that phrase? Why join that crowd? We never fall in with conventional wisdom here. . . .

Meanwhile, I’ve never said anything like anything Trump says. But despite it all they can’t take him out. They can’t stop covering him. They can’t humiliate him. They can’t embarrass him. They can’t diminish his support. They’re powerless, and this has them in a panic. The media that can make-or-break anybody cannot touch Trump, and every time they try, all they do is make him bigger. They can’t explain this. They are frustrated to no end, and so are both political parties who rely on the media to be the great equalizer in all of this.

Nothing’s working. No matter what Trump says, the media is there, and every member of the media is there. Every network, every camera, every microphone is there. Last Friday night Trump was in Raleigh, North Carolina. Reuters lied. Reuters even tried lying to destroy Trump. They ran a story claiming that Trump’s performance and his appearance were shut down by Black Lives Matter protesters. MSNBC ran with it. . . .

Donald Trump is condemning ISIS. Donald Trump is condemning illegal immigration. Donald Trump is condemning a weak, stupid United States leadership. Over here, everybody else is not. They are condemning Donald Trump. In a political sense, Donald Trump, leading the presidential campaign, is the sole occupier of his position. He has no competition for it. Just in a political sense, that’s pretty brilliant positioning to me. He owns the media. They can’t stop talking about him.

And what’s it costing him?

Zero.

Unbelievably dishonest

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The press is certainly unbelievable, and she is unbelievably good at getting the message across.

UPDATE: Katrina Pierson: Donald Trump’s new press secretary is black Tea Party activist.

Pierson says her alliance with The Donald is “perfect.”

“This is a nontraditional campaign,” the outspoken Republican and Dallas tea party activist said. “I can be a little bit more who I am. That’s what I mean when I say it’s like a perfect fit. [Trump’s] sort of not politically correct. He sort of calls it like he sees it. I’m kind of that way, too,”

“One of the dumbest statements I’ve ever heard in politics.”

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What I find the most remarkable is that even the standard “97% of scientists” isn’t good enough for him but has to raise it to 99.5. And I can now see more clearly than ever that to go with his hatreds and narcissism, his lying and ignorance, he is also as thick as two planks. The story is titled Who’s the dumb one? Obama reacts to Trump climate criticism. And aside from everything else, I think on this and by now he even has the politics of it completely wrong. Here’s the story in full.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama defended his remarks about the threat posed by climate change, saying Republicans, including U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, were “the only people” disputing the gravity of the problem.

Obama has called climate change a great threat to future generations. At a news conference on Tuesday before leaving the U.N. climate summit in Paris, he likened global warming to the threat posed by terrorism and Islamic State and said both problems can be addressed by applying steady pressure and new ideas.

Republicans seized on his comments as understating the threat of terrorism [not to mention overstating the threat of climate change]. Trump, front-runner to be the Republican nominee in the 2016 presidential election, told MSNBC that Obama’s comment was the “one of the dumbest statements I’ve ever heard in politics.”

“Well, you know, Mr. Trump should run back a tape or quote on some of the stuff he’s said,” Obama retorted, during an interview with CBS “This Morning” that was broadcast on Friday.

“But, look, here’s what we know: 99.5 percent of scientists in the world say this is a really urgent problem,” he said. “Political parties around the world. The only people who are still disputing it are either some Republicans in Congress or – folks on the campaign trail.”

Obama was among more than 150 world leaders in Paris this week at the start of a U.N. conference that aims to reach an agreement to curb global warming.

On Tuesday, Obama said rising seas and warming climates could be drain on economic resources.

“This is an economic and security imperative that we have to tackle now,” he said.

Why it has been kid gloves in dealing with Obama up till now I don’t know, but Donald does seem to have the kind of political abrasiveness that gets results. And by siding with the “0.5%”, which is now around 50%, Trump is even right about the issue itself.

[Via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit]

The left seeks only plausible liars to lead them

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There is no point in arguing that Hillary is being inconsistent, or that those who have accused her husband of rape have made a case that needs to be answered. Same with everything else about the lies that surround Clinton. No one believes her unless they desperately want to. But many of those who vote for the left now understand somewhere deep inside that everything they believe is wormeaten and rotten. If they are therefore to go on as before, they must find ways to shield themselves from the truth they will not confront. So they look for liars, and the better they are the more they seek them out. Clinton to Obama and to a different Clinton, with the media there to protect them at every turn. America and the West may crash and burn but they will keep their illusions at all cost. The applause at the end shows there are some who will never allow reality to intrude, but seeing how muted the applause was shows even among those who show up at Clinton event know that she is lying and her husband is as well. What she represents remains an unknown to me, but she is 50-50 to be the next president of the United States/

The corruption of the fourth estate

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This is Pat Buchanan on Why Liberal Media Hate Trump but it is more than that. It has a history lesson worth thinking about.

In the feudal era there were the “three estates” – the clergy, the nobility and the commons. The first and second were eradicated in Robespierre’s Revolution.

But in the 18th and 19th century, Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle identified what the latter called a “stupendous Fourth Estate.”

Wrote William Thackeray: “Of the Corporation of the Goosequill – of the Press … of the fourth estate. … There she is – the great engine – she never sleeps. She has her ambassadors in every quarter of the world – her courtiers upon every road. Her officers march along with armies, and her envoys walk into statesmen’s cabinets.”

The fourth estate, the press, the disciples of Voltaire, had replaced the clergy it had dethroned as the new arbiters of morality and rectitude.

