It’s not basketball
Trump doesn’t want debate moderators pointing out lies. Well he wouldn’t, would he. He lies the way the rest of us breathe, so naturally he doesn’t want reality-based people pointing out all his lies, not to mention his pig-ignorance.
Trump says it’s up to the candidates themselves to call out their rivals when they are wrong. Trump spoke Thursday in a telephone interview on “Fox and Friends.” He says the candidates should “argue it out.”
NBC’s Matt Lauer has received criticism for not pointing out factual errors by Trump at a recent forum on national security.
Errors and also lies. He tells lies. Big, glaring, shameless lies.
Trump says there’s pressure on NBC’s Holt ahead of Monday’s debate at Hofstra University. He likens it to the pressure former Indiana University basketball coach and Trump supporter Bobby Knight used to put on referees.
Trump says: “A lot of people are watching to see whether or not he succumbs to that pressure.”
This isn’t a game, Pepe. This isn’t a game or a joke or a sport or even an investment opportunity. This is a choice between a centrist insider and a fascist, and you’re the fascist.
And then cue the fury at Clinton when she does call out their lies. She will be “Crooked Hillary” “Lying Hillary”, with blood coming out her whatever.
When Ted Cruz (also a horrible candidate) called out Trump’s lies, Trump dubbed him “Lyin’ Ted”.
One way this is likely to go, I think, is with Trump doing his usual noisy bullying and Clinton responding and that looking to far too many people like Trump being tough and relaxed and Clinton being shrill and defensive. As with Gore’s sighs.
That’s a generation ago, isn’t it. Not everybody remembers Gore’s sighs.
How did that happen??!
The ‘narrative’ held that Gore came across as ‘too smart’ to be president. That’s, as near as I can figure, the origin point of the terminal tailspin the USA appears to be in.
And Hillary risks getting that same “too smart” treatment, though that would mean acknowledging that a woman can be that smart, so they’re just pegging her with the too rich label.
The “too smart” thing always baffled me. Surely being smart is an important trait in a president.
I remember during the Bush election, several people said to me “I don’t want a president that is smarter than I am”. I don’t understand that at all. The one thing I do want is a president that is smarter than I am, one that has the knowledge and the skills that can do what needs to be done.
This is just part of the ongoing anti-intellectualism in the country, the growing fear of smart people. Elite used to refer primarily to wealthy, powerful people. Now it is used to refer to anyone who has more than a high school education. The working class has been deified, at least in lip service, and all educated people are seen as being like the geeks and nerds that ran Enron and the like – someone to fear.
… sure, he’d prefer the moderators not call him out…
Also, I expect criminals would prefer the judiciary not prosecute them. It just makes things so much more difficult.
And iknklast, re ‘deified in lip service’, I think the lip service modifier is critical. As I think the working class are deified by that crowd the same way women are ‘honoured’ by deeply chauvinistic religions and other social orders. They’re ‘honoured’ so long as they stay in their subservient role and can be manipulated to act firmly against their own interest… and even that, with huge qualifications and mixed signals. So long as they know their place, we’ll say nice–if patronizing–things–and expect very little of them beyond the odd vote and body at a rally. And note that Trump is contemptuous of ‘losers’, and I expect that’s just about anyone who doesn’t make as much as him, in his universe.
… as to anyone saying they don’t want anyone smarter than them in office, I’m always tempted to respond: but doesn’t this restriction narrow the pool left to us rather severely?
Less snarkily: we do need to make being educated, informed, capable, literate actual damned _values_, a lot of places. I don’t really think it’s an accident it’s been going this way. Trump’s a particularly egregious, transparent demagogue, but it’s a general strategy, dumping on ‘experts’ and appealing to some imagined, mythic ‘everyman”s ‘common sense’, and common a lot of places. It’s no coincidence, either, authoritarian regimes like to purge and silence academics, or that right wing ‘populists’ often as not act to put higher education further and further out of reach of their own supporters. These are people who imagine civilisation is a zero sum game; if others get ahead, they’re no longer such big fish themselves in such a small pond, and they’ve just no interest in this.
And the idiocy of all this is: they’re incredibly wrong. Broader and more available education is one of the best ways for any nation to raise living standards overall. Yes, as the population becomes more educated existing structures are likely to become destabliliized, but, long term, the pond itself gets bigger.
It’s what’s really kinda pathetic to me, about these guys: the incredible lack of vision, and, worse, lack of foresight. That, and the essentially parasitic nature of their entire existence. The whole run a garment factory in the developing world and pay your workers dirt bit only works at all so long as someone somewhere else has a high enough living standard to buy your goods… But they’ll erode living standards anywhere and everywhere in blind pursuit of the short term gain. Where it ends with a smaller and smaller group of haves with more and more concentrated wealth is just ugly, and they themselves would eventually miss having customers with actual damned money to spend… If they had the attention span to remember what that was even like. And they’ll encourage whoever they can sucker into it to attack any national or multinational organization or agreement that more broadly pushes up environmental and labour standards, and interferes with this game. _That_, I always suspect, is why that end attacks ‘globalization’: not because they’ve any problem at all with trade; they just figure divide and conquer is the way to go, smaller and isolated governments are easier to buy, and multinational agreements or organizations that extend beyond trade, in any way, especially into labour or environmental standards, however haltingly (hello, EU), are a threat.