Monday, February 27, 2017

Bottom Lines

Well, not really bottom lines.  I don't want to get carried away here.  But important lines, and distressingly,  I find that blank looks sometimes happen when I bring them up.

Jonathan Gruber. Ben Rhodes.  If you have forgotten who they are, this provides evidence for my point.

Update:  Add this story about Rhodes's assistants, one day later. 

As I have stated in the past, I completely get someone holding their nose and voting for a candidate they are unhappy with, or sticking with a party they feel is unworthy of their vote.  Negative voting is a fine American tradition, and may be why we actually don't get violent in the streets after elections. We may hate the other guy, but we are not so sold on our own that we are willing to get violent about it. So anyone who tells me that they didn't like Hillary but there were just too many things about Trump that were beyond the pale, I have no quarrel with that. I just deleted two paragraphs of how I agree with that, because it is beside the point here.

But Jonathan Gruber (game), Ben Rhodes (set), plus the administration's followup falsehoods about their statements (match), provide me with reasons why my choice not to vote for Democrats is entirely defensible. Beyond that point, we can go only into the territory of "well, Trump is worse." These are huge, and should have dominated discussion for weeks after they came out.  The fevered, paranoid accusations of conservatives turned out to be largely true. Once those have been absorbed, all discussions of Benghazi, or the IRS, or private servers and Obama's knowledge of them should have been brought back up and re-examined in that light.  Once people have been caught in big lies, the slack we have previously cut them can be retrospectively withdrawn.

Yet they weren't.  They vanished beneath the waves. Those scandals didn't have "legs," as they say.

I am pretty confident my guess about why they were denied, dismissed, under-reported and even UNreported is correct, and I'm not planning on changing it unless significant evidence shows me otherwise.

You may have similar incidents about the GOPe, or Trump, or Tea Party candidates or whatever, and I will not say you nay.  I will never vote for them because... works for me.  I would ask only that you make sure your signal events are solidly true, rather then impressions about hate crime increasing or quotes out-of-context or even false.

12 comments:

Sam L. said...

" I would ask only that you make sure your signal events are solidly true, rather then impressions about hate crime increasing or quotes out-of-context or even false."

There are, after all, so many lies, untruths, and microslices of truth out there, covered in very thick smoke.

Cynical? Moi??

RichardJohnson said...

Jonathan Gruber. Ben Rhodes. If you have forgotten who they are, this provides evidence for my point.... You may have similar incidents about the GOPe, or Trump, or Tea Party candidates or whatever, and I will not say you nay. I will never vote for them because... works for me. I would ask only that you make sure your signal events are solidly true, rather then impressions about hate crime increasing or quotes out-of-context or even false.

As a Gruber-related point, there is Obama's oft-repeated "If you like your health plan you can keep it." Not many Democrat voters are willing to acknowledge that as a lie. Obama couldn't have known how it was going to turn out. It was the fault of those darned insurance companies that did it- which ignores that those darned insurance companies were responding to the two thousand pages of Obamacare.

RichardJohnson said...

Yes, it was interesting how Ben Rhodes and Jonathan Gruber both admitted to deceiving their audiences, with nary a peep from the Demos.

Texan99 said...

It was such a weird election. Many of my attempts to discuss it with old friends came down to competing lists of why one side's negatives were just too much, but we could (just barely) stomach the other side's negatives. So Trump had almost nowhere to go but up in my estimation, and so far he's done fine in that respect.

jaed said...

I've said this elsewhere: my expectations of Donald Trump are that he is not Hillary Clinton. During the inauguration, after the presidential oath of office, he did not turn to the cameras, tear off a Trump rubber face mask to reveal the face of Hillary beneath, and begin cackling maniacally in triumph. He is, therefore, not Hillary Clinton and has fulfilled my expectations. Anything else is gravy.

It's a surprisingly pleasant state of mind, actually. Because the positive things he has done all count as plusses, and when he does or says things I don't like or am uneasy about, I can ask myself whether he is still better than Hillary in that office and receive an undoubted internal Yes. So I am free to be optimistic about the aspects I like, and phlegmatic about those I don't like.

(Also, I must admit it is very satisfying to watch him beat the Privileged Press like a rented mule. That in itself might be worth the price of admission. The mainstream media's completely unearned sense of superiority—and its consequences—have been corroding the republic for decades now, and he's the first one with the ability and motive to take them down a few pegs.)

Thomas Doubting said...

I like your attitude, jaed.

jaynie said...

jaed, thanks, I appreciated having a good laugh. And may I add that, while my husband supported Trump for being Trump, like with you, Trump not being HRC was my baseline as well. Though, your image of him ripping off his Trump mask and revealing that he was, in fact, HRC is hilarious.

Great essay, Assistant Village Idiot, I followed link from Maggie's Farm blog.

zsleepwalker said...

Jaed--exactly. May I copy that?

Unknown said...

Would mentioning Harry Reid just be piling on? Cuz I'm ok with that.

jaed said...

zsleepwalker—sure, feel free!

It might be easier for me to be positive about Trump's positives because I was never very negative about him. I was not NeverTrump at any point, although I was more anti-anti-Trump than pro-Trump. (I particularly was disgusted by the amount and kind of attacks on Trump supporters.) Someone who was very anti-Trump would naturally be more suspicious, and less inclined to ignore the things he does that they don't like.

I felt that for America to elect Trump would be rolling some very dangerous dice... but then, if you wanted a proven, dependable record of corruption and incompetence, Hillary was the one to vote for.

RichardJohnson said...

2019: Updated link on this story about Rhodes's assistants.

From the archives of the Weekly Standard: Fake News, Exposed (Updated).

After the Weekly Standard went out of business, the Washington Examiner archived its old issues.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Thank you. i was lazy and didn't check the link.