Today the press decides what words are permissible and what thoughts are acceptable. The press conducts the inquisitions where heretics are blacklisted and excommunicated from the company of decent men, while others are forgiven if they recant their heresies.

Now do read on how this is affecting us today and especially how the media is aiming to prevent, if it can, the election of Donald Trump.

Obama is the cause of a problem of gargantuan proportions

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From Roger Simon, From Paris to San Berdoo, Obama’s War on Western Civ Continues. How it would unfold was not predictable with any kind of detail. That it has come to this ought to be a surprise to no one who was paying attention.

America, and its trailing entities in Europe, has a problem now of gargantuan proportions. Barack Obama was and is precisely the wrong man, possibly the worst conceivable man, to be president of the United States at this point in history. No one more invidious could be invented.

Consider how, on hearing of the mass murders in San Bernardino, the first thing out of his mouth was … gun control. That is not just blindness. It’s something scarier — willfull distortion for evil political ends.

Consciously or unconsciously, probably both, this man seeks to destroy the very thing that nurtured him from Honolulu to the White House.

So now the game has changed and Islamic terror has reached our shores as never before, just as many have predicted. It has invaded our bourgeois neighborhoods, with the neighbor next door unwilling to a report a garage bomb factory for fear of being called racist. (This, too, is at the foot of Obama.) What, in the words of Lenin, is to be done?

But while Obama will no longer be president in 2017, the media and the Democrats will still be there, as dangerously empty-headed as ever.

Attention Scott Sumner: Did you know that the Great Depression was a worldwide problem?

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There’s a new book by Scott Sumner with the title, The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression. As is all too frequent, the view is restricted to the United States, where the Great Depression was prolonged by something like a decade until the 1940s because of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Australia reached its trough in 1932 and the UK and most of the world in 1933. The true lessons to be learned are found by not looking at the US. This is the blurb found at the link to the book.

Economic historians have made great progress in unraveling the causes of the Great Depression, but not until Scott Sumner came along has anyone explained the multitude of twists and turns the economy took. In The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression, Sumner offers his magnum opus—the first book to comprehensively explain both monetary and non-monetary causes of that cataclysm.

Drawing on financial market data and contemporaneous news stories, Sumner shows that the Great Depression is ultimately a story of incredibly bad policymaking—by central bankers, legislators, and two presidents—especially mistakes related to monetary policy and wage rates. He also shows that macroeconomic thought has long been captive to a false narrative, which continues to misguide policymakers in their quixotic quest to promote robust and sustainable economic growth.

The Midas Paradox is a landmark treatise that solves mysteries that have long perplexed economic historians and corrects misconceptions about the true causes, consequences, and cures of macroeconomic instability. Like Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, it is one of those rare books destined to shape future research and debate on the subject.

With economics, it’s a “can’t-do attitude” that overwhelmingly works best. Leave it to the market is the answer, although there are some things governments can do. Making adjustment easier, diminishing regulation, pulling back on public spending and easing credit conditions are classical elements in a recovery program. None of these were followed by the US while all of these were followed by Australia and the UK. That’s why our economies recovered and the American economy didn’t. These are the lessons that ought to have been learned but the solipsistic approach to economic policy by American economists, where only the US economy is examined, means that the actual lessons that ought to have been learned never are. Keynes may have been British but it is Samuelson who spread the disease across the globe.

“We must now confront this evil”

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He is from the Labour Party in the UK and at the link is the full text of Hilary Benn’s extraordinary speech in favour of Syria airstrikes which he gave in the House of Commons. And he does not beat around the bush.

The question which confronts us in a very, very complex conflict is at its heart very simple. What should we do with others to confront this threat to our citizens, our nation, other nations and the people who suffer under the yoke, the cruel yoke, of Daesh? The carnage in Paris brought home to us the clear and present danger we face from them. It could have just as easily been London, or Glasgow, or Leeds or Birmingham and it could still be. And I believe that we have a moral and a practical duty to extend the action we are already taking in Iraq to Syria. And I am also clear, and I say this to my colleagues, that the conditions set out in the emergency resolution passed at the Labour party conference in September have been met. . . .

The question for each of us – and for our national security – is this: given that we know what they are doing, can we really stand aside and refuse to act fully in our self-defence against those who are planning these attacks? Can we really leave to others the responsibility for defending our national security when it is our responsibility? And if we do not act, what message would that send about our solidarity with those countries that have suffered so much – including Iraq and our ally, France. . . .

Now Mr Speaker, I hope the house will bear with me if I direct my closing remarks to my Labour friends and colleagues on this side of the House. As a party we have always been defined by our internationalism. We believe we have a responsibility one to another. We never have – and we never should – walk by on the other side of the road.

And we are here faced by fascists. Not just their calculated brutality, but their belief that they are superior to every single one of us in this chamber tonight, and all of the people that we represent. They hold us in contempt. They hold our values in contempt. They hold our belief in tolerance and decency in contempt. They hold our democracy, the means by which we will make our decision tonight, in contempt. And what we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated. And it is why, as we have heard tonight, socialists and trade unionists and others joined the International Brigade in the 1930s to fight against Franco. It’s why this entire House stood up against Hitler and Mussolini. It is why our party has always stood up against the denial of human rights and for justice. And my view, Mr Speaker, is that we must now confront this evil. It is now time for us to do our bit in Syria. And that is why I ask my colleagues to vote for the motion tonight.

Since Paris, and now even more so after the attacks in California yesterday, there is a movement of the parties of the left towards the need to defend ourselves against barbarians.