A national electorate of snowflakes?

The Unablogger

Close presidential elections often turn on small seminal moments that matter. The moments that decided the two most recent presidential elections were not important matters of policy or qualifications, but emotional reactions to off-the-cuff remarks by the losing candidate. My friend and blogger extraordinaire Bill Hennessy has pointed out repeatedly that people make decisions on emotion, not facts; then they marshal together whatever facts support their decisions. This includes decisions on how to vote. This dynamic of human nature reelected Barack Obama and made Donald Trump his successor.

These emotional seminal moments produced a backlash of voters who felt the candidate was disrespecting them. The 2012 moment was Mitt Romney’s remark at his own fundraiser (secretly taped by Democrat operatives who had infiltrated the event) that people receiving government benefits (47% of all voters) were too dependent on government to vote for Republicans. Those 47%ers felt targeted and disrespected, any many of them who were considering Romney either stayed with Obama or (more likely) became discouraged and didn’t vote.

The 2016 seminal moment was supposed to be the release of the 11-year-old Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump making lewd remarks about women. It actually was the seminal moment for politically correct suburban voters (especially the country club set) who either felt personally violated by Trump’s remarks or who didn’t want their friends and business colleagues to associate them with Trump.

Other voters got over it when concerns surfaced over the reopening of the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton. Many now conclude that the FBI caper was 2016’s real seminal moment.

While all of those matters impacted the 2016 election, I believe the real seminal moment for most voters had already occurred in early September with the release of Hillary’s off-the-cuff characterization of some Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Voters who even thought about supporting Trump felt that Hillary had called them “deplorable.” That’s not what Hillary literally said, but the impression stuck. Voter resentment was reinforced by Hillary’s media sycophants who doubled down on the idea that anyone who helps Trump advance what they called his “racial, religious and ethnic bigotry” is part of that bigotry. Tired of being maligned by a society that retroactively shamed old attitudes, equated matters of sincere religious faith with bigotry and otherwise demanded political correctness, voters rebelled against elites by voting for Trump.

I don’t doubt the accuracy of Hennessy’s observation about people making decisions based on emotion, but I do lament it. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the political outcomes of Obama’s reelection and Trump’s coming presidency, there should be serious concerns about momentous national elections turning on hurt feelings instead of issues. Maybe those collegiate “snowflakes” demanding “safe zones” to protect them from contrary opinions are just following the inadvertent mentorship of parents or other older acquaintances that they see making important decisions based on who did or didn’t hurt their feelings.

We gotta grow up!

Hillary dodges a bullet. So does Trump

The Unablogger

FBI Director James Comey’s conclusion that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton should not be prosecuted, in spite of her careless disregard for the safety of confidential information entrusted to her, saves Clinton’s presidential campaign. If he had recommended prosecution, as he could have and should have, the same Democrats who rigged the nominating process to make her the party standard bearer would have intervened and forced her to step aside. Or, failing that, the very super delegates who put her over the top would have revolted against her, allowing Democratic convention delegates to pick someone else. Even deliberate inaction by the Department of Justice and a presidential pardon wouldn’t have saved Hillary.

But Hillary isn’t the only presidential candidate whose hopes were revived by Comey’s actions. Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump also got a campaign lifeline from Comey. Trump has the worst unfavorable numbers  for any presidential candidate in polling history. The only reason Trump is even competitive in this contest is Clinton’s own unfavorable rating. If Democrats were able to substitute a less unpopular Democrat – say Vice-President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (or even Bernie Madoff or O. J. Simpson!), they could count on coasting to a 40+ state win, a Democratically controlled senate and maybe even a Democrat house.

But Comey changed all that. By laying out, in convincing detail, how Hillary broke the law and endangered national security in the process, but holding back on a recommendation to prosecute, Comey saved Trump’s hide too.

Democrats have noticed. With apologies to William Shakespeare, something is rotten in the state of the mainstream media. The usual Democrat sycophants are suddenly turning on Hillary. The Washington Free Beacon compiled this video montage of Democrat media talking heads piling on Clinton in her time of supposed triumph. De facto Democrat press spokesmen like the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, and St. Louis Post Dispatch piled on. This is no sudden discovery of press fairness. They are loyal Democrats who want to shape the Democratic ticket with candidates who will win. They want Clinton out.

