In a typically horrid, horse-race-tout-sheet article entitled, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenngarry Glenn Ross "13 times Trump looked finished, and wasn't", Politico notes that...
Since his June 16 announcement, political prognosticators, pundits and yes, even journalists have speculated that Trump would not last. And each time they did, the blustery Manhattan mogul continued to pick up steam, in spite of, and perhaps because of that speculation.
With the onset of winter, Trump's campaign has now weathered all seasons, girding for battle not only in Iowa and New Hampshire but also with a media and a coastal chattering class that has predicted that this — no, this — no, this — would finally be the episode to sink his ship. But unlike the Titanic, the icebergs that would sink a conventional campaign have left nary a dent. In fact, he closes out the year with a daunting double-digit lead over his closest rival, Ted Cruz.
From June 16 to the present, these are the big moments that caused people to prematurely predict Trump's demise...
Ironically, one of the few areas of agreement we Liberals have with the Trumpistas is that the political press are mostly useless and utterly corrupt ratings whores. However, our fragile bipartisan consensus breaks down at this point, with Trumpistas swearing that the corrupt and useless media are vassals of the Secret Liberal Media Conspiracy which has ruined Murrica, while we on the Left despair that, Holy Jebus, they really are that stupid.
Look, I genuinely don't care about this latest "Golly, isn't it a hoot how fucking useless we are?" exercise in media-jerking-itself-off-in-the-mirror-and-calling-it-self-examination any more than I care about the last dozen, or two dozen, or five dozen times that we heard the Beltway frottaging a mountain of money while yelling "I'm a bad boy! I'm a bad boy!" from the media master bathroom upstairs. The entire apparatus is corrupt from wallet to hair-cut and nothing short of breaking it up and firing the ringleaders will change that.
But for the record, I do once again feel perversely compelled to point out that within 48 hours of the very first of the media's 13 utterly wrong predictions of the Imminent Trump Implosion, at least one, vituperative, foul-mouthed blogger of the Left was busy getting the story right...
As I wrote a few years ago,the brain-caste of the GOP spent a 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.
In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and theWashington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.
They are the GOP's premium leads, but however abundant and renewable a resource the Conservative meatheads may be, come Presidential election time, there is never enough room at the trough for every rapacious Republican hog. This is why every few years we have these Little Red State Fundy moments; that delicate time when the knives come out and the various species of Conservative con men start cutting each other's balls off over who gets to pluck the wingnut pigeons...
...while trying desperately not to call attention to the fact that their entire political system depends on pandering to the army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps which the GOP has worked so long and hard to cultivate...
And so once more, having publicly fucked the same story up over and over and over again, the Beltway media must now use its power and reach to manufacture yet another version of the same lie it always tells in when it gets caught with it's ass hanging out.
The lie that Everybody Got It Wrong.
UPDATE:
And sadly right on schedule, the former home of lucid Liberal analysis put up a post literally entitled...
2015: The year everyone was wrong about the GOP race
No, Benjy. No. Not "everyone" was wrong.
(Crossposted at driftglass' blog)