Stay tuned.

Ewwwww!

TMI Department: The National Enquirer (which first broke the John Edwards story) quotes an Arkansas state trooper on then-Gov. Clinton’s security detail.

It’s not an image I want before dinner. Maybe it will help me lose weight!

Media continue to whitewash Benghazi

The Unablogger

Earlier this week, a bipartisan report by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the September 11, 2012 terror attacks on US facilities in Benghazi, Libya laid fault for the U.S. vulnerability to such attacks to incompetence and terrible management decisions on the part of the Obama Administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But you’d never know that from coverage by the mainstream media. The coverage of the report by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is illustrative.

The report was significant in that senators from both parties, in a body controlled by the President’s party,  set partisan differences aside and joined together publicly to blame the Administration. Of course, partisan considerations did water down the report by using vague obfuscatory language like “analysts,” “officials,” “policymakers” and classically “those in decision-making positions in Washington, D.C.” instead of identifying either President Barrack Obama or former Secretary of State (and likely 2016 Democratic presidential candidate) Hillary Clinton by name. But anyone who read the report got the point.

The bipartisan report’s official conclusion was that it was “imperative” both that the U.S. intelligence community position itself to anticipate, rather than just react to, potential terrorism hotspots and, most significantly, that “those in decision-making positions in Washington, D.C. heed the concerns and wisdom of those on the front lines and make resource and security decisions with those concerns in mind.”  The bipartisan report concluded pointedly, “The United States government did not meet this standard of care in Benghazi.”

Readers of the Post-Dispatch wouldn’t know that. While the paper did cover the report the next day with the Number 3 front-page article totaling 30 column inches (counting the jump to a back page and headlines on both pages), the report’s official conclusion wasn’t even mentioned. (In contrast, two days earlier, the Post devoted more space (34 column inches) to the week-old controversy about the closure of lanes to a Fort Lee, NJ bridge by the administration of potential Republican presidential candidate Gov. Chris Christie.)

So how do you cover a report without mentioning its official conclusion? The Post‘s highlighted bullet points leading the article in the print edition distributed to subscribers (which does not appear in the current online version of the article) spun three of the report’s 14 specific “Findings” that led to the report’s official conclusion:

• A tamer finding that operations in Benghazi continued although the mission crossed ‘tripwires’ that should have led to cutting staff or suspending work. (Finding #5)
• “Analysts” referred “inaccurately” to a protest at the mission, “leading officials” to make “incorrect” statements. (Finding #9) [The report never said that the references to a protest “led” officials to make incorrect statements; the report merely stated that erroneous reports “influenced” the public statements of policymakers.]
• Blamed deceased Ambassador Chris Stevens for twice declining extra security help (based on facts recited in Finding #2).

The lead in the print edition stated, “The account spreads blame among the State Department, the military and U.S. intelligence for missing what now seems like obvious warning signs.” The current online version blames “systemic failure of security for U.S. diplomats overseas.”

As to former Secretary Clinton, whom the Post and other mainstream media are actively seeking to insulate from blame, instead of identifying her as one of the key policymakers who failed to heed the concerns and wisdom of those on the front lines or to make resource and security decisions with those concerns in mind, the Post wrongly inferred that the report had cleared her. Both the print and online versions state deceptively, “The report does not name Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time and now is a potential 2016 Democratic presidential candidate.” In the print edition, that statement appeared under a bolded subhead “CLINTON NOT NAMED.”

In one candid moment, though, the Post account in the print edition did concede that that the Administration’s original characterization of the assault as a spontaneous mob protest against an anti-Islamic video was due to the Administration’s “relunctan[ce] to deal publicly with a terrorist attack weeks before the presidential election.” That validates Republican charges that the Administration deliberately lied to the American public in order to continue its pretense that it had kept the country safe from terrorism. The observation was scrubbed entirely from the current online version.